A Holocaust survivor’s music inspires his granddaughter’s memoir

After her father’s death, Roxanne de Bastion inherited a Blüthner baby grand piano that had been in her family for more than 100 years. She also found old cassette recordings of her grandfather recounting his life during World War II. In “The Piano Player of Budapest: A True Story of Hope, Survival, and Music,” she reconstructs the story of how her grandfather – and the piano he dearly loved – survived some of the darkest days in human history. 

The piano came into the family when the author’s great-grandfather Aladar gave it to his fiancée as an engagement present. He was a successful textile merchant in early 20th-century Hungary, and he and his family lived in a 17-room penthouse apartment on St. Stephen’s Square in central Budapest. 

The author’s grandfather Stephen was born in 1907 and quickly showed an aptitude for the piano. As a young man, he spent several years in Zurich and London before returning to Budapest as a piano player who made a good living performing in clubs, restaurants, and hotels.

Stephen, as de Bastion calls her grandfather throughout the book, finds it easy to ignore the war drums beating in the background in 1930s Europe. When Germany invades Poland in September 1939, he is in Italy and his mother begs him to flee to America while he can. But the pull of home and family leads him to return to Hungary. 

“Not for a second does Stephen think that Hungary would ever sell out its own people,” writes de Bastion. Her grandfather, who is Jewish, is badly mistaken.

Back in Budapest, Stephen slips comfortably into a routine of composing and performing. But he soon gets called up for “military training.” Instead of a uniform, as he expects, he’s given a yellow Star of David. It turns out that he is part of a forced labor unit assigned to drain swamps and lay railroad tracks. Overworked, with never enough food, her grandfather is eventually granted leave and returns to Budapest and his music.

In October 1942, he is sent to the Russian front as part of a labor unit in support of the German invasion. Eventually, the Soviet army counterattacks and the Hungarian front collapses. Stephen and his fellow laborers flee, but he is slowed down by dysentery and typhoid fever. His companions abandon him. For months, he trudges alone across the snow-covered fields, avoiding starvation by eating scraps that he finds when he beds down in stables and pigsties. He eventually reaches a station in what was then known as Kiev, where he finds a train that takes him to Budapest. He slowly recovers his health, but of the 1,069 laborers who left Budapest with him the previous October, only eight ever return.

Even worse lies ahead. In March 1944, Germany invades and occupies Hungary, and the Arrow Cross, an ultranationalist fascist party, launches a reign of terror against Jews. Stephen’s family members are forced from their apartment into an overcrowded building in a Jewish ghetto. Stephen gets a safe passage document that will take him to Switzerland. But upon hearing that his parents will be sent to a concentration camp, he substitutes their names on the document and saves them instead. 

Before long, he becomes one of the nearly 440,000 Hungarian Jews who are deported to a ghetto on the Austrian border. As the Soviet army approaches, the prisoners are put on a forced march to the concentration camp at Mauthausen, where Stephen will spend the next year. Soon, the Russians close in, and he and his fellow inmates are evacuated once again and endure a death march to a small camp at Gunskirchen. While some 6,000 of his fellow prisoners die, Stephen survives and is liberated by American troops. He finally returns to Budapest.

This is not a book for the faint of heart. The long descriptions of violence, hatred, and inhumanity feel overwhelming. But it is also an amazing story of persistence, grace, and a will to live.

This is also a tale about the quest to understand one’s roots. De Bastion, herself a professional musician, tells us that she barely remembers her grandfather, but the more she listens to the recordings, the more she understands who he was. As a clearer picture emerges, she comes to better understand her family – and herself.