The Grace of Dying Early

A German Chancellor coined a phrase that became one of the most effective quotes in Germany to show that the generations born after the Nazi tragedy cannot bear the responsibility for its deeds:

DIE GNADE DER SPAETEN GEBURT = THE GRACE OF BEING BORN LATE.

I have turned it round to show how fate was kind to those who died too early to have suffered the calvary prepared for them.

I conceived a potential script for a TV or film feature to which I gave the title: “The Grace of Dying Early”.

In a nutshell, the idea was to show a doctor, who in 1938, when antisemitism in Hungary was not yet at the bestial state it reached in 1944, suffers a heart attack, but is revived by the ambulance crew. He recovers and is well enough to, with his wife, accompany his son, who, through devious ways has managed to obtain a visa to leave the country at a time when still so few thought of doing so, to the railway station to say goodbye.

In the course of the next few years the doctor and his wife suffer the fate of the tormented and abused Jewish population in Budapest, until Eichmann reaches the scene in the spring of 1944 and with the enthusiastic approbation of a good part of the population, deports 460,000 Jews to Auschwitz. The Jews of Budapest are given a respite by Horthy being pressurized by the Western Powers not to allow their wholesale deportation, and are herded into ghettoes.

It is then that my good doctor is denounced for some trivial reason and is deported to Treblinka. Immediately on arrival, like all the other deportees, he is driven naked through a narrow passage in the forest, quite near the railway station, and murdered by an extermination squad.

The shot that is to kill the doctor is amplified into a cataclysmic explosion, and the screen goes blank, only to revert to the scene, where the ambulance arrived in 1939 and he was revived after his heart attack.

An alternative version:

The son, returning to Budapest after many decades spent abroad, visits the memorial at the corner of the Parliament, the place where Jews dragged out of the ghettoes in the bitter winter of 1944 had to undress, and were shot, tied together in groups of three and dumped into the Danube.

While brooding over these terrible events, the story of his father emerges in his recollections of those terrible events.

Amongst the victims is the Father and the shot that hits him is magnfied into a cataclysmic explosion that sets the clock back to the time of his heart attack in 1938. This time, the efforts to revive him fail, and the doctor dies in peace, spared the suffering he would have had to endure if he had survived.

So in the closing scene, instead of the Father and Mother taking their leave of their son at the railway station, only the doubly grieving Mother waves as the red lights at the end of the train disappear into the gloom.

I cannot help thinking that this could be the basis of a script - unusual and having a very meaningful title, so far not exploited.

I was in fact the son who survived (my brother did too, but that’s another story). The details of my escape from Hungary and my subsequent induction into the British services and the S.O.E. could be intertwined with the suffering of the good doctor. Both stories are potentially interesting even now, even so many years after the events.

By the way, the reason the doctor was denounced is that he kept a secret radio in the Ghetto. My screenplay shows him recognizing the voice of his son, broadcasting from Italy as an S.O.E. agent, using the phrase he said to his mother at the railway station: “I will return when roses in Hungary grow without thorns”. As that same phrase crackles through radio the doctor immediately recognizes the identity of the speaker. He later excitedly tells others in the ghetto about this, but someone betrays him, the Nazis find the hidden radio in his room, and his doom is sealed.