The Restaurant Keeper Poem by Paul Hartal

The Restaurant Keeper

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In the City of Toronto there was once
a restaurant owned by a man named Imre Finta.
Born in 1912 in Austria-Hungary, Finta spent
his years of youth in my hometown Szeged,
immigrating to Canada after the Second World War.
Settling in Toronto, in 1953 Finta bought
the Candlelight Restaurant but it did not go well,
so he closed it. Then he opened The Moulin Rouge
on Avenue Road at DuPont Street.
The old fashioned Hungarian gentleman greeted
his guests warmly, politely kissing the right hand
of his female patrons.

I had never dined at the Moulin Rouge
but I encountered Finta in a brickyard
and also at the railway station of Szeged
in the summer of 1944.
At that time I was eight years old
and Finta, aged 32, was a Captain
of the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie.
He was also a Nazi collaborator who supervised
the deportation of 8,617 Jews to slave labour lagers
and death camps. I was one of them.

A few months earlier, on March 19,1944,
the German Army occupied Hungary
and Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest.
His Mission was to implement in Hungary
the "Final Solution", a Euphemism the Nazis
used to disguise the mass murder of the Jews.

In June 1944, swearing gendarmes pushed
a group of Jewish prisoners from the ersatz ghetto
of Kistelek onto a freight train. My mother,
my three year old sister Vera and I were
among them. We travelled thirty kilometres to
Szeged where the gendarmes led us to
an abandoned brick factory that was turned into
a makeshift concentration camp.
The brickyard camp commandant was
SS captain Angermayer, whom I remember
as a tall and lanky silhouette
moving among the prisoners in a black uniform.

He was assisted by ruthless gendarmes
in cock-feathered hats, armed with
bayoneted rifles and swords,
who terrorized the captives.
Living conditions in the makeshift ghetto
were dreadful. Only one water tap served
almost nine thousand people and the latrine
did not deserve that name. Garbage was strewn
all over the place. The silence of the night
was broken by the screams of the mentally ill.

Captain Finta, head of the Department
of Investigations in Szeged, appeared
in the brickyard day after day.
Accompanied by a group of his detectives,
he repeatedly threatened to shoot every person,
who hides his or her own money and valuables.
This chief of "investigations"
and his police thugs had beaten and tortured
innocent Jewish men and women in order
to find and confiscate their private property.
Many of them committed suicide.

Aided by doctors and midwives, the gendarmes
conducted the bodily searches, including anal
and genital inspections. Not everyone in Hungary
was impressed though by the efficiency of police
investigations. Endre Hamvas, the Catholic Bishop
of Csanad, for example, was shocked and sent
a protesting report to church officials
on the brutal police searches.

On June 21, Finta initialled and submitted
a memorandum to the Mayor stating that
the German SS command decided to deport
the Jews from Szeged on June 25,27 and 28,
on three freight trains.
The deportations occurred under dreadful weather
conditions, amid thunder storms. A lot of rain
fell on the city in June. The dark skies opened
their gloomy gates. The heavens were weeping
for the sorrows of mothers, the anguish of fathers,
for the misery of the world.

Finta came to the railway station to oversee
how the gendarmes pushed us onto the crowded
cattle cars. About eighty people were squeezed into
each box car like sardines. The guards provided for
every car a bucket of water and another bucket
to serve as the toilet. When a woman called out,
"please, give us more water", a gendarme replied:
"You don't really need water because
you will be soon dead".

Finta stood at the station cursing the Jews.
His former fiancée was among the deported,
and he told her that she was "a Jewish whore".
Three months later his police career was over.
The advancing Soviet Army crossed the Tisza River
and on October 11,1944, had taken Szeged.
Finta did not wait for their arrival and fled from
the city.

After the war a Hungarian People's Court in Szeged
tried him in absentia for his complicity in torture,
robbery, forcible confinement, kidnapping and
manslaughter. In 1948 it convicted Finta for
war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was
sentenced for five years of prison with forced labour.

Yet Finta was free. He and hundreds of other Nazi
war criminals arrived in Canada, hiding their
terrible secrets. They committed harrowing atrocities
in their own country. Then they fled and found safe
haven in Canada. Not knowing their horrific crimes,
Canada welcomed them with open arms.

However, in 1987 Finta was arraigned in Toronto
and prosecuted for war crimes. But, how do you
deliver justice half a century later? The crimes were
committed in another country, in a different era,
while the memories of the witnesses have faded.

Mind you, the judicial system is not about justice
but the power struggle between prosecution and
defence. And the Finta trial was very poorly
designed. He was not judged for robbery, torture,
kidnapping, deportation and murder but for
his mind set in 1944.

Thus Finta managed to pass
the responsibility for his crimes to his superiors.
In 1990 the 78 year old Finta walked out
of the court hall as a free man, proclaiming his love
for the Jewish people. He did not forget to add that
he used to have many Jewish friends and that once
he even had a Jewish fiancée.

As his victim, I do not feel any anger or bitterness
over his acquittal. I do not believe in punishment
for revenge. Moreover, what sort of justice can result
from a trial? After all, courts cannot compensate us
for our sufferings, for our lost years of youth.
Nor can they bring back to life the dead.

Monday, November 25, 2019
Topic(s) of this poem: holocaust,memoirs
COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Kevin Patrick 25 November 2019

Its stories like yours that remind me the strengths and weaknesses of humanity. This is a story to be told to everyone, including the next generation, so that they understand the horrors lived. I don't know if I would have strength to forgive, but drinking from the spring of anger is what drives evils to continue. Yours is a testament of humanity.

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