My (Real) Birthday

"The speed with which the Hungarian authorities cast out Jews from society, then robbed, segregated and deported them was unprecedented in the entire history of the Holocaust."

I will turn 42 tomorrow. 42 seems like a high number. I don't feel 42. I don't (I hope) look 42. I don't really want to be 42. But I must accept it so I am trying it on. Silently mouthing it to myself in the mirror as I look for gray hairs. (There are still none.) I'll still be vague about my age, as needed, but it is a fact I need to live with and perhaps embrace over the next year.

(David was 42 when we had Eli 10 years ago. When he looks at pictures of himself from those days he bemoans his youth, strength and dark hair. He misses himself at 42. That makes me feel better.)

My grandfather, Ferenc Koszeg Sr, died at 42. In that context, 42 seems like a low number.

He had the same crappy birthday I have. January 2. Unfortunately (?) for him, the year of his birth was 1900. He died of typhus or some other horrible disease; cold, abandoned and alone in a labor camp on the Russian front. He was one of the "25,000-42,000 unarmed Jewish men ordered to battlefields [who] lost their lives between 1941 and 1944 at the hands of brutal guards, due to inhuman conditions and/or military action." He was taken away to the camp where the Jews were suffering "from horrendous living and internment conditions similar to those in the concentrations camps of the SS" in 1942. At age 42.

I often thought about him on my birthday as a child. I always wondered if he had hated this January 2 business as well. The #DayNobodyWantsToCelebrateAnymore.

My father, who barely remembered him, had a picture of him hanging in his bedroom. It was of a serious-looking bald man with eyes like my brother's. He seemed old and mysterious. I knew from my grandmother that he had been a successful and well-to-do dentist, a man of great renown around Budapest as the favorite dentist of "classy ladies and gentlemen" and that she loved him so deeply that she forgave his indiscretions and occasional coldness. I later learned that he was a charming, well-educated man who spoke several languages, loved travel, good food and beautiful women as much as he hated being Jewish and all that it entailed in Hungary in the 1930s.

I also knew that he wasn't supposed to have died and left a 3-year-old child with no father, a young woman with no husband. But, until today, with 42 looming over me, I never quite fully appreciated how young he was when he was torn away from his life and everything that he knew. I never fully felt the awfulness of it all.

So on this day, I want to honor him and learn to appreciate my 42 years and my freedom and privilege to keep on living as I choose.