Komarom

Komarom is a border town in NorthWest Hungary. It's in that indistinct corner where the country might be Austria or Czechoslovakia as was.
I've been reading "The Hare with the Amber Eyes"; I tripped over the name Komarom in the summary of what happened to the writer's relations from this place, an entrainment point for Auschwitz, and, as ever, I felt that sickening rush of heat and quickened heartbeat, that feeling of fearing to read on or turn the page in case I see the personal name of my father in conjunction with some atrocity. It is an absurd and exaggerated reaction, yet I can't help wondering ... Komarom was at least one place where he served as a Royal Hungarian Gendarme.
I have read de Waal's book with mixed feelings, feelings I've had in relation to other similar books as well. This excellent piece of scholarship unpeels event by event the dismantling of a Jewish family through the twists of the early twentieth century, the chapters on the consequences of Anschluss make grim reading. But here's my problem: it's difficult, even impossible, to give substance to the diasporic experience of ordinary people. De Waal's family were sufficiently grand to leave behind records of visits to the opera. Who recorded my grandparents' visits to the cowshed? Or that of the millions displaced and traumatised? And I'm not Jewish. My parents' experience and my experience of them, my post-memory, has no easy slot, precisely because it is a history of ordinary people. And even worse, my father was on the "wrong" side in so many different ways: Czechoslovak born Hungarian siding with Nazi Germany in the hope of retrieving lost land, a Royal Hungarian Gendarme signed up in the last months of immiment defeat but at the very time when deportations to the gas chambers escalated; no tale of the Shoah does not single out the Hungarian Gendarmes for ruthless brutality.
So de Waal's book is one I can read and pity the lot of his disposessed baronial family but ultimately it is not my story. Who wants to read that the pain of ordinary people, even those on the losing side is as great as that of princes?