Ember Mária: Biography

Mária Ember (Abádszalók, 19 April 1931 – Budapest, 30 December 2001)

Writer, journalist, critic, literary translator. Elected posthumous member of the Digital Academy of Literature on 4 June 2020.

Born in Abádszalók on 19 April 1931, died in Budapest on 30 December 2001. She was highly regarded in many professions – as a journalist, editor, writer, literary translator, art critic, and historian. She published more than thirty books. Her best-known work is Hairpin Bend (Hajtűkanyar), but her most widely read books are her travel guides – two for Germany, one each for Vienna and London. Her books and writings on Raoul Wallenberg are indispensable historical reference works.

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Mária Ember was born on 19 April 1931 in Abádszalók as Mária Julianna Elsner. Her father was Dr. Henrik Elsner, her mother Erzsébet Grosinger. The author changed her surname in July 1951 with the approval of the Minister of the Interior. In the early decades of the 20th century, the Elsner family, which was on the road to assimilation, came to Abádszalók, a village in Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County, from Felvidék. Mária Ember's father, Henrik Elsner, a lawyer, was born in Lőcse (LevočaÖ in 1887, and completed his secondary school education at Lutheran High School in Iglo, a school town in the Spiš region, but obtained his law degree at the University of Law in Budapest. In 1926, the Hungarian Bar Association accepted him as a member, and two years later, he chose a wife (Erzsébet, the daughter of Jakab Grosinger, a copper merchant) from Törökszentmiklós, who was 14 years younger than him and from a well-off middle class family.

A trilingual lawyer (Hungarian, German, and Slovak) specialising in property matters, in just a few years he had created a secure livelihood for his family. He enrolled his two daughters – Mária and Judith – in the Roman Catholic elementary school in Abádszalók. He had no other choice, as the town had no Jewish elementary school.

The end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s saw the waning of this idyllic childhood: the assimilated family of Jewish origin was slowly being hemmed in by exclusionary, disenfranchising laws: Mária, who had excelled in her studies, was admitted to the gymnasium of the Miskolc Girls’ Educational Institute, but only with the help of her father’s remaining contacts, and only as a private student. In April 1944, the Hungarian gendarmes deported Henrik Elsner to the internment camp at Sárvár. His journey from there – according to research by Mária Ember decades later – probably led to the Auschwitz gas chambers. His wife and mother-in-law, together with their two daughters-in-law, were moved to the ghetto in Kunhegyes barely a month later, and then transported to the last collection point in Hungary before the deportation, the sugar factory in Szolnok. There the family dwindled further: the gendarmerie investigators searching for Jewish property beat Mrs. Jakab Grosinger Ungár Rezsina to death.

The deportation train was diverted at the last minute to Strashoff, and from July 1944, the mother and her two daughters were employed at the Waagner-Biró Iron and Steel Works in Vienna (Stadlau). At the war plant, her mother worked as a cleaner and Mária, the elder daughter, was a forced labourer until the spring of 1945, when the Red Army liberated Strasshof. They returned to the country that had expelled them, „enriched” by a combination of fortunate coincidences and a lifetime of experiences. In 1945, the inevitable dilemma arose – where to go „home” to? – to which the hopeful and practical maternal answer was: to Abádszalók. Otherwise, „how would your father find us?” The truncated Elsner family made the journey home to Budapest on foot, returning to their ransacked house in Abádszalók at the end of April. The mother was only able to recover a fraction of their stolen belongings. But the head of the family’s jacket, although returned, waited in vain for its former owner. The first fourteen years of Mária Ember’s life had an indelible impact not only on her future, but also on her professional and literary life.

In 1945, due to difficulties making ends, the elder Elsner girl was sent to the Szenes Anna Home for Girls in Pest, an institution for half-orphans and orphans, where she learned the dressmaker’s trade. She graduated in 1950 from high school, and became a full-time student of Hungarian and German in the Faculty of Humanities at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in September of the same year. In 1954, she obtained a secondary school teaching qualification in journalism and Hungarian studies.

As her first experiments in fiction prove, she wanted to write her „unwritable experiences”. In 1954, she began to record her actual experiences in the idle hours of the editorial night shifts – 14 years later, these became the basis for her first novel, I Tell Myself the Story (Magamnak mesélek). After her marriage in January 1952 to András B. Hegedűs, a teaching assistant, the newlyweds took a special course to acquire sobering historical knowledge from those interned and imprisoned in the 1950s, and who, on returning to their friends, revealed the true face of the Rákosi regime through their own trials and tribulations. These stories became a mobilizing force, a truly revisionist effort, one of the forums of which was the Petőfi Circle, founded in 1955 under the auspices of the Democratic Youth Alliance. András B. Hegedűs was the deputy secretary-general of the organisation, and was later named the main intellectual preparator of the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Mária Ember played an important role in ensuring that readers could learn about the meetings of the Petőfi Circle, and not only from the rumours.

The Sántha Affair – her article published in June 1956 in Magyar Nemzet covering an actual conspiracy – was given a prominent place in her „counter-revolutionary” index of crimes. The report revealed the story of the „witch-hunt” of the world-famous Hungarian neurosurgeon Kálmán Sántha four years earlier, and demanded full restitution for the professor, who had been stripped of his title, clinical director’s post, and, above all, banned from performing life-saving operations. Ember’s letter was an unprecedented sensation for its time. More than a hundred letters from readers, including a postcard from a living but morose literary classic („Madam, please accept my tearful and loving greetings for your article on Sántha. Always a supporter: Milán Füst.”) – offered proof of how unusual it was for someone to proclaim the truth of a non-party opponent.

In the days of the revolution, Mária Ember assigned to herself the role of chronicler. Her diary entries from 1956 – which only made it to print in book form under the title Everything Belatedly (Mindent késve) after her death in 2006 – are important contributions to the everyday life of the revolution, as well as to the eventful history of her paper, the ill-fated Magyar Nemzet, which was full of events even then.

The state security and internal affairs documents prove that the communists planned a lawsuit against the Magyar Nemzet, which was found guilty of starting the „counter-revolution”. One of the defendants in this exemplary trial was supposed to have been Mária Ember. Then the concept changed: journalists were offered pardons. All the staff of the banned daily newspapers were dismissed, and if they were summoned before the journalistic vindication committee, they pledged their faith to the puppet government led by János Kádár, took on their required role of regime propagandists, and could even forget their „guilty past”.

Mária Ember did not ask for this deal, and only months later could she find a job as a primary school teacher. After a short time, she became the breadwinner of the family, as her economist husband was dismissed from his job at the Statistical Office, arrested, and sentenced to two years in prison in the spring of 1959.

In 1961, she became the editor of the cultural section of the Neue Zeitung, a small-circulation weekly newspaper for Germans in Hungary, and from 1972 she was the editor of the Pesti Műsor programme magazine. Her absence from the press lasted until 1976, when, after two decades, having gained literary prestige, she was again made a staff member of Magyar Nemzet.

In her years of exile from the press, she began writing novels. Her autobiography, I Tell Myself the Story, was published in 1968, and its sequel, Coincidences (Véletlenek), appeared three years later. The breakthrough came in 1974 with Hairpin Bend (Hajtűkanyar). Its success with readers was due in no small part to the fact that the Communist Party, which had seized power by 1949, had made „Jewish themes” taboo for more than two decades. But Hairpin Bend, which weaves fiction with historical documents, broke through the wall of silence. The novel recounted the reality of Hungarian deportation and the German concentration camps with restrained but searing accuracy.

However much the dictatorship of the Kádár regime had softened, the novel was too much for the authorities. In March 1975, at the 11th Congress of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, a resolution of the „highest level” – as a guideline to publishers and periodicals – stigmatised „the striking phenomenon of turning back to the past”.

Mária Ember, who returned to Magyar Nemzet as an editor and wrote travel guides also entertained the public with crime parodies and humorous sketches as a fiction writer, but she did not stop turning to the past. Her short story collection, The File-Poem and Other Stories(Az aktavers és egyéb történetek), is a testament to this, as is her novel A Happy Woman (Egy boldog nő), the „raw material” of which was a long biographical interview with a middle-class woman who had simply endured historical hardship and never actively rebelled against her fate.

In contrast to her literary protagonist, the author spoke out again in October 1979, signing with her husband a protest against the trial of the Czechoslovak oppositionist Vaclav Havel and several other activists of Charter ’77. It is now well-known that the 250 rebels were persuaded one by one to withdraw their signatures, and those who refused were subject to reprisals of one kind or another. „I gave my signature on a case which – and I feared this – was about to pass without a word. And I thought that this modest (and, from the future, certainly modest) expression of freedom of conscience would not be a »stain« on the image of our country.” Mária Ember, who was sent on creative leave, was not dismissed in the end, but merely relieved of her „confidential” post. Her personal life also changed around this time: she and her husband moved apart, and though they maintained political solidarity and working relations, they eventually divorced.

The fruits of this new, forced career were the art reviews, sensitive in their responses, and which the readers of Magyar Nemzet liked for their accessibility and readability. The exceptionally hard-working Mária Ember continued her turn to the past that led to new literary and historical works. Before the change of regime in 1989, she published her historical interpretation book 100 Pictures (100 kép), the first in Hungary to include photographs from the Auschwitz album, and her work The Acrobats of the Death Train and Other Historical Interviews (A halálvonat artistái és más történelmi interjúk).

In the second half of the 1980s – although she formally retired in 1987 – she became an important member of the reappointed editorial staff of Magyar Nemzet. After the regime change, the majority of the editorial staff went on strike for the independence of the paper, but the Antall government gained decisive influence and those who did not accept this, including Mária Ember, were forced to leave.

For a long time, Mária Ember’s historical, editorial, and journalistic self seemed to have been suppressed, or at least forced into dormancy. In 1992, she organised the first major Wallenberg exhibition at the Buda Castle Palace, and then went on to give a detailed account of the 1944 activities of the Swedish diplomat in Hungary who was responsible for saving Jews, and who was deported to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War and there disappeared. Her magnum opus, Wallenberg in Budapest (Wallenberg Budapesten), published at the turn of the millennium, is still an indispensable source of research in this field.

She was sixty-eight years old when it became clear that the best she could do against cancer was to stall for time. „I was sentenced to death for the second time,” she told only her closest friends. All outsiders could see was that Mária Ember was beginning to impose a terrible pace of work on herself. She completed and published unfinished studies and embarked on the life story interview that her „compatriot”, the poet Gyula Jenei, also born in Abádszalók, had been urging her to do, so far unsuccessfully. This conversation – in which not a single word was said about her illness – is a rigorously strict, but perhaps also unfair, reckoning with herself: „I ask myself more and more how we managed the talent that was put in our cradle. The answer is a bit bitter, because perhaps we could have done more and better if we had worked under conditions of freedom.”

And as if to leave a testament to this, in the last months of her life she wrote two short novels, two gems that crowned her oeuvre, in a race against the passing of time. The first of these little books, Will We Still Live In 2000? (2000-ben fogunk még élni?) was published in December 2001, while she was still very ill. But her masterpiece, Away from the Village (El a faluból), was only published posthumously.

The biography was written by Gábor Murányi, translated by Benedek Totth and Austin Wagner.