My grandmother, Babi, was the only child of lawyer Lajos Szmik and Ilona Voight, born in Buda’s Vizíváros neighborhood on June 24th, 1898, after 17 years of ever more hopeless waiting. Her parents’ happiness knew no bounds. She was given everything a well-to-do bourgeois family could give their daughter: a young German nanny, French governess, vacations on the Adriatic, visits to dear Transylvanian relatives, her own estate near Budapest where she could run about with her cousins under the plentiful fruit trees, pots of jams and tomatoes simmering throughout the summer. For winter it was ice skating, piano and singing lessons, opera, theater, balls. Great-grandfather twirled his legendary moustache and grumbling, smiling, paid the bills of the seamstress and the milliner. All that mattered was that he see this girl, the only one, happy.
On June 24th, 1914, they celebrated her 16th birthday on the estate. All of the cousins, uncles, and aunts were there, and every prospective suitor there was to speak of: sons of friends, university students, doctors-in-training, lawyers, young captains, the guests altogether totaling around 50 people. A sagging dinner table, paper lanterns in the garden, a Gypsy band playing waltzes on the terrace.
“And then I was overcome with such a horrible fit of sobbing that I all but died,”
Grandma mused over the photo album 50 years later as she told me the story. “They laid me down, the doctor calmed me, Mother placed a wet cloth on my forehead. Nobody knew what the matter was. Nor did I. All I knew was that in my entire life, I would never be happier than I was in that moment.”
How is Babi's life connected to Béla Lugosi? Faded photos – and the story written here – tell the tale.
