Finally, we reached the office of the chief surgeon, the doctor who had operated on Zoltán. An erudite man with medical degrees from Vienna displayed on the wall behind his desk and a beard like Sigmund Freud’s, Dr. Keller insisted on brewing us tea, heating the water on a small primus stove that sat next to a metal tray of surgical instruments. As he bustled about, filling the kettle, spooning loose tea into a china pot, setting cups and saucers and a sugar bowl on the work table where he bade us sit, he apologized for the state of the hospital, concerned lest “the Western visitors” think that medical care in Hungary was primitive. They were out of room and out of medical supplies, he explained with József translating. No antibiotics, no anesthetics, no morphine. Imagine operating on a fu
