My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  When he was digging up the wooden construction which marked the original triangulation point, Lund found a bronze Maria-medal buried, probably, when it was put up. He was not a religious man, but still he felt there must be some connection between the appearance of the Holy Virgin and the finding of this Patrona Hungariae medal. While trying to solve this mystery he hit upon a wonderful idea. He told his men to work without haste and leave the rest to him. That evening, when the norm-controller arrived to check up on how much rock had been cut during the day, he congratulated Lund: the brigade had cut two hundred and fifty metres. This was because Lund had discovered that if he moved the new triangulation point nearer the edge of the precipice each day, it looked as though great progress had been made. He had no reason to fear that he would be found out. Not even the foremost mining engineers of the country could have calculated or even estimated the weight of hewn rock piling up at the foot of the mountain, and not even a new geodesic measurement of northern Hungary could have proved that he had cheated.

  Lund’s discovery helped not only his brigade but all the prisoners working on the quarry front, among them the men dangling from the top on ropes ten or twenty metres long, hewing steps into the quarry wall. The beautiful boy with the Antinuos face told me of Lund’s trick that same evening and asked for twice his usual Greek lesson because now he had more time to study. He said that Lund, a very modest person, was inordinately proud of his idea and compared himself to Archimedes because, contrary to Archimedes who said, ‘Give me a fixed point to stand on and I shall move the earth from its orbit’, he had removed the fixed point and brought everything to a standstill.

  We hoped that by slowing down work at the quarry and on the road-building we could at least arrest our further deterioration if not gain new strength. This, however, did not affect the forty or fifty elderly men who suffered so badly from the cold and the wet that there was little hope for their survival. One evening I was visited on my bunk by a very intelligent man with soft eyes and hard features, György Korda, formerly a captain in the so-called economic police. Korda told me that the chief nachalnik, Dezsö Tamas, and his deputy, Sandor Jeges, had offered him the job of nachalnik. He was the third to be interviewed, because two other former police officers had rejected the offer – as a result of the appearance of the Holy Virgin. Korda’s information did not surprise me. A year ago the AVO had selected the nachalniki from among the ‘un-real social democrats’ (which was what we called the careerists who joined the party in 1945, to distinguish them from the old – that is the ‘real’ – social democrats); these were later replaced by lumpen-proletarians and lumpen-intellectuals who pretended that they had remained good communists even in prison; while lately – perhaps from professional solidarity – the posts of nachalniki were generally given to policemen – not Horthy police, but those who had served in the ‘democratic police’.

  Korda told me that he had accepted the offer, but could still resign if I disapproved. He had decided to form a brigade of the older men and thus to save them. His plan was ready and he had already discussed it with Illésfalvy, who was working in the AVO store-house and who had promised to throw the wooden pegs supplied by the main AVO stores into the fire. We knew that the shoemaker’s shop was still making Sunday boots for the AVO staff – although the camp commander had prohibited it after Michnai’s escape. The head of the shoemaker’s shop had informed Dentures that very day that they could make no more boots if they were given no pegs; Korda, on the other hand, had told Dentures that there would be plenty of pegs if he was permitted to organize the old men into a brigade which would manufacture treenails in a covered shed among the woodpiles. Korda planned to deliver a few handfuls to the shoemaker’s shop every evening and throw the rest into the fire. Neither the camp commander nor the political officer need know anything about the arrangement. Though the plan sounded somewhat naïve, Korda was certain that it would come off. And if the wooden pegs business folded up he would invent something else.

  The reason why Korda told me his plans in detail was that he wanted me to use my name and prestige to win for him not only an acquittal but a summa cum laude forgiveness for his communist past and for having been a captain in the notorious economic police. I gave him my word that I would do so on condition that the old men survived without exception.

  I did not have much confidence in Korda’s undertaking, but soon learned that he was executing his plan with exemplary courage and coolness. In the mornings, when we left the camp for our places of work, Korda led his brigade in the direction of the quarry, because it would have been dangerous to remain behind, seeing that the commander and the political officer were always snooping about to catch idlers. On the way to the mine the old men disappeared as if the earth had swallowed them up. They stole back, one by one, to the shed among the woodpiles behind the barracks and sat there all day around a fire. It was Korda who obtained the charcoal – so that there should be no smoke – from the charcoal-burners working in the depths of the forest. The calorie-value of their diet sufficed for this way of life, and the old people soon began to show signs of recovery. This solution of the problem was welcomed by the entire camp because the constant – though justified – complaints of the older men had been driving us to despair.

  The first weeks of January, therefore, passed in relative calm. Because of the slower tempo of the work and the universal, quiet confidence created by the appearance of the Holy Virgin, nobody died of starvation. I often thought of Michnai and still hoped that he had reached his destination. At the same time I was affected by the atmosphere in the camp and almost came to believe that I myself had seen the Holy Virgin, instead of having conjured her up. At least I was almost convinced that she had indeed appeared to Todi above the embers and, by some strange coincidence, had announced the very things I had suggested – or perhaps prophesied. And in addition to the easier work and the heavenly vision there was another reward for our renewed strength and determination to resist: the dogs.

  We often talked about what we would do to the AVO if conditions changed. Only twenty or thirty of our comrades insisted that they must be hanged to the last man or imprisoned in exactly the same conditions as ourselves. My friends, myself and the Catholics, Pali Musza, Kertész and Pista Todi, declared that we had no wish to live in a society that maintained prisons like this, no matter who was in them. If we did as the communists did we would, willy-nilly, become identical with them. The judges and lawyers – Rigo, Banvölgyi, Berzsenyi – said that according to the penal code, any independent Hungarian court would sentence to death thousands and thousands of AVO men, high party functionaries and party secretaries for murder and complicity in murder, and that even communist law would support the sentences on the basis of the paragraphs dealing with the unlawful torturing of individuals and entire classes of people. However, we all agreed that the law must not be applied. At the beginning of the century the feudal régime had suppressed the agrarian-socialists and social democrats with brutality and machine-gun fire; then the 1919 dictatorship of the proletariat had introduced a Red Terror, to be followed by the Horthy régime, and a White Terror; then came the blood baths of the arrow-cross and the Gestapo in 1944, and finally the present situation. The vendetta must be stopped once and for all.

  In this we were united; but none of us had any idea as to what to do with the guilty. In principle we were all for forgiveness, but in practice the idea of living under the same roof with these people in a decent society appeared impossible. Finally we had agreed that the best solution would be to deport them, with their families, to the Soviet Union – although, since a complete change of régime in Hungary implied a complete change in the Soviet Union, it seemed heartless to wish them on a democratic Russia. The fate of the dogs, however, changed our attitude. We did not discuss it, but a few days later Egri informed me that I had been talking about AVO murderers in my sleep, and planning to strangle Stalin – in English, which made things even worse. Paul Musza, who was known for
his boundless tolerance, was pacing the barracks in his bare feet, shaking his fists and calling to the Almighty to mete out justice.

  On the morning after they escaped into our barracks we wanted to take the dogs to work with us, but, obeying their instincts, they crawled under the bunks. After we had left the camp the AVO guards ordered the cooks to remain in the kitchen and keep away from the windows. Then – as Helvetius related – they coaxed the dogs out into the yard and began to shoot at them. They did not aim at the head but at the hind legs, obviously to revenge the desertion. When we returned from work, the whole camp was drenched in blood. The black-and-white-striped mastiff which had spent the night on Uncle Csaplar’s bunk escaped, wounded, to a spot between the two barbed-wire fences and was still alive the next morning.

  My large white bitch escaped to the shed behind the kitchen, where it was nursed by Helvetius. He called over one of the doctors from the infirmary, who extracted the bullets from the dog’s legs and thighs and bandaged them. At noon, when Helvetius and the other cooks brought the kettles out to the work-sites, he laid the dog in an empty kettle. He carried the animal to the charcoal-burners’ furnace where two reliable fellow-prisoners were working: Palffy-Muhoray and Lajos Dalnoki Miklos, son of the prime minister of the 1945 democratic Hungarian government. They hid the animal in a woodpile and Helvetius visited it every day, bringing bones and half of the AVO guard’s goulash. I always looked in on the dog whenever I could. She lay motionless in the dark and, according to the charcoal-burners, never came out into the open. I squatted down by her, seeing nothing but her luminous eyes and feeling her chin on my hand. She never made a sound except when she smelled a guard. Then she began to growl, persistently, monotonously, but not louder than the humming of a bee.

  In the middle of January our situation again began to deteriorate. The nachalniki must have noticed something, because they were constantly on the look-out for sabotage, though in vain. In their fury they sicked the AVO guards on us every time they caught us resting or talking. The guards – when they were alone, and particularly those of peasant origin – shrugged their shoulders and snapped at the nachalnik: ‘Don’t you see he’s finished?’ However, when they came in twos, they vied with each other in brutality. One morning, for instance, when I was loading logs in the forest, a young AVO guard with a face like Lord Byron’s dropped a whole bar of chocolate at my feet; but the same afternoon, when he was accompanied by another guard, Mongol, he hit me, at Talian’s request, with such force that I fainted and discovered only later that he had knocked out two of my teeth.

  In the third week of January one of us was collapsing every day, usually around a quarter to twelve, immediately before the cooks arrived with the cauldron, when we heard the distant sound of church bells from the village in the valley. Those who collapsed usually died the same afternoon or during the night. They were all middle-aged, well-built, once strong men: workers, clerks, peasants. There was not one intellectual among them. The fact that our once so feverishly debated theory had proved correct no longer interested us. Even the materialists recognized by now that it was the spirit which fed the body with the last drops of the vis vitalis, but even the idealists had to recognize that though, by some miracle, we had been the guests of Christ, the feast was now over.

  Although I had lost approximately one quarter of my weight, which had remained unchanged at sixty-six kilogrammes since my student days, I felt relatively strong, above all spiritually. Therefore I thought it my duty to devote my energies to comforting and entertaining my fellow-prisoners, even if my friends repeatedly warned me to be careful. But what was the use of being careful? It became increasingly clear to me that death by starvation would catch up with me in six to eight weeks, and if our food were unexpectedly improved, or the prisoners were released, I, who could write of my experience, would be the last man of all the thirteen hundred that they would let go.

  In spite of this I still had some confidence left in my habitual luck, which had so far preserved me from being beaten or kicked to death. However, even luck deserted me. The blows received from Byron-face were only a prelude to what was to follow. The next day eight of us were carrying a heavy tree-trunk ten metres long down to the camp from the forest near the quarry. On the uneven slope the full weight of the trunk bore down now on four, then on two of us, so that they were sighing and cursing uninterruptedly.

  ‘Imagine that you are carrying Stalin’s coffin,’ I said to comfort them. ‘It will immediately feel lighter.’

  I noticed too late that a nachalnik, György Kerekes, was standing behind me on the side of the path. Kerekes had been a communist party functionary when they arrested him; he said he had committed grave mistakes, though nobody believed him. He often explained that if he had the opportunity to send a message to his wife he would beg her to tell their son that his father was a scoundrel and that he must learn to hate him. At first, when he drove them to greater and greater achievements with double portions of food and extra cigarettes, the young members of his brigade had been devoted to him. But when the men no longer possessed the strength required of them he accused them of sabotage and had them locked up. When, exhausted with hunger and from sitting in short chains, they returned to work, he demanded that they perform their previous quota. He repeated this process two or three times until his men were reduced to skeletons.

  Kerekes was not as stupid as my nachalnik, Talian, who denounced us every five minutes and exasperated the AVO with his oily flattery and ceaseless, hysterical tantrums. Kerekes approached the AVO guards not more than once or twice a day, asking for their help in whispers, because, he said, he could no longer bear to listen to the slandering of our socialist society, or to watch the sabotage. If they didn’t help him he would be obliged to go to the camp commander. The implied threat scared the guards and they did what he asked, locking up the alleged culprit or beating him senseless on the spot. At such times Kerekes stood by with his arms crossed on his chest and turned away his head, though his muddy eyes were alight.

  The previous week I had had a quarrel with him. An AVO colonel from Budapest had held an inspection in the square between the barracks. I was standing next to Gabori and immediately before us stood the nachalniki and the camp commander. After the inspection the colonel addressed us briefly. ‘I have now seen for myself that you are all right. Or has anyone a complaint to make?’ he asked, reaching for his revolver. ‘Well, that’s that, then,’ he concluded with satisfaction, and trod deliberately on Gabori’s boot in the toe of which there was a palm-sized hole. Gabori waved a cheerful goodbye with his big toe and the colonel turned away nervously. After the inspection Kerekes demanded that Gabori be punished because he had attacked the AVO’s prestige and had tried to make the camp a laughing stock. This time, however, nobody listened to him.

  Two days later, as I was coming back from visiting the sick dog, I met Kerekes in the forest. He stopped me and addressed me as ‘comrade’, against which I vehemently protested. Kerekes swallowed the insult and then begged me to help him re-educate my destructive friends, in the first place Gabori. It was his duty as a communist to attempt this almost hopeless task.

  I felt myself going green with fury.

  ‘You are not a communist,’ I replied. ‘An honest communist who attempts to preserve his faith even in prison must necessarily go mad. You are neither mad nor a communist. When you were brought here you saw at once that the physical effort demanded of the prisoners was too much for you, so like Richard III you resolved to become a villain. If you get out of here you will continue playing the communist to get yourself a good job and make others work. It is a comprehensible attitude but it has nothing to do with communist ideology.’

  He watched me from under his straight brows and did not interrupt. I noticed for the first time that he was slightly hunchbacked, which had brought Richard III to my mind. He was so completely unprepared for my words that he began to stammer and defend himself. I remarked that he was not the only one to have atte
nded lectures on psychology at the university, and went on my way. When, a few days later, he overheard my remark about Stalin’s coffin it was easy to guess what was to come.

  The same evening, as I was about to go into the barracks, two giant, red-faced AVO guards whom I had never seen before stood in my way. They led me behind the building. Both were at least a head taller than I and I stood between their broad, square shoulders like a football on the starting line. They began to hit me expertly, without emotion, pushing me back and forth between them. I tried to behave like a ball, to transform myself into kinetic energy and fly from one to the other without resistance. In the end they pushed me a few times in the chest and back, then they let me go. My friends were busy playing bridge with hand-painted cards made of old cardboard boxes and had not noticed my absence.

  Two days later I had another misadventure. The guards must have cracked one of my ribs, because I felt a deep, stabbing pain at every breath and could hardly walk. In the morning, in the quarry, I simply kneeled down behind a small pile of rock. There was no nachalnik around. Some ten of my fellow-prisoners stood in a circle round me, begging me to recite a poem I had written to Suzy. This poem was very popular and although some hundred men knew it by heart they always liked to hear me recite it.

  I was coming to the lines:

  … And when I die I will speak from my grave,

  Standing in its pit to send you my eternal love.

  I will send you the sound of my vanished footsteps

  Sandalled in the fallen leaves of autumn…

  when a boulder began falling from the crest of the mountain where Lund and his men were working. Usually no rubble fell on the spot where we were, but this time a round stone, the size of a child’s head, fell on the pile behind which I was kneeling, ricocheted and hit me squarely in the forehead. I was immediately covered in blood. My companions led me to Doctor Bede, who was on duty in the quarry and who put iodine on the wound. With this I considered the problem solved.