The next morning I felt faint, feverish and sick Doctor Acs, who inspected the barracks before the inmates went to work, told me that I had concussion. This, however, did not suffice to keep me in bed, even less to take me to hospital. But when he noticed an egg-sized boil on my neck to which I had paid no attention his face cleared.
‘With this,’ he said, ‘they will let you into the infirmary.’
About thirty of us stood in line outside, waiting for the camp commander to appear. He sent the first, a peasant called Csibraki, suffering from sciatica, who had been crawling on all fours for a week, to join his working party. He did the same with another peasant suffering from cirrhosis of the liver. In Mutor’s case he hesitated. Mutor had a brain tumour and the entire camp knew it. At night, when he got up to go to the outhouse, he often knocked his head against the upper bunk in the dark and the bump woke us all. We watched his loping, unbalanced gait with horror but what horrified us even more was the circumstance that his name, Mutor, was an anagram of his disease, tumor.
‘All right, you can stay behind,’ the camp commander conceded. With the others he was more lenient and with the exception of two cases of sciatica and a serious case of coronary thrombosis he herded the others – who suffered from visible diseases, mostly boils on the neck, the knee or the hip-joint, into the infirmary. I was the last. He looked with horror at my neck. ‘Go in there and have yourself treated,’ he said.
Doctor Acs pointed out my bed, then took me into his consulting room and put me on his own bed so that he could talk to me while he was treating the others. But first he repeated the offer he had made me a year ago concerning glucose. When I again refused he said we would talk about it later and called in the first patient. During the treatment he told me that he had constructed an electric instrument to cure sciatica which the AVO, because it was an invisible disease, regarded as malingering. When the patient left he inspected my boil and said he would open it as soon as the staff sergeant arrived. He had plenty of chloroform and every minute of unconsciousness was a precious gift. I begged him not to wait because I might talk under chloroform and abuse the communists as I did in my sleep. He laughed and declared that he had operated on many an AVO guard and officer in the presence of the sergeant and they all sent Rakosi to the devil under the anaesthetic. The staff sergeant had never read Freud and didn’t take anything said at such times seriously. Besides, he was interested only in the operation and in nothing else.
‘A sadist?’
‘No. Or rather, only within the civilized, Galenian limits, like myself.’
Acs stood at the window, framed by the black-green, ghostly pines of the distant forest, and looked at me beseechingly. His face was lead-grey and thinner than was warranted by the work he was doing. It was rumoured in the camp that he was a morphine addict, but even if that had been true, his trouble was his conscience. A year before he and Count Janos Hoyos, both working in the infirmary, had been the most popular men of the camp. ‘At least our hospital is headed by two just men,’ my friends used to say. Very soon, however, Hoyos told the camp commander that he refused to work in the hospital if he was not supplied with penicillin and insulin. He was put in chains and sent to Budapest. We never heard of him again. Acs became chief physician in his place. At first Acs portioned out the medicines at his disposal equally and was hated because the small quantities didn’t do anyone any good. During the last few months he had changed his method, trying to save the élite of the camp, and making himself even more bitterly hated by the others. When, in the morning, he visited the barracks, people reminded him of medical ethics and spat in his face. Acs suffered terribly from all this. That was why he had constructed his electric instrument, which, he hoped, would prove his goodwill. When he saw me come into the infirmary his whole face lit up. Now, at last, he could open his heart to someone.
‘This is what happens to those who accept any kind of post under the communists,’ he said suddenly. ‘Look at me, George. All night long I walk up and down in this room. I agreed to become head of the infirmary because I had to agree. I am the most experienced of the five physicians in the camp, if someone has to shoulder the responsibility it is best that it should be me. At least, that’s what I told myself. But there’s no excuse for a physician who doesn’t notice what subconscious waters feed the roots of his rhetoric. I accepted this post because I was afraid to work, the blows and the thing we call, so euphemistically, “fatigue”. Fear won’t save me,’ he said, pointing to the green-black pines, straight as cypresses, in the distance, ‘because death will catch up with me anyway.’
He could not continue because Robert Gati, obviously tired of waiting outside, came into the consulting room. Acs looked at him angrily, but then kneeled down to take off the plaster from his broken leg. Gati – a short, delicate young man with sagging shoulders – had once worked on the party’s official daily, Szabad Nép. They arrested him on the Czechoslovak–German border when he was trying to escape to the West. The prisoners hated him; they alleged that shortly before his arrest he had written a report on the Vac penitentiary in which he complained that the political prisoners had it too good there. Gati behaved modestly and was mostly silent. When I first talked to him while we were carrying stone together, he told me that in 1949 he had come to the conclusions that Rakosi, GerÖ and Farkas were rascals. Within forty-eight hours he was on the Czech border, because he felt that he must enlighten the West without a moment’s delay. His childish simplicity moved me deeply and I suggested to my friends that we invite him to join our nightly conversations. They, however, protested because they said Gati smelled like a communist.
‘Well,’ Acs asked him while cutting the plaster, ‘are you still devoted to your one-time comrades?’
‘I was never devoted to them,’ Gati replied quietly. ‘All I did was declare that not every communist is a scoundrel. There are honest men among them.’
‘For instance?’
‘For instance Sandor Haraszti, Géza Losonczy, Miklos Gimes… and I could name at least half a dozen on Szabad Nép.’
‘Try to stand up,’ Acs commanded.
‘Besides,’ Gati continued, ‘I never approved of what was going on here. The members of the Hungarian communist leadership are cynics and criminals. They compromised the cause of communism,’ he added, walking a few steps with his face distorted with pain but without complaint. ‘I am deeply convinced that it is different in the Soviet Union. It is simply unthinkable that such prison conditions should prevail there.’
‘Stop spinning!’ I moaned, resting my swimming head on Acs’s straw pillow. ‘Rakosi does exactly what Stalin tells him to do. Our treatment here, the layout of the camp, and even the number of barbs in the barbed-wire fence are copied from the Soviet example. Besides, I find that both from the point of view of theoretical and practical bolshevism this camp is perfection itself. It is a miniature edition of the communist society of the future.’
The AVO sergeant appeared before I could develop my theme. I woke, some time later, on bed No. 13 in the common ward. One of twelve other patients, a man whose name nobody knew, lay unconscious on his bed. His dixie, still half full of beans, and his bread were on his bedside table. His neighbour, an informer by the name of Deak, had raised himself on his elbow and was watching the movement of the blanket over the dying man’s chest. His hand was hovering above the dixie and the bread, ready to swoop down as soon as the man had drawn his last breath. The others waited for me to open my eyes and then begged me to tell them about America.
I began to tell them the story of my captivity on Ellis Island. While I talked I took my temperature, which was above 104°. A few minutes later I felt sick and staggered out into the bathroom. I leaned my head against the barred window and looked out on the still, black-green pine trees. The shadow of death – I thought.
When I returned to my bed, Deak was still in the same position, his hand extended towards the food. Around four o’clock we were honoured by a visit from Hans Arse,
accompanied by Doctor Acs. I had never seen this man before but knew him well by description. Nobody knew his real name but his nickname was known in prisons all over Hungary. He was the medical colonel from Vacz who tore open the shirts of the hanged to put his stethoscope on their hearts. Every two weeks he came to Recsk to inspect the infirmary. He was a middle-aged, puny little man with an old-fashioned, black leather medical bag under his arm.
He came directly to my bed.
‘This malingerer has been lying here for months!’ he shouted at Doctor Acs. ‘How long, do you think, I will tolerate it?’
‘Habet concussionem cerebris, collega excellentissime …’
‘Stop gassing,’ the colonel interrupted. ‘And you, get dressed and go back to work right away!’ he yelled at me.
He remained standing beside my bed and waited until I had dressed. Deak took advantage of the opportunity and devoured the dying man’s bread. Acs bent his head. It seemed to me as if red, linoleum-like spots were dancing up and down his lead-grey face; but perhaps it was only my feverish imagination. When I stepped out of the infirmary and began walking up the mountain slope in the icy wind, I felt considerably better.
Three days later, one Saturday afternoon when at roll-call they read out the names of those who had earned punishment, mine was included. I was to be locked up at night for two weeks and spend two hours each night in short chains. Garamvölgyi’s name came immediately after mine. Two days before, coming back from work – we had been working at different places – we were glad to have an opportunity to talk but, just inside the barbed-wire fence, we came face to face with the Gravedigger. He was sitting, dead drunk, on the side of the ditch and shook his fist at us.
‘I saw you,’ he screamed. ‘I saw you playing cards in the bushes instead of working …’
‘But, sir …’ Garamvölgyi tried to explain. ‘Faludy was not …’
‘Shut your face, carrot-top!’ the Gravedigger yelled. ‘That Faludy, he is a decent fellow, but this one here,’ and he pointed at me, ‘this one here is a scoundrel! I’ll show him, never fear!’
But it is possible that I had my own carelessness to thank. Wrangel had warned me that Deak had denounced me for imperialist propaganda while in the infirmary, and denounced Doctor Acs for having kept me there though there was nothing wrong. Before Hans Arse’s arrival I had been telling my fellow-patients about the weeks spent on Ellis Island. I had come at Roosevelt’s invitation, but without a regular visa, and he had omitted to inform the immigration authorities, who decided to make a case of it, arrested my wife and myself on board ship and took us to Ellis Island. Here a square-faced and disagreeable judge declared that the United States had no need for Hungarian poets and therefore sentenced us to deportation. My friends left no stone unturned to get me out. ‘Roosevelt’s guest on Ellis Island,’ screamed the newspaper headlines. After Dorothy Thompson’s extremely outspoken article on this subject, the judge who had sentenced me apologized in the name of the United States and personally put me and my wife on a ship taking us into New York harbour.
I told my fellow-patients about the days spent on Ellis Island. During the day we sat around, in comfortable armchairs, in a huge room, reading, playing table tennis, listening to the radio. The authorities ordered all the Hungarian newspapers for me, and from a public telephone box I could talk with my friends in New York. In the dining-room we sat around beautifully laid tables and had a choice of American, French, Chinese and Jewish dishes. Every afternoon I received visits from my friends… It never occurred to me that I was giving Deak, who was busy devouring his dead neighbours’s bread, plenty of material for denunciation with which to earn himself more bread.
However, there was no time for speculation. A few minutes later we were standing in line, with our blankets under our arms, before the door of the prison within the prison. Mongol – a slant-eyed, pale-faced, hysterical and vain young guard – led the twelve of us sentenced to short chains to an empty cell and locked the door on us. There was so little room that we couldn’t sit down. Doctor Acs squatted in a corner with his back against the wall. His face was stiff and grey like the cheap, synthetic marble used, in the last century, for kitchen cupboards and stairs. He could not have been more humiliated. The night before, he had tried out his home-made electric instrument on Csibraki, a peasant suffering from sciatica. The screams of the patient were heard even in the most distant barracks. He was so badly burned that the cartilage between two of his vertebrae fell literally to pieces. Acs, who was usually sober, cold and precise and despised nothing more than his colleagues’ love of quackery, seemed to have been carried away by a strange furor operationis; when the guards finally freed the patient from his hands the unfortunate man was dying. At the morning inspection several of the prisoners called Acs a ‘murderer’ and they looked at each other in amazement when he was given only three days in the cell. It did not even occur to them that it was not for Csibraki’s death that Acs had been sentenced, but for keeping me in the infirmary on allegedly false pretences.
Uncle Horvath was sitting behind me on the floor. In the morning we had been shifting woodpiles from one place to another. The paralytic old man had crawled around on all fours, building miniature woodpiles in the middle of the road from tiny twigs. Sub-lieutenant Laszlo Nagy, the political officer, had asked him harshly what he was doing. ‘I am amusing myself,’ the old man replied, and crawled away in the mud. The long-legged sub-lieutenant asked the sergeant guarding us whether the old man was being impertinent, and the sergeant assured him that Horvath wouldn’t even recognize his own wife any longer.
‘Do you know who I am, Horvath?’ the sub-lieutenant asked.
Horvath raised his watery blue eyes and examined the features of the one-time grocer’s assistant.
‘Sure, I know. You are that damned kike who wouldn’t even leave the dying alone.’
The sub-lieutenant stared at him as if he couldn’t believe his ears and then, shaking his fists hysterically, he ran away.
Dani Kis, who was standing next to me with his arms crossed on his chest, was the first to be called out. I had always liked the look of this young man. With his jet-black hair and moustache, his strong nose and almond-shaped eyes he was the very image of the Hungarian peasant of the lowlands. This was how I had always imagined György Dozsa, leader of the 1514 Hungarian peasant insurrection, whom the nobles – though he was a nobleman himself – fried on a white-hot iron throne and then made his lieutenants eat his living flesh. One of the informers had denounced Dani Kis and he was sentenced to short chains on the grounds that he had exchanged his bread for cigarettes. Everybody in the camp knew that Dani did not smoke.
Through the door I could hear Mongol ordering him to put as much wood on the fire as the stove would take. When he called me out Dani was sitting in chains close to the blazing iron stove in the polygonal room from which the corridors and the cells opened. I was led into a small cell where the guard tied my wrists to my ankles. When he had finished with me he went to fetch Doctor Acs. He made the doctor sit on the floor and put his two hands between his ankles. Then he jumped on the extended hands and tied the wrists to the ankles in such a way that the rope cut deep into the flesh. Acs didn’t even wince. There was no room left for Garamvölgyi in the cell, so Mongol tied him up in the corridor, lifted him by his collar and his red hair and plumped him down on the broad shelf built into the cell-wall for that purpose.
When he had locked the door on us I pulled out both hands from the loops of the rope and straightened my back. I did not know whether I owed my freedom of movement to my narrow hands or to Mongol’s goodwill. I at once offered to loosen the bonds of my friends, but Acs refused, saying that he had deserved this punishment and would bear it like a man – if he could still be called a man – and Garamvölgyi refused because he was afraid the guard might come in and catch him. He wanted me to put back my hands too and, out of solidarity, I complied though the loose rope hardly bothered me at all. A few minutes later Garam
völgyi began to moan and soon he was howling like a dog at the moon. Acs tried to explain to him that if he concentrated on his position and thought of nothing else, his suffering would soon become unbearable, but if he occupied his mind with other thoughts the two hours would soon be over. Besides, he ought to be grateful to the pain because it made him forget hunger and exhaustion.
‘I can’t stand it!’ Garamvölgyi sobbed, gnashing his teeth.
Apart from the slight itching in my wrist when I leaned back, I was filled with peaceful indifference. After all, I could free my hands any time I wanted. If I couldn’t, I would probably also suffer – I thought – but as it was, only the suffering of the others turned this cell into a torture chamber. I freed my hands again and listened to the moans and cries. A conversation was going on immediately outside our door between the guard and Kertész, the bigoted mathematics professor who, whenever he heard an AVO man swearing, warned him of the hell fire awaiting him. The guards thought he was slightly mad and liked to have their joke with him.
‘Tonight I’ll teach you to swear, you son of a bitch!’ announced Mongol.
‘Thank you, sergeant, sir, but I don’t swear.’
‘And why not?’
‘I am a Catholic, sir. My faith forbids me to swear.’
‘Do you like rats, Kertész?’
‘I don’t, sir. I am frightened of them.’
‘Well, if you won’t swear I’ll shut you into the dark cell, and that’s full of them.’
‘Don’t do that, sergeant, please!’
‘Then swear. Now!’
‘What shall I swear?’
‘I’ll give you something easy,’ Mongol said after some deliberation. ‘It won’t take you long to get it out. Say after me: That the tin-Christ of Buda put his scabrous pr—— into your arse!’
My Happy Days In Hell Page 54