“There they all go!” the guards would shout as the prisoners fainted and screamed and went mad.
Tibor’s other contribution was both extremely simple and extremely effective in subduing difficult prisoners. He stood the man facing the wall where a bright light shone into his eyes. Against the man’s forehead he would place the point of a pencil, putting the other end against the wall. “If you let that pencil fall, you will be beaten to death,” Tibor warned his prisoners. And there the man would stand, pressing the pencil against the wall with his forehead, trying not to faint because of the bright light in his eyes. Sometimes when a man left this punishment after a couple of hours, the pencil would go with him, imbedded in the thin flesh of his forehead.
There were other aspects of Sunday that even Tibor, when he subsided from his fearful rages, preferred not to think about. Since his early youth he had not cared much for girls, but in the house on Fo Street he began to hate them. Because on Sundays the women guards, who always seemed to Tibor more vengeful than any man could ever be, would drag to their own quarters some male prisoner and force him to undress. Then they would torment him in hideous ways that most of the men guards refused even to talk about. The AVO women used knives and hairpins and cigarette lighters, and the things they did to the male prisoners made even their male colleagues shudder.
“Somebody ought to stop them,” Tibor said one day, and this was his undoing, for a spy within the Fo Street prison reported this uncommunist remark to the head of the prison, who called Donath before him.
“Did you speak against the women guards?” asked the official, a thin man with a sharp nose and penetrating eyes.
“I only said—”
“Shut up! Liar!” the thin man screamed. Rushing up to Donath, he shoved a report under his nose. “Look at this!” he shouted hysterically.
He showed Tibor a study of confessions, and it proved that almost twice as many enemies of the government confessed after a Sunday afternoon with the women guards, as confessed following treatment by Tibor and the male guards.
“Are you an enemy of the government?” this man shouted.
“No,” Tibor pleaded. “I’ve had a good record.”
“Yes, you have,” the thin man agreed in a surprise move which caught Donath unawares. “And for that reason I’m not going to dismiss you. But you’ve got to learn that meaningless sympathy for criminal elements who oppose the government is in itself a crime against the government. I’m sending you to Recsk.”
Tibor, trained in hardness, stood firm. “Yes, comrade,” he said without blinking.
“A year or so at Recsk will prove to you,” the thin man said softly, “how despicable and unworthy of the least sympathy are the enemies of our government. You’ll come back a better man.”
When Tibor Donath returned to his quarters he looked with eyes of incalculable hatred at each of his colleagues. One of them had betrayed him. One of them had caused him to be transferred to the worst prison in Hungary, a place terrible for the imprisoned and the guards alike. For a momentary advantage some foul friend had betrayed him, yet such was the system that he dared not even speak of the betrayal, nor allow his manner to admit that it had happened.
“One of them did it,” Donath swore silently to himself as he surveyed his friends. “Some day I’ll find out which one, and I’ll slowly strangle him, I’ll gouge his eyes out, I’ll …” He had to stop his phantasmagoric dreams lest he fall into a screaming rage.
“I’m going to Recsk,” he said simply. He had to speak to relieve the unbearable hatred.
None of his friends reacted to the statement, some lest they be reported for having shown undue sympathy with what was, on the surface, merely a routine shift in assignment, and one because he did not wish to convey his sense of joy in the punishment for which he was responsible. In terrible hatred, Tibor Donath completed his arrangements. That night a truck picked him up for the fifty-mile ride to northeast Hungary, where the infamous prison of Recsk stood.
As he left the headquarters on Fo Street, his friends stood stolidly in the doorway watching him go. Still not a flicker of human emotion crossed their faces, and he in turn sat stiffly in the truck without turning his back to try one last time to penetrate their masks and uncover the man who had spied on him. “I’ll find him,” Donath swore. “I’ll cut his heart out.” Indulging in such fantasies, he allowed the full fury of his hatred to consume him, and by the time he reached Recsk he was practically a maniac and well prepared for his new assignment.
The truck that sped Tibor Donath to his disciplinary assignment in Recsk also carried, cooped up like an animal in a quarry box, a political prisoner named Ferenc Gabor, who was also on his way to Recsk, but for discipline of a much sterner kind. Even as he rode he was doubled up into a tight knot, the walls of his cage pressing in upon him on all sides. He had a gag in his mouth and his hands were bound by iron chains. His crime, if he had committed one, had been forgotten. He was identified merely as a man who would not talk, and the last words his brutal guards at the headquarters on Fo Street had flung at him were, “Well, Mr. Silent, you’ll talk at Recsk.”
I now propose to describe the horrors of this ultimate AVO prison in the words of Ferenc Gabor, a broken man of thirty-five when I met him in Vienna. This is what he said his years in Recsk were like.
“Five kilometers outside the little village of Recsk, northeast of Budapest, we entered the main gate of the notorious prison where I was to live for three years. I was handed a uniform which had to last me as long as I lived there. It consisted of an old AVO suit from which the official leg stripes had been removed, to be replaced by wide red bands which could be seen from a distance. Shoulder patches and other marks of rank had been cut off. I was a figure in khaki.
“Recsk formed roughly a square, one thousand yards on each side, and was known as escape proof. At least only one group of prisoners ever escaped from it. Around the prison grounds ran an intertwined barbed-wire fence nine feet high and charged with electricity. Thirty yards outside that ran a second fence, also charged with electricity. Fifty yards further out was a third fence. These fences might conceivably have been penetrated by a determined prisoner with a rubber-handled wire cutter—except for the fact that between the first and the second the ground had been carefully plowed and harrowed so that footprints would show, and hidden beneath the fresh soil were numerous powerful mines. In addition, the middle fence was studded every fifty yards with tall watchtowers containing machine guns and searchlights.
“On the inner fence, facing the prisoners, were signs which read, ‘Warning! If you touch this fence, you will be shot.’ On the outer fence, facing any accidental tourist or villager who might wander toward the prison, was a similar warning: ‘Government property. Trespassing forbidden. You may be shot without warning.’
“But it was not the fences that made Recsk intolerable. It was the life inside. Only the most hardened AVO men were assigned here, and since duty at Recsk was for them a kind of punishment, they made our lives so hellish that we often prayed for death. Believe me, what we experienced at the headquarters in Budapest was nothing compared to what we went through at Recsk.
“Toward one end of the compound there was a small granite outcrop which rose about 280 feet in the air. We were given the job of reducing this hill to gravel which would pass through a small sieve. Each prisoner was required to produce two hand trucks full of gravel each day. Since we had no goggles, many men lost their sight from flying fragments, but this did not excuse them from work. The food was kept inadequate to support such work—they didn’t care if we died. During the first year the average prisoner lost about seventy pounds in weight.
“If I did not make my quota of gravel each day, I was forced to stand in a clammy cell for the entire night with cold water up to my knees. Then, if the guards wanted to play with me next morning, after I had no sleep, they would make me carry a hundred-pound rock up and down a ladder fifteen times. If I fainted, they resu
med the game when I recovered.
“But the worst thing about the punishment was that we knew the AVO were able to corrupt our fellow prisoners. They had planted among us spies who would inform on anything we said, or even seemed about to say. For this the spies got extra food.
“We worked from four-thirty in the morning until nightfall with only a brief rest for lunch, and after work we were marched back to our quarters, which consisted of two compounds containing small rooms, into each of which eighty men were jammed. For three years we were allowed no books, no paper, no pencils, no radio news, no newspapers. We could have no visitors, no mail, no parcels of food, and we were not permitted to tell our families where we were. We did not know for how long we were there, nor for what reason. We lived a life of blank terror, in which we could not even discuss anything with our fellow prisoners, for fear the AVO would know of it.
“Month after month we lived lives of utter exhaustion, too weak to work and too tired to sleep. The only break in our schedule came when the AVO summoned us at night for interrogation or games. Then we were beaten and abused and humiliated. They screamed at us to talk, but they never said what about.
“One night when a sallow-faced guard with pasty yellow hair, whom the others called Tibor, had beaten me with unusual cruelty, one shouted, ‘Let’s make him the white mare.’ To do this, they inserted a broomstick under my knees, then doubled me up into a tight ball, lashing my wrists to my ankles. We were deathly afraid of this punishment, for it placed such a stress upon the stomach and heart that we knew no man could bear it longer than two hours. And if the AVO were particularly playful they sometimes made a man into the white mare and forgot him. Then he died without anyone’s caring.
“But even normally, this treatment was almost unbearable, for after a man had crouched on his knees for some time in this position, while his taut muscles were beaten with rubber hoses, he would have to fall over, and then new portions of his body would be exposed to the hoses.
“On this night they had another man and me for the white mares, and after they had beaten him until he was numb all over, he rolled against the hot stove, and his left hand had become so insensitive that he was not aware that it was pressing against the fire. In this way he burned off two fingers and half his palm. He became aware of what was happening only when he smelled his burning flesh. Of course the AVO men knew, but they were laughing.
“One of the cruelest tricks they played on us, however, was a psychological one which cut deeply into one’s sense of reason. Each month we were paid a good wage for our work on the rock quarry. When we got our wages the AVO always lectured us, ‘This proves that communism does not make slave labor of its prisoners, the way capitalism does.’ Then they charged us for our food, our barracks, our electric lights, and for the services of the guards who protected us. We were left enough for one package of cigarettes a month. But on any report sent out from Recsk there appeared the reassuring fact that its prisoners were being paid regularly at the going rate.
“I said that one group escaped from Recsk. There was a tailor who by diligence manufactured out of his old AVO uniform one that looked real. Then from scraps he painstakingly built up a cap, and ornaments, and when he was properly fitted out, he assembled a group of daring fellow prisoners and a make-believe tommy gun in his arms, boldly marched the whole contingent out the main gate.
“ ‘We’re bringing in some dynamite,’ he told the guards, and off his crew went into the woods and freedom.
“The AVO response to this was diabolical. Without making any fuss, they quietly rounded up 250 prisoners, anyone who had been seen talking or loitering at meals or laughing. Those who had fallen below their quota at any time during the last two weeks were also grabbed. It was a sickly time, because the prisoners knew that something terrible was about to happen, and everyone seemed eager to spy upon his neighbor in hope of escaping the dreaded and unknown punishment.
“At first the retribution was simple. The 250 prisoners were herded into a special prison within the prison. Expecting all sorts of extreme punishment, they found what happened to them less than what they had expected, but after a week of constantly increasing pressures—beatings, wormy food, unusual and hateful punishments centering on the sexual organs—it became apparent that the AVO at Recsk had decided to reduce these 250 men gradually to the level of screaming animals.
“They succeeded. The experience of that prison within a prison was so horrible, so far beyond the imagination of man either to conceive or to accept, that within two months there was not a sane man left. And each day when the guards threw the animals their meat, laughing at them as they fought and tore at one another for the inadequate chunks, a voice would announce over the loud-speaker, ‘You are in here because your friends escaped.’
“The hatred that was thus built up against the clever tailor and his brave crew was terrifying, but perhaps not even the guards knew how inhuman it had become, for when they caught one of the escapees, some three months later, as he was trying to flee Hungary, they brought him back to Recsk and led him into the prison within a prison. The voice in the loud-speaker cried, ‘Here is one of the men whose escape caused you your misfortunes.’
“Within two minutes after the recaptured prisoner was thrown among his former mates, he was torn to pieces.”
Among the AVO men who conceived this plan was Tibor Donath. His years at Recsk had hardened him to the point where he was totally incapable of the softness he had once displayed in Budapest. During the long dreary nights in the barrenness and cruelty of Recsk, pairs of guards formed attachments for each other, and whenever a new batch of young guards arrived, the older men would study them attentively. On one such occasion Tibor noticed a handsome young man from one of the country districts and promptly made overtures to him, but the new guard repulsed him, and that week the young man was mysteriously reported for holding out for himself some of the cigarette money collected from the prisoners.
The new guard was severely punished, for he had been in trouble before arriving at Recsk, and when he returned to the AVO barracks Tibor saw with great inner glee the manner in which the young man tried to penetrate the basilisk stares of his friends, endeavoring vainly to determine who had spied upon him. But Tibor’s moment of triumph was not unmixed with fear, for the young man seemed so choked with hate that Tibor thought, “I’ll have to be careful of him.” But before long some other friend secretly reported the young man for some other offense, and he disappeared from Recsk, to what ultimate punishment Tibor never knew.
Sometimes in the guards’ games with prisoners Tibor would stand aloof for a long time, watching, with a fascination he did not comprehend, the punishment of some especially recalcitrant enemy of the government. He would not take part in the beatings or the torments, until suddenly one of the new prisoners would remind him vaguely of some schoolboy associate, and in great agitation he would grab a rubber hose, and, in blows twice as fast as any other guard used, he would thrash the bewildered victim until the man almost fainted with agony.
“Speak! Speak!” Tibor would scream, dancing about the man like a demon.
But in spite of his moments of apparent aberration, Tibor Donath was far from being insane. He knew what he was doing, and when the wild beatings were ended he would sometimes sit alone in his quarters and feel resentful over the fate that had sent him to Recsk. “What’s the use of beating prisoners up?” he mused to himself. He was not sorry for the prisoners. As enemies of the state—and never once did he question that they were members of the criminal element that was trying to destroy Hungary—they deserved no pity. It was what such endless punishment did to the guards that bothered Tibor.
“I’d like to get a desk job,” he often told himself. “In Budapest. I’m orderly and enjoy keeping things straight. I’d be good in a desk job.” Then the poisoned dream would return and he would have to acknowledge to himself how unhappy he really was. “What I’d really like would be to drive a big car.” His shoul
ders would weave as if he were turning smooth corners fast and he would steer with his hands. In dreams he would be hastening down the boulevard with someone very important in the back seat, and he would be happy. Then a bell would ring, and he would have to admit that he was not in Budapest, but in Recsk.
At such moments he had learned to stay away from prisoners. “If I saw one of their dirty faces now, I’d kill him,” Tibor admitted to himself. And he had no special desire to kill anybody, for although no embarrassing questions were asked when a prisoner died, it probably got onto a man’s record somehow, and Tibor had learned that in Recsk the most important thing was never to give anybody—not even your closest friend—a single thing to report to the command. Because in Recsk everybody spied constantly on everybody else.
It was while brooding about his exile to Recsk that Tibor Donath discovered a fact which he had not previously admitted to himself. “I’m going to be an AVO for the rest of my life,” he mused one day. “And why not? I get good money, the best things in the stores, and if I ever get back to Budapest I’ll be able to have a car of my own. This is a pretty good life, and nobody’ll ever get anything on me again.” He forgot the inconveniences of Recsk and thought of the good days ahead, when he could be more of his own master. “I’ll have a good apartment in Budapest and a car and maybe an officer’s rank. What would I have had if I’d stayed in the village?” He laughed at the comparison and whispered to himself, “Recsk can’t last forever. Then … fun.”
It was therefore with a sense of real relief that Tibor Donath learned that his disciplinary sentence to Recsk was ending. His assignment was to the provincial capital of Gyor, where he quickly became one of the ablest sergeants. The brutality of the Gyor headquarters was famous in that part of Hungary, and he did nothing to diminish the reputation.
Finally, in the spring of 1956 he was given a second chance in Budapest. He still did not get the desk job he wanted, but he did buy a car with his increased pay and he did find the acceleration of life in the capital as exciting as he had hoped. “We have got to be on special guard,” his officers told him. “Something’s happening in this city, and we’ve got to know about it.”
The Bridge at Andau Page 12