The Bridge at Andau

by James A. Michener

  Arrests were much more frequent now than when Tibor had first served in Budapest, but the crowding in the cells had become so critical that prisoners had to be released more quickly. What this meant to a man in Tibor’s job was that he was left a shorter time in which to exact confessions, and was therefore inclined to use more brutality and to use it sooner. To add to the congestion, infamous concentration camps like Recsk had been abandoned, so that again the pressure to discharge trivial prisoners was increased, and Donath found himself setting men free whom in the old days he would have kept for incredible tortures.

  The general agitation which marked the summer of 1956 escaped Tibor’s attention, for the elite AVO spies did not bother to tell him anything, while choice political prisoners who might have something to divulge by-passed his authority. All he knew was what he was told: “Something’s happening. Find out what it is.” But he found nothing, for the dismal procession of students, petty agitators and fools brought before him had nothing to tell.

  Therefore, one of the Hungarians most astonished by the events of October 23 was the farm boy, Tibor Donath. “They’re firing at the radio station!” an underling reported, and with mouth agape Tibor watched a truck load of reinforcements leave his building for that battle.

  When others departed for Stalin Square, “where a big riot is taking place,” and to the offices of Szabad Nep, “where they’re destroying the paper,” Tibor felt that all Hungary was falling apart. This feeling increased during the twenty-fourth, when sickening reports of the previous night’s doings filtered down to his level.

  “They murdered AVO guards at the radio station,” an AVO man who had been there reported. “Murdered them!”

  “What for?” Tibor asked.

  An officer appeared, ashen-faced, to announce, “The whole city’s in revolt. It’s got to be put down. If you see anyone who even looks suspicious, shoot him.”

  Assignments were then made and another officer said, “We’re going to surround Parliament Square. Weak-kneed politicians will probably make promises if people gather there. We’ll make our promises with machine guns. Have you heard what happened to our men at the radio station?”

  As the gruesome news accumulated, Tibor Donath fell into a dull panic. “Why doesn’t the government do something?” he asked himself over and over. Noises in the city terrified him and he began looking frantically into the faces of his friends, wondering which one had betrayed him into such a dreadful plight. But in their no longer stolid faces he saw panic like his own. Night was particularly bad, and he ordered all the lights on. When he heard noises from the cells below his office, he thought for one fearful moment that perhaps even his prisoners were joining the frenzy, and he shouted, “Go down and see what’s happening.”

  He was pleased, therefore, when direct action became possible, and on the morning of the twenty-fifth he hauled a machine gun to the top of the Ministry of Agriculture building overlooking Parliament Square. As masses of people carrying flags began to come within range of his gun, he whispered to his companions, “We ought to fire now,” but they said, “We will, later.” But the wait allowed his sense of confusion to deepen, and it was not until the man on his left nudged him that he felt a sense of stability.

  “Look at those tanks!” the man whispered.

  Tibor Donath stared down at the line of massive Russian tanks, their huge guns pointing at the crowd. “They’ll keep order,” he said reassuringly.

  The other AVO man nodded eagerly, and it was with sadistic relief that Tibor and his friends saw the AVO men on the Supreme Court roof finally begin firing volleys into the crowd. His sense of reality was restored.

  “Now we shoot!” he yelled, releasing the safety catch on his own gun.

  Before the next command could be given, Donath with dumb amazement saw a Russian tank turn its heavy guns and deliberately aim at the AVO men on the opposite roof. “What are they doing?” he half screamed. The man on his left gasped, and there was a dull roar as the tank fired. Tibor could see the AVO men on the Supreme Court roof fall backwards from the force of the blast, and he was too weak to fire his gun.

  Then, as his horrified eyes watched the Russian guns slowly change direction and end their traverse facing him, he began to scream, “They’re going to fire on us!”

  The AVO man on his left did not bother with words. Deserting his gun, he dived for shelter, but Tibor stayed where he was and began firing. Forgetting the impending doom of the Russian guns, he madly sprayed machine-gun bullets into the crowd below him. Each human being in that crowd he personally hated. Somehow they had caused this idiotic, this outrageous falling apart of the world.

  A tremendous explosion shattered the walls about him, but in a terror which consumed and yet directed him, he shifted to the abandoned gun on his left. More bullets were sent into the stampeding crowd, while a second blast of Russian shells tore at his security.

  When the gun was emptied, when the rubble had collapsed about him, he dumbly rose and stumbled across the roof. Looking down for the last time in stupefied amazement at the Russians and at the dead Hungarians littering the square, he left his post. “What’s happening?” he muttered to himself.

  With the instinct of a clever animal, Tibor ripped off all AVO insignia as he descended the Ministry stairs. He did not depart by the main door, but slipped into an alley and then another and on down a back street far from the Danube until he came at last to Koztarsasag Square, a most ill-named square, considering the use to which it had been put: Republic Square was where the communist party of Hungary had its headquarters and where the AVO had one of its most diabolical underground prisons.

  Tibor Donath remembered having visited this headquarters once when things were going well in Hungary. Then everything had seemed neatly ordered, with intelligent men directing the nation. Now there was chaos. A man in a gray suit was shouting to no one in particular, “Damn Rakosi and Gero. They’ve taken a plane to Russia.”

  “Where’s Rakosi?” another man yelled, not having heard the news.

  “What are you doing here?” a communist official asked Tibor.

  “The Russians fired on us,” Donath said.

  “Everybody’s firing on us,” the official snapped. “Our own police, our own soldiers, our own people.”

  “What’s happening?” Donath asked weakly.

  “You damned AVO are all crazy,” the communist shouted. “Go down in the cellar where you belong.”

  Bewildered by the confusion in which guns were being hauled into window emplacements by men who knew little about guns, and in which orders were being shouted where there was no one listening to carry them out, Donath slipped down into the cellar, where he was to spend six days of increasing terror.

  About two hundred other AVO men were there at one time or another—the number fluctuated—and many prisoners. Occasionally an ashen-faced AVO man would appear with shocking news, “They hung one of our men at the Petofi statue.”

  “But I was there only a few minutes ago.”

  Or some super-tough AVO man would swagger into the cellar with a captured freedom fighter, and he would begin beating the boy until an older man, aware of the desperate situation in which they found themselves, would growl, “Get back on the streets.”

  Among the prisoners who suffered a special hell in this cellar were some women and children, and one day Tibor saw that some of his wiser colleagues were staying close to the women.

  “What are you doing that for?” Tibor asked.

  “When the time comes for us to leave this cellar,” the older AVO men explained, “one of these women walks out ahead of me.”

  “Do you think there’ll be shooting?” Tibor asked.

  “Look!”

  From a window which could be peered through if one stood on a box, Tibor saw with horror that all the riffraff of Budapest—the kind he used to thrash with rubber hoses—had gathered in Republic Square. “Why don’t the tanks drive them away?” he wondered, but then his l
ast memory of how the Russian tank had behaved recurred, and he concluded that if the world had gone mad his job was to save himself.

  “Do you think they’ll let you through?” he asked the AVO man who planned to use the woman as a shield.

  “Of course,” the older man said. “They always do.”

  But Tibor had a better plan. Looking again at the wild-eyed fools in the square outside, he had a premonition that perhaps they were going to shoot if any AVO man appeared. So he went over to another group of prisoners, who flinched in expectation of a beating, and said to one about his own size, “I’ll take your clothes.”

  He was not a minute too soon, for through one of the front windows a hose was thrust into the cellar and water began flooding the refuge of the AVO men. Another was jammed through a second window, and it was clear that if the flood of water continued long, those in the cellar would have to evaculate, whether the men standing guard outside intended to shoot or not.

  At this point Tibor Donath slipped out a back door and down another series of alleys, but he was so fascinated by what was going to happen in the square that he rashly doubled back toward that point, standing inconspicuously in his new civilian clothes at the edge of a crowd that was about to witness one of the major events of the revolution.

  It was these events in Republic Square to which I alluded in the opening paragraphs of this section. They were a blot on the revolution, and since there are incontrovertible photographs of what transpired, Soviet Russia had the opportunity of reproducing them in a white paper which attempts to prove that decent officers of a decent government were callously murdered by capitalist criminals.

  As the waters rose in the cellars of the communist headquarters, whose upper floors were already occupied by freedom fighters, the trapped AVO men had no alternative but to drown or surrender. They chose the latter, and from the front doors of the ominous building there issued forth about a dozen typical AVO men. They had been guards at Recsk, where they had doubled men up into white mares and killed them with kicks. They had been watchers in the deep prisons at headquarters, slashing and beating with rubber hoses. They had been border guards, shooting and tracking down with dogs men who would be free. They were the sadists, the monsters, the perverts and the murderers.

  A dreadful silence greeted them as they stepped into Republic Square. Men who had suffered under their terrible ministrations looked at them. No one moved forward to touch them. Instinctively the crowd moved back, as if still terrified by the power of these inhuman jailers.

  It is possible that the tragic massacre of Republic Square might have been avoided—although this is only speculation on my part—if a young freedom fighter had not spotted, in the rear of the AVO procession, the prisoners who had been kept underground for months and even years.

  “Look at what they do to us!” the young man shouted.

  And from the prison came women and children starved nearly to death, men too crippled to walk, men with blue welts across their faces, and men whose minds were deranged. A ghastly sigh went up, the pathos of a generation.

  Then one of the older AVO men appeared, pushing a woman in front as a shield, and this set loose the awful fury of the crowd.

  Some of the AVO men were clubbed to death. Others were shot. A few tried to run but were caught and killed. Some of the dead were strung up by their heels. An outraged society had suffered enough at the hands of these inhuman monsters, and its revenge was overwhelming.

  For days no one would bury the dead AVO men. Buckets of lime were thrown on them by health patrols, but even this decency was not accorded two fat bodies that lay in Republic Square for a week. People came to see them and workmen would stand over them and weep bitter tears of frustration, recalling the ten years of fraud and terror under which they had labored to support such AVO men.

  The reason these two bodies were not disturbed was that across their chests had been pinned, for the public to see and know, documents found on the men when they were shot. The first body was that of a major whose papers stated that for his meritorious service to the communist party his monthly salary was being raised to 18,000 forints.

  “I get 800,” a man from Csepel said as he looked at the document.

  The other man was not an officer, and his pay slip read 10,000 forints a month.

  Nothing that was said about the AVO caused more bitterness than these two official documents. Workmen were outraged to discover that men who had contributed nothing but terror to the nation had regularly received more than twelve times the salary of a man who made bicycles, or bread, or shoes.

  I cannot condone the massacre at Republic Square, but I can understand it. The great revolution of Budapest would have been cleaner if Republic Square had not happened, but it would have been too much to expect men and women who had suffered the absolute tyranny of the AVO not to have retaliated. One of America’s finest and gentlest newspapermen, the dean of our corps in Middle Europe, said bitterly after he had reviewed far less of the AVO terror than I have reported, “I was in Budapest at the time, and although I believe that revengeful death accomplishes little, I devoutly believe that the human race would have been better off if Hungarians had assassinated every one of the 30,000 AVO. The world’s air would have been a little cleaner.”

  But beyond revenge lies the necessity of trying to understand why communism requires an AVO to perpetuate its system. From what I have seen of communist regimes, I am satisfied that each communist country has its exact equivalent of the AVO. The reader can be absolutely certain that a similar force operates in Russia, in Bulgaria, in Latvia, in North Korea, in China and wherever else communism has been in operation for over one year. Evidence from escapees who have fled these countries is unanimous in defense of this contention.

  Why must communism depend on such dregs of society? We must answer either that communist philosophers are inherently evil beyond the capacity of a normal imagination to conceive—which I am not willing to claim—or that no matter on what elevated plane communism begins its program of total dictatorship, it sooner or later runs into such economic and social problems that some strong-arm force is required to keep the civil population under control. It is this latter theory that I accept.

  What happens is this. When communism is wooing the workers in Csepel, all kinds of exaggerated promises are made if they seem likely to awaken men’s aspirations and their cupidity. These promises are couched in such simple terms and such effective symbols that they become immediate goals of the revolution, and I think we have seen in Hungary how eagerly the fulfillment of those goals was awaited when communism did triumph.

  But the promises were so vast and unrealistic that there never was a chance of attaining them, and probably the organizing communists who made the original promises knew then that they were totally beyond any hope of realization.

  Review briefly what communist agitators had once promised the Hungarians who appear in this book: consumer goods such as they had never known before, increased wages, increased social benefits, shorter hours of work, improved education for everyone, a greater social freedom, and a government directly responsible to the working classes.

  Under communism such promises were never even remotely capable of attainment, for although Hungary had the natural wealth wherewith to produce the new consumer goods required under the communist plans, the communists lacked either the organizing ability or the honest intentions needed for the translation of raw materials and labor into consumer goods. Any system—either state socialism or enlightened capitalism—would have had to work intelligently and hard for at least ten years to achieve what the communists promised. Under communism, with its irrational production, its gross favoritism and its downright incapacity in management, there was never a chance of success. Within two years the people of Hungary realized that the promises which had seduced them would never materialize, and that instead of freedom they had purchased only tyranny.

  When an awakening of such magnitude begins to spr
ead across a nation, the communist leaders, who from the first have been aware of the impracticality of many of their promises, must take steps to silence the protests that naturally begin to arise. At first this is simple. The police pick up and sentence to long years in jail those intellectuals who begin to see through the empty promises.

  But when this relatively simple task has been completed, the police must next begin to arrest workingmen who are asking when their pay increases will begin, and housewives who want more bread and cheaper shoes for their children, and clergymen who have started to protest the earlier round of arrests. Soon the ordinary police begin to balk at such senseless arrests, so a special police must be organized.

  I find it difficult to believe—and for this reason some Hungarians say I am naive—that when an AVO is first instituted in a communist country, its communist leaders intend it to become an instrument of national torture. I rather think that frightened bureaucrats call it into being with the firm intention of controlling it and keeping it a rather simple force which will operate to protect their position. Later, like Dr. Frankenstein, they find that they have created an uncontrollable monster, which ultimately entangles them in its evil grasp.

  “Not so,” reason my Hungarian friends. “When communism took over our nation, every important leader had already been trained in Russia. Rakosi and Gero were Soviet citizens. In Moscow they had been carefully taught that communism must rely on terror, and when they arrived to take control in Budapest, they already carried in their pockets precise plans for the AVO. When they built it, they knew what it would become. For they knew without it communism could not exist. Proof of our reasoning goes beyond the personality of those horrible men, Rakosi and Gero. Proof is that our first AVO officers were trained in Russia. Our terror did not mature, as you suggest. It was transplanted, fully grown and ready to operate.