“Furthermore,” reason my friends, “if any communist leader in Europe succeeds in taking his country into communism, he will have to rely upon his own special AVO. And it will not occur by accident. It will be organized carefully, and its initial cadre of officers will definitely have been trained in horror in Moscow.”
I am not sure who is right, I in my belief that an AVO matures by a process of inevitable deterioration in a communist society, or the Hungarians who point out that Lenin preached the introduction of terror and the liquidation of opposition in the first days of a communist regime as a calculated strategy of power. In either event the end is inevitable total terror.
But what I am sure of is this: If Japan were to go communist tomorrow, as some of its citizens desire, within a year it would have one of the world’s most terrible communist secret police. If Indonesia goes communist, it will know the same sullen fury as Budapest knew. If the communists I have known in India succeed in taking that vast land into communism, they should realize that with the inevitable collapse of their cynical promises will have to come a secret police that would terrorize Amritsar and Delhi as they have not been terrorized since the day of Tamerlane. I am sure that communism must have an AVO to silence the protests of the people it has defrauded.
From what has been related so far, we can see how subtly the presence of an AVO poisons the entire life of a society. The process is one of interlocking incriminations. In a factory a spy ring reports on each workman. Within this spy ring, inner spies report on the work of lesser spies. The AVO itself is ridden with spies, and even the upper circles of the communist control groups are checked constantly by their own spies. There was in Hungary no prison cell so remote but what the man in the next cell might be a spy, there was no AVO post so insignificant but what some other AVO man was spying upon it.
One of the awful aspects of interrogating Hungarians regarding their life in communism is their admission that they had to take into constant consideration the fact that their neighbor, or their schoolteacher, or their butcher was an AVO spy. The number of men and women I have met who were betrayed into weeks of brutal AVO treatment by intimate friends was a constant shock to me. In fact, this studied tearing down of the fabric of normal society was perhaps the AVO’s outstanding contribution to Hungarian life. Their goal was to incriminate every living Hungarian, and many of the dead. When everyone was incriminated, then any normal social relationship was impossible, and only the AVO could thrive. It is against such a conclusion that we must judge the men and women who gathered in Republic Square that November day and finally came face to face with the evil which had corrupted the entire nation. That an outraged citizenry should have risen to smite their tormentors should be no surprise.
In studying the AVO dictatorship in Hungary, I repeatedly found that my senses had been numbed by the magnitude of the story and that, like the world at large, I had reached a point of cynicism at which I muttered, “Well, the camp at Recsk was probably bad, but not that bad.” Any mind has difficulty in focusing upon the planned corruption of an entire nation.
But on three occasions, when I had reached such numbness, I found that some trivial question of mine would lay bare a minor story of such intensity that it would illuminate the entire subject, and I would for a moment perceive what communism in Hungary must have been like. For when the mind has abused its elasticity in trying to engorge a horror of national magnitude, it can still accept the limited story of one man.
One Sunday afternoon in Vienna I was talking with a sturdy Hungarian coal miner about conditions in the mines at Tatabanya. We discussed wages, working conditions and how a miner qualified for a paid vacation at Lake Balaton. (“Never the miners, only the bosses.”) This big workman was so clear in his answers and so unemotional in his attitude toward Hungary, that at the end of a most rewarding interview I pointed to his rugged physique and said, “Well, at least one man seems to have prospered under the regime.” I thought that had ended an excellent interview, but it was the phrase that actually launched it.
“You should have seen me when the AVO got through with me,” he said.
“Did they arrest you?”
“Yes. They held me for thirty-three days. When they let me go I could barely walk, and my wrists were as thin as this.”
“They give you bad treatment?”
“The worst,” he said simply and without rancor.
“What for?”
“They saw my suit.”
“What about your suit?”
“It was an American suit. An old one, but the only one I ever had.”
“Where did you get an American suit?” I asked.
“That’s what they wanted to know.”
“What did you tell them?” I pressed.
“The truth. During the war I had been deported by the Germans as a forced laborer. I wound up in Linz, where the Americans found me. Before I could get back to Hungary I worked for them for a while, and an American engineer bought me this suit at the PX.”
“So what did the AVO do?”
“They said that any man who had an American suit must be an American spy.”
“Then what?”
“They beat me every day for thirty-three days, and starved me.”
“And all because you were wearing an American suit?”
“Yes.”
“You mean to say an AVO man could pick you off the streets and hold you in prison for thirty-three days simply because he didn’t like your suit?”
“He could have held me for thirty-three years.”
Even more deeply moving was a casual conversation which to me still epitomizes the AVO terror. More than anything else I stumbled upon, this accidental account remains in my memory. I was interviewing a Hungarian housewife whom I had met at the border and whose fine, warm face had led me to think, “There’s a woman I’d like to talk to. I’ll ask her how women faced the revolution.” During our discussion she gave me much valuable information which I have used in the section dealing with housewives during the days of peace. She was eminently sensible about everything, so free from a spirit of revenge and with such a warm good humor that I was congratulating myself upon having found a woman with a perfectly average story, free from all emotional complications.
But as I was putting away my notebook I happened, by the merest chance, to look down at the woman’s right hand and casually I asked, “What did you do to your hand?”
“The AVO broke it,” she said simply.
“Those fingers?”
“They broke them with a rubber hose.”
“And those two holes in the back?”
“Lighted cigarettes.”
“Why?”
“A friend of mine escaped over the border.”
“Did you help him?”
“It was a girl. I didn’t even know about it.”
“But they arrested you?”
“Yes.”
“What for?”
“On the chance that I might know something.”
“Was it pretty bad?”
“When I said I didn’t even know the girl was going they shouted, ‘You liar.’ Then a man punched out my teeth.”
There is no point going on with her story. It was cruel to the point of nausea—thirteen months of endless brutality and persecution—yet there was nothing unusual about it. Other prisoners had their hands broken and their teeth punched out. But there is one aspect of Mrs. Marothy’s story which was different.
Most of the names in this book are fictitious for the reason that the people involved are still terrified that the AVO will track down their friends and relatives and torture them endlessly. Each of the people whose stories are told here will recognize himself, for in each instance at the end of the interview I said, “Now you make up a name for me to use.” They understood and did so.
But when I finished talking with this particular woman she said boldly, “Go ahead and use my name. It’s Mrs. Maria Marothy. I suffered so much at the h
ands of these beasts that this can be my only revenge. Let them know that in freedom I hold them in contempt.” Mrs. Marothy found a new home in Ohio, and I can imagine her walking into a store in some small town and shopping in broken English. But I fear that if the storekeeper, or one of the other customers, were to ask her, “What happened to your hand?” no one in Ohio would be prepared to believe her answer.
There was one feature of Mrs. Marothy’s story which I myself was unable to believe. After she had explained her broken hand, she added, “Maybe another story would show you how much we despised the communists. Who do you suppose is going to come out with us?”
“Is it someone I might know?”
“You know him.”
“Who?”
“Imre Horvath, Jr.”
It is difficult to explain to an American the profound shock this simple statement made both on me and on the listeners at our table. We were stunned. Because Imre Horvath, Sr., was probably the most universally detested Hungarian communist. During the height of the Budapest revolution this shameless diplomat had the gall to rise in the United Nations plenary session in New York City and claim that the Russians had a right to return and that all good Hungarians welcomed them, since the uprising was merely a civil disturbance engineered by fascist warmongers. When news of Horvath’s pronouncement in the United Nations reached Hungary the rage against him was extreme. Many refugees told me that they would have killed him if they could have got to him. He was unquestionably their most despised enemy.
“Is his son leaving Hungary?” I asked.
“Indeed!” Mrs. Marothy assured me. “He lived in our apartment house. He knew what the AVO had done to me, and he was ashamed of his country. When he heard about his father’s speech in the United Nations he swore he would leave Hungary forever.”
“Did he do so?”
“Can you keep a secret?” Mrs. Marothy asked.
“Of course.”
“He has left Budapest. He will join us tomorrow.”
It seemed so unlikely that a young man of Imre Horvath, Jr.’s, significance would be allowed to escape that I showed my disbelief. Mrs. Marothy saw this and said, “Believe me, all decent Hungarians are mortally ashamed of what Horvath, Sr., did to us. His son most of all. Believe me, he will come out.”
But days passed and he did not appear. I left the border and he was still not among the refugees. Back in New York I kept watch on the headlines and Imre Horvath, Jr., did not appear among the list of refugees, so I concluded either that Mrs. Marothy had never known him and had made up the story, or that she was mistaken about his intentions.
Then, on the last day of my work on this book, at the last moment when changes could be made, news came that Imre Horvath, Jr., had fled to the west. He said little, but what he did say provided one of the worst indictments of the system which had driven him and Mrs. Marothy into exile: “I was especially shocked when I talked to my father about the fate of Laszlo Rajk [nationalist communist leader executed by Stalin’s order in 1949]. I said everybody in Hungary knew that scores of innocent people were being tried and executed. He replied, ‘It is better to liquidate hundreds of innocent people than to let one guilty person remain in the party.’ ”
The most revolting story I stumbled upon was told by a man whose name would be recognized throughout much of Europe and America, for he was for some years a world champion in an exacting sport. I had been trying for some time to check the charge made by many refugees that athletes were given special treatment in Hungary and that they had no cause to fear communism. As one refugee had explained it, “The communists figured that athletes were big and dumb and would never cause political trouble, so they were well fed and pampered because if they won against the democracies, it gave communism good publicity.”
It was among a group of refugees at the border that I found this world champion, and we had a delightful talk. He was very quick and lean and had laughing eyes which let you know immediately that he knew why you were asking so many questions.
“Sure, we had it much better than the average man,” he admitted. “Nobody ever bothered us much, once we signed the agreement.”
“What agreement?” I asked.
“Well, when they took you out of the country, say, to England or France, you agreed that if for any reason you ran away from the team and didn’t come home, the police would arrest your whole family and keep them arrested till you did come home.”
“What if you didn’t have any family?”
“Then your friends.”
“So you signed?”
“Oh, sure. You knew they would apply the rule anyway, so there was no reason for not signing.”
“Would you say that athletes were used for propaganda purposes?”
“Certainly. What else? It gave us a big thrill in Paris when we beat the Frenchmen. We players were thrilled because we had beaten France. But the AVO were thrilled because we had beaten noncommunists.”
“Were there AVO with the team?”
“With every team. They were very strict outside the country, because if one of us ran away, it would be the AVO’s neck.”
“But no rough stuff?”
“Oh, no. Athletes were special.”
“Why don’t you compete any more?”
“The two bullets in my shoulder.”
“What two bullets?”
“The ones the AVO put there.”
“On a trip?”
“No,” he explained. “After several trips to England and France I suddenly said to myself, ‘Hungary is a hell of a place to live. I’m leaving.’ But at the border they shot me down.”
He showed me the huge indented scars in his shoulder and I said, “How’d you get such big scars? They operate on you with a shovel?”
And he replied, “Dum-dum bullets. They explode inside.”
He proceeded to tell the same old story of beatings, indignities and three years of slave labor in a filthy, deadly coal mine. Only two features were new, and by this time I was so deadened to what I knew was coming next that I took only desultory notes: “The AVO man who supervised our team testified that in Paris the English referee had spoken to me twice, so this proved I was a spy. I got my three-year sentence for spying, not for trying to escape.” And the other note in my book reads: “In twenty-one months at coal mine 50 killed, 250 crippled. Drownings, pit gas, cave-ins. Nobody gave a damn.”
Then, as so often happened, as we were about to part, this clean, happy, wiry champion said almost gaily, now that he had gained freedom and had left the evil behind, “But I’m not a crybaby, remember that. When things were worst I always told myself, ‘Well, anyway, you missed Major Meat Ball.’ ”
“Who was he?”
“It was a she.”
“Major Meat Ball? An AVO?”
“Of course. It was only the AVO that you remembered.”
“Where’d you meet Major Meat Ball?”
“Her name was Piroshka, which is Russian for meat ball. I met her in the AVO torture cellars at 60 Stalin Street, in Budapest. I can describe her exactly. Anybody who ever saw her could. She was a redhead, plump, about thirty-five years old. She was pockmarked and had fat lips. She was about five feet two and not bad-looking except for the pockmarks. Everyone knew she was a horrible sadist.
“I say I missed her, that means I missed the worst part. But I had enough. She went into the cell next to mine with a bottle and told the man, ‘Urinate in it.’ Then she brought it in to me while it was still warm and said, ‘Drink it.’
“Once she drew a little chalk circle in my cell and told me to walk around it. I did so for eight hours.
“With women prisoners she was unbearable. She did things to them that even now I can’t describe. But as I said before, I was forever grateful that I missed her. The man in the next cell didn’t. She came in to see him one day wearing only a dress. ‘You must get hungry for a woman,’ she said, nuzzling against him. ‘Well, I get hungry for a man, too. Tonight I’m g
oing to take you up to my quarters.’ So that night she took him to her quarters and got undressed. But just then an AVO burst into the room, shouting, ‘You rapist. Messing around with my wife.’ This AVO called some other AVO, and they began beating my friend almost to death. They ended by holding him down and ramming a thin, hollow glass tube up his penis. Then they beat him till it broke into a million pieces. That was how Major Meat Ball operated.”
Weakly I asked, “How do you know?”
The world champion said simply, “I had to hold the guy when he went to the toilet.”
A stranger to Hungarian history is tempted to say of the AVO terror that it was the worst in the experience of this long-troubled nation. But in certain respects that statement would not be true, for Hungary has known six major terrors, and the communist one is merely the last in an ugly line.
Between the two epoch-making battles of Mohacs, the first (in 1526) a notable Turkish victory over Hungarians and the second (in 1687) a triumph of Hungarians over Turks, Budapest and its surrounding countryside lay under Turkish domination. At intervals, this Ottoman terror was brutal, but when the dominance of Muslim rule was finally accepted by the Hungarians, the Turkish dictatorship relaxed into a kind of heavy-handed, corrupt occupation. In both extent and stupidity, this Turkish terror was a dreadful experience and a deterrent to Hungarian progress.
In 1919, in the midst of the chaos that accompanied the end of World War I, Hungary experienced a native-bom terror about which confusion and debate continue to this day. In that year, Admiral Horthy, of the old Austro-Hungarian fleet, became regent of Hungary and instituted a reactionary dictatorship that lasted until 1944. Life in Hungary during this period was not exactly pleasant, but it probably never reached the levels of debasement screamed about by communist agitators, who refer in almost every speech to the “Horthy fascist terror.” Nevertheless, Horthy must be blamed in part for Hungary’s quick surrender to communism. Invoking his memory, the communists had easy entry into Budapest.
In 1944 Hungary entered into a one-year Nazi terror, which can be precisely defined. If one was an average, well-behaved citizen, the Nazi occupation was not too bad. Everyone testifies to that. It was disagreeable, and Hungarians came both to despise and to ridicule the Germans, but life was not intolerable. But if one was Jewish, the Nazi terror was hideous beyond description, and the worst accomplished by the AVO fell short of what the Nazis did. It was this German terror that was automatically extended by the homegrown regime of Ferenc Szalasi for a brief period in 1944.
The Bridge at Andau Page 14