Under AVO scrutiny, the school became a potential trap for every household. Teachers would ask their students, “Does your father keep a picture of Comrade Stalin in your home?” “What radio station does your mother like best?” “Does your father think that Comrade Rakosi is always right?” “Does your mother ever take you to religious meetings at night?”
Religious instruction was a very touchy problem. In some schools it was available, but only if parents requested it for their children in writing. The child was then allowed to receive highly colored official interpretations of religion, while the parents’ letters were forwarded both to employers and to the AVO, who would order that any man in a sensitive position who insisted upon religious instruction for his children be fired immediately and placed in the labor corps. In fact, in the cities retaliation was apt to be so severe that cautious parents quickly learned to ignore the school’s sanctimonious announcement: “If any parents want their children to have religious instruction, all they have to do is write a letter stating that fact.”
Therefore, any Hungarian youth who had reached the age of twenty had spent the first half of his life in war, starvation and insecurity, and the next half in the bosom of communism, coddled and tempted. Quickly he learned that for any preferment in life, he had to be a good communist. Did he like games? Only communist groups could have teams. Did he want to attend a summer camp? He could do so only if he was a communist. If he wished to go on to the university, he had to have an exemplary communist record. In all of Hungary there was no conceivable escape from this crushing burden of propaganda which bore down upon him to remake his personality. If the human soul could be transformed, communism proposed to transform it.
Any young man or woman who had experienced ten years of such relentless pressure should have become a living testament to the boast of Joseph Stalin, who once growled, “Education? It’s just a weapon whose effect depends upon who controls it and whom he wishes to strike with it.” Hungarian boys and girls had been trained by Stalin as intensively as human beings could be to strike the enemies of communism. They were bound morally and spiritually and economically to the two pillars of Hungarian education: love Russia and defend communism.
Yet when the test came, almost a hundred per cent of Hungarian youth hated Russia and tried to destroy communism.
This fact is so striking, and has so many ramifications for world history, that we must try to discover why the Russian plan went wrong. Why did these young people behave exactly contrary to expectations? And how were they able to resist the poison with which they were daily inoculated? To find one answer we must study the nature of the Hungarians themselves and the role they have played in history. For another answer we shall pick up one typical family as it struggles through the Hungarian marshes, on its way to the bridge at Andau and freedom. From this inspection we may comprehend what the Russians were up against.
It was an American diplomat, exhausted from days of work during the crisis, who best described the Hungarian. Limply he cried, “When this pressure lets up, I want just one thing. A transfusion of Hungarian blood. I want to feel like a man again.” It was the consensus of observers that the Hungarians were some of the toughest individual human beings of recent years.
In those days much was written that both inflated Hungarian pride and ignored history. It is true that the Hungarians have always been brave, but they have also been an extraordinarily contankerous people. Their neighbors have usually found it almost impossible to get along with them. At one time or another, and often within recent years, Hungary has either fought or quarreled with each nation that touches her borders.
To the east the enmity with Rumania has been historic and undying. It centers on conflicting claims to the province of Transylvania, and given a chance, it would surely flare up afresh tomorrow. Much of Hungary’s curious predilection for alliances with Germany has sprung from her desire to be revenged on Rumania.
To the south Hungary has experienced quite bad relations with her Serbian neighbors, so that the history of this border is one of war and retaliation, the most serious flare-up having occurred in 1942, when Hungarians were charged with the massacre of at least ten thousand Serbs. Less than four months after signing a treaty of perpetual friendship with Yugoslavia, Hungary invaded that country in an act so flagrantly in violation of international morality that the Hungarian prime minister, Count Paul Teleki, committed suicide in protest.
Hungary’s relations with Croatia on the southeast and with Slovakia on the north were little better, while Austrians held that one of the main reasons for the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire that used to bind Central Europe together was Hungary’s intransigence in empire affairs and her unwillingness to accord her own minorities fair treatment. Few nations, for example, have a worse record of anti-Semitism, or a longer one.
A long-time student of Balkan affairs has remarked, “Hungary has customarily had only one staunch friend in this area, Bulgaria. That’s because there is no Hungarian-Bulgarian border.” Since most histories of this part of the world have been written by scholars with Serbian or Rumanian sympathies, it is easy to guess what nation is usually cast in the role of villain. However, even an unbiased American scholar like Carlton J. H. Hayes* can summarize Hungarian behavior in this manner:
“… the Magyar aristocracy made no pretense of sharing the management of Hungary with the masses of their own people, to say nothing of sharing it with any subject nationality. They preserved their hold on large landed estates throughout the realm. They forced the use of their own language in the public schools of the whole kingdom. They did their best to Magyarize the Slovak peasantry in their northern provinces and the Serb population of the south. They abolished all traces of local autonomy in the large Rumanian-speaking province of Transylvania, in the east. In the west, they put more and more restrictions on the partial autonomy which they had granted in 1868 to Croatia. They kept the Hungarian parliament and the ministry at Budapest under their own domination. They persistently refused to extend the suffrage for parliamentary elections; and so high were the property qualifications for its exercise and so intricate were the electoral laws that in 1910, out of a total population of over twenty million in the Hungarian kingdom, fewer than one million were voters, and, though the total population was about evenly divided between Magyars and non-Magyars, almost all the seats in the parliament were occupied by Magyars.
“The subject nationalities in Hungary were thus even more discontented than those in Austria, although their wholesale exclusion from the Hungarian parliament at Budapest deprived them of a central place, such as the parliament at Vienna provided for dissident Austrian nationalists, where they might collaborate against the existing regime and advertise to the world their grievances and demands.
“The poorer classes of Magyars as well as the subject peoples suffered from the aristocratic character of the Hungarian government. Though much was done by the Hungarian parliament to foster popular education, and though some of the worst grievances of the peasants against their landlords were redressed, the remarkable agricultural development which Hungary experienced between 1867 and 1914 redounded chiefly to the financial advantage of the great landowners and governmental oligarchy. This fact was evidenced by a startling emigration from the country, amounting to over a million for the years from 1896 to 1910, and by a widespread popular agitation for electoral reform, an agitation which in the first decade of the twentieth century brought the kingdom to the verge of civil war.”
I must point out, however, that there is a Hungarian explanation of such ugly evidence, but since Hungary has produced few persuasive historians, her side of any quarrel has not been well presented to the public. My own introduction to this fiery nation is a case in point. For some months in the early 1930s when I was first a student in Europe I roomed with a Transylvanian, whose native land had often been switched back and forth between Hungary and Rumania. At this time, most of Transylvania was under Rumanian rule, i
t having been so ordered by the victorious Allies at the conclusion of World War I, but his particular village still remained in Hungarian hands. My stubborn friend was a revolutionist who dreamed constantly of correcting that fault, and he fed me such a constant torrent of abuse against Hungary that in self-defense I began to study Hungary’s interpretation of events, and although these accounts were poorly written and lacking in subtle persuasiveness, I found myself developing a marked partiality for this small nation. In later life my Transylvanian revolutionist must have suffered several cyclonic reactions, for under Hitler all Transylvania went to Hungary, while under Soviet Russia it was returned to Rumania, where it now rests. At any rate, in me his intemperate denunciations produced a pro-Hungarian.
I found the Hungarians to be a sensible and a unique people. Their history even prior to the 1956 uprising against communism was a long testament both to their courage and to their determination to exist as a nation. If communism had had the intelligence to ingratiate itself with these strong people it could have erected in Hungary a powerful barrier against the west. For according to the facts of their history, they were a people who could find a logical home either with the Western European nations, with whom they shared a religion (Catholicism) and a cultural history, or with an Asian-European bloc, with whom they shared a linguistic kinship and a common ancestry.
It was some time toward the beginning of the ninth century that a group of about twenty thousand nomads from Central Asia were living on the western slopes of the Ural Mountains, looking down into what was to become Europe. In a series of daring westward thrusts these relatively few Ugrian-Turkic tribesmen moved successively across four great rivers: the Volga, the Don, the Dnieper and the Dniester. This brought them close to the mouth of the Danube, but after scouting parties found those areas occupied, the nomads appear to have decided on a brave trek into less contested lands.
By the middle of the ninth century the Asiatic tribesmen had begun to cut boldly right across the Carpathian Mountains and by the year 892 had reached the glorious plains of Central Europe rimmed by protective mountains. To the east lay the forbidding East Carpathians, to the north the West Carpathians, to the south the Dinaric Alps and to the west the towering Alps themselves. It was a noble plateau, cut approximately in half by the lovely Danube, which here took its dramatic ninety-degree swing to the south.
The vast, rich plain was scarcely inhabited. The dying Roman empire had maintained small settlements at Vienna and at the village of Buda, each on the right bank of the Danube, but there was little else, and the Ugrian-Turkic tribesmen swept in and soon controlled the plains. Their German neighbors on the other side of the Danube nicknamed them “The Hungry People” (hungrig), and the name lasted. They, of course, always referred to themselves by their correct name, the Magyars.
Thus by an accident of history, and because of the bravery of the first Hungarians, an Asiatic people was thrust down into the middle of Europe. Slavs surrounded them to the north and south, Germans to the west, and a mixture of Germans and Romans to the east. They retained many of their Asiatic ways and their speech—among the European languages Hungarian is related only to Finnish, the Finns probably having started from the same section of Asia and having reached Finland by some alternative route—and they proved a tough, rugged people, loyal to the death and committed always to the idea of a free Hungary.
Europe is deeply indebted to Hungary, which made many sacrifices to protect the safety of the west. For centuries this small group of herdsmen, only recently from Asia themselves, fought off subsequent waves of invading Mongols, who otherwise would have ransacked Paris and Rome. Later it was the Hungarians who bore the brunt of Europe’s fight against the Muslims of Turkey, refusing to relinquish either the Christian religion, which they had adopted around the year 1000, or their European way of life.
But if the Hungarians prevented other Asiatic invaders from reaching Western Europe, they saw no reason why they should not go there themselves, and in a series of wars they swept into German, Italian and Slavic lands until the west united and said in effect: “The Hungarian plain is yours. Stay there!” After this understanding was reached, an uneasy equilibrium was maintained whereby Hungary, of Asiatic ancestry, served as a buffer state fending Turkey off from German areas, and keeping the northern Slavs of Russia from establishing a common border with the southern Slavs of Yugoslavia. Now completely Europeanized, Hungary’s historic role has been to keep Asia out of Europe, whether the threat of invasion has come via Russia or Asiatic Turkey. Hungary could well be called the cornerstone that holds Western and Eastern Europe together.
The Hungarians developed into a remarkably attractive people. Small, wiry, quick to anger, they have finely chiseled faces and bodies admirably adapted to games. They love music and hunting, show great affection for folk arts, old national costumes and bright color harmonies. After a thousand years in Europe they have lost most of their Asiatic characteristics, though one sometimes finds a Hungarian with high cheekbones and the skin pulled tightly back from the eyes. And although they were violent in their reactions to their neighboring lands, they lived in peace among themselves. Their family life was extremely close-knit, and their loyalty to the family group made feudalism an attractive system, under which they produced some of the most powerful noblemen in Europe and some of the most stubborn. The changes that could have made Hungary a modern nation were fanatically resisted by these noblemen, so that in the peace treaties following World War I, Hungary was savagely stripped of its border lands by her neighbors. No nation suffered more national humiliation in 1918 than Hungary.
Even then the noble families, who retained control, refused to accept modern concepts of government, and a gallant land was kept in a state of strife, bickering and dictatorship. At the end of World War II, after pathetic switches in policy in a vain attempt to regain lost border provinces, Hungary stumbled and fumbled her way into communism.
It was this people, contrary and brave, that Russia decided to mold into an ideal communist satellite, and everything was in Russia’s favor. The Hungarian plain, under the careful attention of peasants who were naturally good farmers, produced more food than it needed. Mineral resources were to prove of great value, and the people of the plain were surprisingly well suited to a technological society, for Hungarian boys liked machines and the men made excellent engineers. Finally, the nation had proved over a thousand years that if its loyalty could be enlisted in a reasonable cause, one could find no better men in Europe to have on one’s side than these unique, rugged descendants of the tribesmen from the Ural Mountains.
On the other hand, Hungary’s neighbors had uncovered ample proof that any nation which insulted Hungary’s sense of honor would find it a land most difficult to deal with. Hungarians were by nature contrary, by conviction patriotic and by training heroic. Their friends called them “The Irish of the East”; their enemies termed them “The Prussians of the Balkans.” To understand how these characteristics combined to motivate an individual Hungarian family, let us journey to the bridge at Andau, where in mid-November a group of Hungarians were struggling across the last few miles of Hungarian soil.
It was a bitterly cold day as Janos Hadjok and his wife Irene led their two children, a boy of nine and a girl of thirteen, through the last Hungarian swamp and onto the rickety bridge. They could have moved faster except for Mrs. Hadjok’s brother, Gyorgy Lufczin, who seemed about to collapse. Twice he stumbled and was unable to get up, and his ashen face, made doubly grotesque by two days of beard, showed that he might be near death.
“You’ve got to come,” Janos Hadjok argued with his brother-in-law.
“Leave me here and go on,” the sick man pleaded.
“We’ll never leave you,” the Hadjoks replied. Then they helped the poor man to his feet and dragged him across the bridge to freedom, but then his nerves totally collapsed, and he seemed about to die. “Leave me and go on,” he begged.
“No, Gyorgy, we’ll get yo
u to a hospital,” his brother-in-law assured him, and with the help of Austrian rescuers, the little family got the sick man to a restaurant in Andau, where they propped him up in a corner.
There one of the Austrians had the good luck to meet Mrs. Lillie Brown, dynamic wife of Irving Brown, the AFL-CIO representative in Europe. She happened to be of Hungarian ancestry, her father having emigrated to the United States in the early years of this century. Mrs. Brown spoke to the sick man in his native tongue and found that he had been wounded in the stomach and then hastily patched together. On the long hike to freedom his insides had literally been falling out. Now his face was ghastly to see, and it seemed that within a few hours he must be dead.
“I’ll rush you to the hospital in Eisenstadt,” she offered.
“The family too?” he asked weakly.
“No, we can’t take the family,” she explained carefully. “They have to go to another place.”
“Then I won’t go,” he said simply.
Mrs. Brown is both energetic and forthright. “You are dying,” she snapped in Hungarian, “and you’re worrying about people who are well. Are you crazy?”
“If they had not stayed with me,” he argued, “I would have died. I won’t go.”
Mrs. Brown lost patience and cried to a guard, “Throw this man in a car and rush him to the hospital.”
“I won’t go!” he protested.
Finally Mrs. Brown asked, “Well, where is your family?”
“Over there.”
And then Mrs. Brown could understand why a man in pain of death would insist upon keeping with his own clan. Mr. Hadjok was a handsome, well-built man in his early thirties and Mrs. Hadjok was a solid Hungarian housewife of the same age, with a marvelous smile. But it was the children who were special. Dressed in her brown winter suit, Vera was a scintillating beauty with a tiny mole on her upper lip which made her look like Greta Garbo, while young Johan was a dashing blond terror of nine. They were two of the most appealing children to cross the bridge of Andau, and on the long bouncing trip over the rough roads to the hospital at Eisenstadt, Mrs. Brown had an opportunity to get better acquainted with this typical Hungarian family.