But communism could counterclaim, with some justification, I fear, that Hungary proved nothing of the sort. It merely proved, communists could claim, that reactionary, capitalist, priest-ridden, fascist parents were determined to keep their children’s minds enslaved and that against such fiends honest communism had little chance. For by communist definition, Janos Hadjok and his wife were fiends.
Taking only the evidence I have given in this report, it would be obvious to a communist that the Hadjoks were reactionaries (they taught their children history); they were capitalists (they had once owned a small enterprise of their own); they were priest-ridden (they believed in God); and they were murderous fascists (didn’t their son try to cut off the ear of a decent communist?).
However, the most damning part of the story of Hungary’s youth is still to come. The Hadjok children were counter-indoctrinated, that is certain, so it is not surprising that they fought communism. But the number of children whose parents were less brave than the Hadjoks, and whose families did not re-educate them at night, was far greater. These children also fought communism.
There were hundreds of thousands of children whose parents were either dedicated communists or at least on the surface subservient to the Soviets, yet these children also fought the evil system. There were some well-established cases in which the children of AVO men turned their backs on communism and fought with the independence fighters. And there were even some sons of highly placed officials, like young Imre Horvath, who took arms against their fathers’ government.
These facts seem to prove one thing: In all of Hungary there were only a few young people—some of the students at the Marx-Lenin Institute—who remained faithful to the system into which they had been lured and imprisoned; all the rest, regardless of their parents’ opinion, rejected communism in its moment of crisis.
*A Political and Cultural History of Modern Europe, Volume 2. Copyright, 1939, by Carlton J. H. Hayes. New York: The Macmillan Company. Used by permission of the publishers.
9
The Bridge at Andau
There was a bridge at Andau, and if a Hungarian could reach that bridge, he was nearly free.
It wasn’t much, as bridges go: not wide enough for a car nor sturdy enough to bear a motorcycle. It was a footbridge made of rickety boards with a handrailing which little children could not quite reach.
It wasn’t actually in Andau, nor even near it, yet it was known throughout Hungary as “the bridge of Andau,” and many thousands of refugees, coming from all parts of Hungary, headed for it. Fleeing the Russians, with only a paper bag, or with nothing, they headed for this insignificant bridge and for freedom.
Andau, of course, is not in Hungary. It is a village in Austria, but since it was the nearest settlement to the bridge, the name was shared, and the tiny village, which showed surprising capacity for accepting refugees, gained fame from a bridge which in no way belonged to it.
Nor did the bridge cross a river of importance. It did not even cross a rivulet, nor a sizable gully. It merely crossed the muddy Einser (First) Canal, which had been dug generations ago to drain the nearby swamps. Now it formed part of the boundary between Austria and Hungary.
No roads led up to the bridge, no railroad. It had been erected years ago as a convenience for local hay farmers who reaped the rich grasses that luxuriated on the swamplands around the canal and who, for most of their history, had never bothered much about the separation of Austria and Hungary. Actually, since the bridge was entirely inside Hungary, when a man did cross it, he still had a few hundred yards to go before he reached Austria.
You can see that this bridge at Andau was about the most inconsequential bridge in Europe, and if it had been left to its placid farmers and their hay fields it might have lasted for several more generations, until its timbers finally rotted and fell into the canal. It would have vanished unremembered.
But by an accident of history it became, for a few flaming weeks, one of the most important bridges in the world, for across its unsteady planks fled the soul of a nation. Across the bridge at Andau fled more than twenty thousand people who had known communism and who had rejected it. They had seen this new way of life at close hand, and they had learned in sorrow that it was merely ancient terrorism in horrible new dress, for it not only robbed and cheated a man of the material things to which he was entitled; it deprived his mind of every challenge, every breath of new life and all hope. It was at Andau that the refugees from Russian terror finally told their story. It was here that the world learned, in unmistakable accents and dreadful clarity, how bankrupt communism had become as a system of government.
The far-off men who had originally built the little wooden bridge at Andau could not possibly have foreseen what a story was ultimately to be carried across their structure. Nor could they have foretold that across their bridge would flee the flower of Hungarian manhood, abandoning the homeland for which they and their fathers had continuously fought. With great reluctance and with grief the brave people of Hungary finally decided that they must abandon their wild and lovely country and go into exile.
To understand the drama of Andau, it is necessary to visualize the border area, for it is unique. This corner of Austria resembles a low-lying football field, in the middle of which an Austrian guard stood with me one night and said, “To the south is Hungary, but over there to the east is Hungary, too. We’re a tiny corner of freedom, with Hungary all around us.”
To the south, along the long side of the football field, ran a high canal bank, entirely in Hungary. South of that the bank dropped sharply into the sluggish Einser Canal, too wide to jump, in most places too deep to wade. Still farther south lay the Hungarian swamps, completely covered with reeds and rushes and cattails. It took determination to escape through this border of Hungary.
Along the shorter side of the Austrian football field, the eastern, things were different. Here Austria ended in a drainage ditch which could be waded if a refugee was willing to wade up to his armpits in the deepest spots, or only up to his knees if he was lucky. But in order to get to this ditch the refugee had to penetrate a formidable Hungarian swamp choked with reeds head high.
At the point where the ditch to the east emptied into the canal to the south—the corner of the Austrian field—stood two Hungarian border guards, and about half a mile beyond them rose a tall, gloomy machine-gun tower manned by AVO men. A few hundred yards beyond the foot of this tower stood the Andau bridge.
One other factor made escape into Austria difficult, for when a refugee finally had pulled his feet clear of the Hungarian swamps, he found upon arrival in Austria that it was swampland, too. He had to struggle through an additional mile of marsh until he reached a road. Here Swiss and German Red Cross trucks waited at a rescue hut to carry women and children to safety, but men had to walk a final five miles into the village of Andau, where at last they were free.
In spite of these obstacles, there were occasional days at Andau bridge when escape was like a lovely picnic! Then the AVO guards were, for some unfathomable reason, absent from their towers, the bridge was open, and the marshes were frozen over. Russian snipers were not operating and refugees were free to walk boldly down the broad canal bank. On one such day, for example, thousands of singing people came down that joyous sunny path, and it was here, in the extreme corner of Austria, that I began to have one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
In my day I have observed many emigrations—pathetic Indians struggling out of Pakistan, half-dead Korean women dragging down from communist-held North Korea, and Pacific Island natives fleeing the Japanese—but I have never witnessed anything like the Hungarian emigration. First, there was the unprecedented youth of the emigrés. In the other evacuations the refugees had been mainly old people. But while I was at Andau, it was the finest young people of the nation who were leaving; their average age was only twenty-three. Second was their spirit. They were not dejected or beaten or maimed or halt. In considerable joy they were
turning their backs contemptuously upon the Russians and their communist fraud. Third, they were young people with a purpose. They wanted to tell the world of the betrayal of their nation. Any watcher at the border heard them say a dozen times, “I wish the communists of France and Italy could live under communism … for just six months.” Then somebody would interrupt, “No, let’s not wish that on anybody.” Fourth, it was difficult to find among these people any reactionaries, any sad, defeated human beings looking toward the past. World communists are trying to convince themselves that only fascists, capitalists, American spies, Catholic priests and reactionaries fled Hungary. I wish they would ask any one of us who greeted these refugees what kind of people fled their evil system. They were the best people in the nation, the most liberal.
But if the people were as I described them, why should we watchers at the border who welcomed them into freedom feel universally a sense of tragedy? I met no westerner who failed to have this sensation of great tragedy in the Greek sense, and I have seen some of the toughest newsmen, refugee teams, disaster officials and photographers in the world stand at this happy border and have tears well into their eyes.
I think they were overcome by the tragedy, not of these refugees, but of Hungary. What terrible fate had befallen a nation when such young people had grown to despise it and had fled? Consider, for example, eleven groups that had left their homeland, and imagine the loss they represented to a nation.
One, at the university in Sopron five hundred students, thirty-two professors and their entire families simply gave up all hope of a decent life under communism and came across the border. I am sorry that no American university was able to accept them as a unit; we were all glad when Canada’s University of British Columbia did so. What a vital impulse Vancouver is going to get.
Two, the finest ballerina of the Budapest Opera walked out with several of her assistants.
Three, enough football players fled Hungary to make several teams of world-champion caliber.
Four, the three finest Gypsy orchestras of Hungary came out in a body and have begun to play around the restaurants of Europe.
Five, some of the top mechanics in the factories at Csepel left and were eagerly grabbed up by firms in Germany, Switzerland and Sweden.
Six, a staggering number of trained engineers and scientists in almost all phases of industry and research fled, some carrying slide rules and tables applicable to their specialization, others with nothing. I myself have met accidentally at least fifty engineers under the age of thirty. A careful census would probably reveal more than five thousand. Their loss will hurt Hungary dreadfully.
Seven, a majority of both the Budapest symphony orchestras came out and plan to give concerts in the west. Several of the best conductors came with them.
Eight, many of Hungary’s best artists crossed the border.
Nine, and many of her notable writers.
Ten, several members of the Hungarian Olympic team decided to stay in Australia, others defected along the way home and still others refused to take the final plunge back into communism. This was a major propaganda defeat.
Eleven, and most impressive of all, were the young couples with babies. No group came across the bridge at Andau without its quota of young married couples. At a point fifteen miles inside Hungary, doctors of amazing courage passed among the would-be refugees and gave each mother some sedative pills for her children, so that they would be asleep during the critical attempt to pass the Soviet guards, lest an unexpected wailing betray the whole convoy. Then, in Austria, other doctors would have to revive the children lest they sleep too long.
For an American to understand what this great exodus meant, this comparison might be meaningful. When the final count is in, it will probably be found that about two per cent of the total population of the nation has fled. If this happened in America, about 3,400,000 would leave the country, or the population of Philadelphia, Boston, Providence and Fort Worth combined. If that happened, it would be obvious that something was wrong with the United States.
But even this comparison misses the essential truth, for it was not the total population of a city like Boston—the young and the old—that left Hungary. It was mainly the young, often the elite of the nation.
Here is a better analogy. Suppose things got so bad in America that the following types of people felt they had to abandon a rotten system: the University of Southern California en masse, the Notre Dame football team and the Yankees, Benny Goodman’s orchestra, the authors of the ten current best sellers, the actors in six Broadway plays, Henry Ford III and Walter Reuther, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, all the recent graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the five hundred top practical mechanics on the General Motors assembly line, the secretaries of the eighteen toughest unions, and a million young married couples with their children.
Now suppose that the average age of these Americans fleeing their homeland was twenty-three, that they were the kinds of people who might normally be expected to have brilliant futures before them, that there were no aged or sick or mentally defeated among them … only the best. Would you not say that something terribly wrong had overtaken America if such people rejected it? That’s what happened in Hungary.
The drama at Andau never ended. Robert Martin Gray, the hard-working operations officer of the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, guided into camp a nine-year-old boy and his mother. The boy’s story was so ridiculous that Gray checked his age several times. The child said, “When we ran out of gasoline we used water in our bombs. They worked just as good because when we threw them into a tank, the Russians would get scared and try to get out and older boys would shoot them.”
The child’s mother said, “On the first two mornings after he had stayed out all night I gave him spankings. A nine-year-old boy out on the streets all night. He said, ‘But Mother, I’ve been blowing up tanks.’ How can you spank a child who has been blowing up tanks?”
Each story was more bizarre than the last. Through the dusk one evening came a tall, very handsome young man who said in perfect English, “See if you can do anything for the men back there. We were fired on. Of a hundred and ten who tried to get through, only twenty-nine made it.”
When we asked his name, he said boldly, “I’m Josef Kormany, a citizen of Canada. My home is at 82 Emerald Street in North Hamilton, Ontario.” His story was so pathetic, and his manner of telling it so free from bitterness, that we were amazed both that he could have lived through it and that he could have retained such an appealing simplicity.
“I had a good job with General Motors of Canada, and I was a high official in United Auto Workers Local 199 of the CIO. All my life I had been a good union man, and on the side I served as program manager for Hungarian-language programs over Station CKTB.
“Why did I go to Hungary? It was my homeland and I wanted to see what was happening under communism. I found out. The AVO took away my passport, told me I was now a citizen not of Canada but of Hungary. So I tried to escape, and they shouted at me, ‘Who sent you in to spy, Tito or Truman?’ I would rather not tell you what they did to me.
“They finished by beating me senseless and sending me to the coal mines as a slave laborer. I had some really awful experiences, but do you know what infuriated me most? I could still strangle that guard.…
“This is what that monster did. We weren’t slaves; we were worse than slaves down in this awful mine. We worked twelve hours a day, but to make things look good, they paid us a regular wage. Of course they took it all away from us for food and lodging and renting our prison uniforms and paying for the guards. But if we worked long hours overtime we got just enough cash to buy a few cigarettes and some jam. You’d be astonished at how men would cry when they could get one piece of bread with a little jam on it.
“So on the day after we bought our cigarettes and jam, while we were down in the pits where you wouldn’t be able to get a free man even to visit, let alone work, this guard,
may God damn him perpetually, would go through our prison cells and crumple up our cigarettes and mix them with the jam and then smear it over the dirty floor.”
Nobody said anything, and after a moment Josef Kormany, who wanted me to use his real name, swore, “In Canada there used to be two Hungarian-language newspapers that were communist. I now have only one job in life. I’m going back to Canada and fight those newspapers. I used to think that they told lies. I used to wonder about some of their promises. I don’t have to wonder any more.
“From 1951 to 1956 Hungarian communists kept me bottled up in prisons so bad I can’t describe them. Why? Because they guessed that I had seen through the lies by which communists govern. I’ll tell you one thing, I never forgot, no matter how bad they treated me, that I was a Canadian citizen. I knew I’d get out some day. But God help the Hungarian I meet in Canada who tries to peddle communism now.”
His name was Josef Kormany, of North Hamilton, Ontario, and he was vitally important to me for a special reason. Some time earlier I had heard the athlete narrate his hair-raising story about Major Meat Ball, the sadistic woman jailer. I wanted very much to report this story but I held back because I was tormented by a fear that I had been told either a lie or a vast embroidery worked onto a thin fabric of truth. So I had asked dozens of refugees, “You ever hear of Major Meat Ball?” and no one had. So I decided not to use the story. Then along came Josef Kormany.
“Know her? You bet I know her! She worked out of 60 Stalin Street. About thirty-five, pockmarked, thick lips, red hair. Anybody like me who was taken to 60 Stalin Street knew the Meat Ball.”
“Would you say that she was a sadist?” I asked casually.
“I wouldn’t tell even you what she used to do.”