So if anyone doubts my reports on Major Meat Ball, he can write to Josef Kormany, North Hamilton, Ontario, and he will find that I have told only a selected part of the horror. Kormany can provide the details.
Through the darkness the refugees came, men who had walked the hundred and ten miles from Budapest, and often they carried with them some single document that would testify to their honorable participation in the fight for freedom. Under some flickering light they would produce a torn and sweaty piece of paper, which they had carried in a shoe, stating, “Lajos Bartok fought at the Kilian Barracks for three days. The Revolutionary Committee. He has a brother in Los Angeles, 81 Queen Street.”
It was in such a wavering light that a rugged workman with gray eyes and brown hair one night drew his family of three sons and a tired wife about him and produced his document: “Letter of Commendation. Csepel, November 3, 1956. The Revolutionary Committee of Csepel has asked Gyorgy Szabo to carry a gun and to ride in a car if necessary while doing his work in defense of the revolution. Ivanitch Istvan, President of the National Committee.” There was a stamp on the document, and it is Szabo’s story that I have told in my account of the men from Csepel. After his wife had broken down on that last night in Csepel, the family had walked over a hundred miles to freedom, the parents carrying two of the children most of the way in their arms.
Others came out more dramatically. Imre Geiger, the tough kid with the useless rifle and dangling cigarette, walked miraculously straight down the open railway track to Nickelsdorf, the most dangerous single escape route in Hungary, since it was patrolled by Russians. On came the cocky young fighter, lugging his rifle right toward an Austrian oupost, which under the rules of war would have had to arrest him, disarm him and send him back to Hungary.
Another refugee already safe inside Austria ran down the railway track to scream at Geiger, “Throw away the gun!”
“Never!” the wiry dead-end kid shouted back.
“They’ll send you back to Hungary!”
Young Imre Geiger stopped dead in the middle of the Nickelsdorf tracks. Why he was not shot down I will never know. “They’ll send me back?” he shouted, a standing target for the Russians.
“Run, run!” His adviser scrambled back to safety and watched in horror as young Geiger remained outlined against the barren sky, just standing there looking at his rifle. Finally, as if surrendering an arm or a mother, he tossed it aside and continued his stroll down the tracks. No refugee came out of Hungary with greater bravado, and it is perplexing to think that while he came right through the Russians, lugging his rifle, more cautious groups, tracing their way through swamps in secrecy and silence, were being caught.
Each night contained its miracles. For me the most haunting came when Barrett McGurn of the New York Herald Tribune and I stood watch toward four o’clock one morning. There had been crowds of refugees, singing and kissing each other and some even with bottles so they could toast freedom the moment they touched Austrian soil. Never were they alone, for they traveled in groups to sustain their courage on the last long hike through the swamps.
It had been a night of almost unbearable tension, watching these souls from the grave well up out of the dark canal and then burst into song. But toward dawn, when the cold was tearing at your ability to stay by the canal another minute, there loomed out of the darkness a solitary figure whom neither McGurn nor I will ever be able to forget as long as we live.
It was a woman, all alone in the bitter night. She was a tall woman with gray hair and a handsome face. She wore a coat that would have been suitable for an evening at the opera. It had a bit of fur about it but no warmth. Her dress was thin and her scarf was quite inadequate.
She loomed out of the darkness like a demented queen from some Shakespearean play. Why she was alone we never knew. When she saw us she hesitated, and if we had been Russian soldiers, I am sure she would have jumped into the canal and tried to escape, but when she heard us speaking English she came up to us through the icy air and spoke rapidly in French. “I have been walking three days,” she said. “Before that the Russians caught some of us and held us in a bunker for forty-eight hours. Some of us were shot. I escaped. How far must I go now?”
“Only one more kilometer to the hut,” McGurn lied to encourage her.
“I can make that. If I have survived the last three years, I can survive the last kilometer.”
Then she went into the cold mists. Who was she? We never knew. What torments was she feeling? We could only guess. But as she went down the silent canal, a great gaunt figure of triumphant tragedy, fighting against the darkness totally alone, I saw something that haunts me still. She wore high-heeled shoes and had worn them through the long miles, the Russian prison and the swamps.
I missed the most gallant incident at Andau, but Dan Karasik, the red-headed announcer for CBS, not only saw this beau geste but photographed portions of it. On a rainy day, when the swamp to the south had become impassable, large numbers of Hungarians, including many families, tried to penetrate the marshes to the east, and here, in the tall rushes, they became hopelessly lost. The AVO, discovering this, moved in under Russian direction, and started to pick up the would-be escapees and haul them off to prison camps.
At this point Karasik saw, coming through the head-high rushes to the east, a young Hungarian man of perhaps twenty. He wore no cap, no overcoat. He was a husky chap, and when he reached the shallow drainage canal that separated the eastern rush fields from Austria, he plunged heartily in, splashed his way across and asked one question: “Austria?”
“Yes,” Karasik said.
“Good,” the young man grunted in German. He then turned, splashed back through the icy water and in about ten minutes led to safety some fifteen Hungarians, blue with cold.
“Austria,” the young man said, but before the refugees could thank him, he had disappeared into the rushes, and for a while Karasik heard him thrashing around; then he dramatically appeared with another convoy, muttering only the magic word, “Austria.”
He made three more trips, but on his next the lookout in the tower spotted him and by means of signals and gunshots directed a team consisting of two border guards and an AVO man into the very rushes where the young scout had gone for his sixth group. There were shots, a scuffle and then, to the horror of the watching Americans inside Austria, the three patrolmen appeared with the young bareheaded Hungarian as their captive.
They led him down the canal path to the tower, but before they got him there he broke away and dived into the rushes alongside the canal. There was a mad scramble, and after many tense minutes the young guide broke once more through the rushes and splashed to safety. Karasik says, “A cheer went up. You couldn’t help it.”
But many brave men faced equal perils. What set this particular young man apart was his next action. Says Karasik, “After the guards had gone disconsolately back to their tower the young man sat down, took off his soggy shoes, and disclosed the fact that he had no socks. His feet must have frozen. But from around his neck he took another pair of spare dry shoes and put them on. We thought he intended to use them for the hike to the trucks and some dry clothes.
“Instead he stood on the Austrian side of the canal and listened. Over in the rushes he heard a noise and he started back into Hungary. We pleaded with him not to take such a risk, but he said, ‘Ungarn!’ (Hungarian!) which meant, ‘There are still some Hungarians lost in there.’ And while we watched in silent wonder, he made three more trips through the bitter-cold waters of the swamp and brought out all his countrymen.”
But if I missed this remarkable performance, I did see one that became a legend along the frontier. When Russians guarded the bridge, and when the thermometer dropped to a paralyzing nine degrees above zero, we prayed that the deep canal which cut off the marshes to the south would freeze, thus providing another escape route. But stubbornly it refused to do so; only a thin film of razor-sharp ice formed on the surface. To this semi-frozen canal came
a young married man, his exhausted wife and two children. There was no way for them to cross to safety, and AVO men with dogs could be expected along at any moment.
So this father took off all his clothes, then lifted his little girl in his arms and plunged into the deep canal. Breaking the ice with his chest and one free arm, he waded across, climbed up through the marshy slopes and deposited his child in Austria.
Then he returned to Hungary, rolled his clothes in a ball and handed them to his son, whom he lifted high in the air for his second trip through the freezing waters of the canal. Again he stumbled up the steep and marshy bank and delivered his child to freedom.
Once more he sloshed his way back through the deep canal to lift his weary wife in his arms and bring her to safety. Not one of his family got even so much as a foot wet, and if this man lives today—it seemed doubtful when I last saw his totally blue body—he is a walking monument to the meaning of the word love.
Out of the reeds and out of the rushes, out of the mud and the muck, through the swamps and across the canal, over the rickety bridge they came—the finest people in Hungary. A Norwegian Red Cross woman once caught my arm as she saw them and cried, “How can a nation let such people go?”
How arrogantly they came, with honor stamped on their faces. Once I met forty-four of the most handsome, brave and cocky young people I have ever seen. They had come from all parts of Hungary. No one had led them, no one had driven them, but from every type of home they had converged on the bridge at Andau, and as they passed me on their way to exile I counted the things they had brought with them: these forty-four refugees had among them two girls’ handbags, two brief cases and one paper bag of bread. That was how they left, in the clothes they wore.
I asked one of them, “Why did you bring so little?”
And he said, “Whatever the communists let us have, they can keep.”
They came only with their honor.
The overpowering drama of this great exodus gripped me as previous evacuations had failed to do, and I went back night after night to help bring in the fugitives. Most of the stories told in this book were acquired initially at Andau. Many of the Hungarians I speak of here I first met in the night watches at Andau.
Boys like young Josef Toth, who fell wounded at the attack on the radio station, were helped here by their friends and limped to freedom. Married couples like Zoltan and Eva Pal walked to the border and escaped after their brief taste of peace. Csoki, the Little Chocolate Drop, strutted his way across the bridge, and so did Istvan Balogh, the university student—Peter Szigeti, the communist intellectual, had come out by another route. The most memorable family, of course, were the Janos Hadjoks and their crippled brother-in-law, but there were others whose stark drama shocked all who came into contact with them.
It was nearly four o’clock one wintry night when out of the mists came a man of middle size, his attractive, trim young wife and their two children. I greeted them at the edge of the bridge and said that Austria was just a few hundred yards away. To my surprise the husband said in excellent English, “That’s good news.” And his excited wife cried happily, “Now my two children are safe.” Then the quartet passed on to freedom with perhaps the most significant story of the evacuation, although I did not know it at the time.
For the traveler was John Santo, and soon his story was flashed around the world as indicative of what was happening in Hungary. Santo had once been secretary-treasurer of the Transport Workers of America (CIO) in New York and had been deported in 1949 on charges of being a communist. With a great flourish, Hungary had given him and his Brooklyn-born wife political asylum and then a top political position: dictator of the meat industry for all of Hungary.
His story was inevitable. He had become disillusioned with communism in practice and was now fleeing the country to seek new asylum in America, as a penitent communist who was willing to help unravel strands of the conspiracy in America. “Communism,” he said, “is a dictatorship against the proletariat, against the farmers, against the former factory owners, against the aristocracy, against everyone.” He had suffered the economic tyranny of the system as long as possible and had then walked out.
There were many curious aspects to this great migration. No one ever understood why the Russians allowed so many Hungarians to escape. On good days more than eight thousand walked across the border unmolested. They had been brought to points only a few miles away in trains and trucks which the Soviets could easily have intercepted, and the rumor became current: “The Russians are sending a hundred thousand spies into Austria.” Certainly the bulk of the refugees moved with Russian knowledge, if not with their full approval. A likely theory developed that “the Reds have had so much trouble with Hungarians that they don’t care if they all leave the country.” Indeed, if the rate of exodus of the first two months had been projected into the future, Hungary would have been totally depopulated in less than eight years.
But on other days, and one never knew when this would happen, the Russians clamped down with machine guns, police dogs, phosphorous flares, road blocks, land mines and special patrols. Then either escape from Budapest or penetration of the border defenses became most difficult, and many would-be refugees either stumbled into AVO hands or were betrayed by their guides, and were sent, the survivors feared, to Siberia.
Thus one man might make the trip from Budapest in the manner of a gay excursion, whereas the next went through mud and hell to gain freedom. It was truly said of the refugees, “Each man who crosses the border is a novel; any ten men comprise an epic.”
We often suspected that the Hungarian guards along the border were fed up with the evil system of which they had to be a part. One day while I was standing at the check point directing refugees where to go as they came down the canal from the bridge, a father appeared with two sons, the older a strong lad of about thirteen, the younger a boy of nine. The father was a sober-faced man in a fur shako, and after all the other refugees had been allowed to pass down the canal footpath and into Austria, the two Hungarian guards at the check point made him remain in Hungary with his two sons.
Those of us who were watching assumed that the guards had refused permission for this man to pass, and there was a visible mood of tragedy upon us all, but finally one of the Hungarian guards, slinging his sub-machine gun over his back, came to speak in German to Claiborne Pell, an officer of the International Rescue Committee who was observing the border.
To Pell’s astonishment, the guard said, “The little boy is afraid to leave Hungary until his mother gets here, too. She may never get here. Won’t you see if you can get the boy to join you. It would be better if he left Hungary.”
I was given the job of talking with the boy, although I knew no Hungarian, but since I had on a good overcoat the child assumed that I must be a communist official, and when I bent down to talk with him he bravely opened his shirt and raised his hands to show me that he had no weapons or official documents hidden on his person.
I knelt on the frozen ground and put my arm about the whimpering boy. “You better come on over on this side of the line,” I said. The fact that I did not strike him, that I was apparently not an official, was too much for the boy and he collapsed in my arms weeping. I said to the father, “Tell him his mother may get out later.”
The father and the older boy stepped into Austria and the Hungarian guard turned his face while I carried the weeping boy to join them. I had gone only a few steps when there was a shattering explosion of machine-gun fire, and I turned back panic-stricken. Claiborne Pell was laughing. He explained, “The guard wanted the other guards back in the tower to think he was on the job. So he fired a volley into the air.”
When Pell and the shakoed father had left the frontier with the two boys, the communist guard and I looked at each other for some time, and after a while he took me by the arm and led me well into Hungary, right past the observation tower with its machine guns and across the bridge. There was a woman with two children
, and one of the girls was unable to walk any further. The Russians might come along at any moment, and it would be wise if the family hurried on.
So the guard hoisted the little girl and put her on my shoulder. Then he hustled the woman and the other child over the bridge and led us all back into Austria. At the border he fired another blast to let his AVO bosses know that he was on the alert, and I carried the sick little girl to freedom.
And there was one freedom fighter with no legs, and no wooden legs to replace them. This man caught a bus ride from Budapest to a point about fifteen miles from the border. These last fifteen miles he covered by pulling himself along on his hands. When we got to him the stumps of his legs were almost rubbed raw, and his hands were cut and bleeding from the frozen soil. Nobody said much about this man, for there was nothing that words could add.
One night at Andau an extremely handsome young blond giant of twenty-four came swinging down the path, as if he had not a care in the world nor any bad memories to forget. I got to know him and found that he bore one of Hungary’s noblest names—something like Festetich or Tisza or Andrassy or Karolyi or Esterhazy. These are names which hold no charm for me, personally, because it was partly due to the reactionary principles of such nobles that Hungary was prevented from taking the necessary steps that might have forestalled communism.
But I was impressed by this young man, let’s call him Esterhazy. He was able, quick-witted, good-humored and not at all disposed to feel sorry for himself. He said, “My branch of the family dates back well before the sixteenth century. We wound up with fifty peasants and four thousand holds of land near Budapest. I was only fourteen when our land was expropriated, but I understood why that had to be done. Yet when my family of six was moved into a two-room peasant cottage I found that the peasants were very good to us, even though it involved some risk. They brought us food and clothing and sat around with my father as if he were an equal friend.