The Bridge At Andau Part 10

"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 cla.s.ses 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, it 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 kins.h.i.+p 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 n.o.ble 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 n.o.blemen in Europe and some of the most stubborn. The changes that could have made Hungary a modern nation were fanatically resisted by these n.o.blemen, 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 n.o.ble families, who retained control, refused to accept modern concepts of government, and a gallant land was kept in a state of strife, bickering and dictators.h.i.+p. 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 you to a hospital," his brother-in-law a.s.sured 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 das.h.i.+ng 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.

She found that in spite of hards.h.i.+ps that would have crushed a lesser breed, the Hadjoks had kept together, had protected one another, and had demonstrated a depth of family unity that would amaze a casual onlooker who had never known the rich experience of being one of a closely knit group. At the hospital Mrs. Brown didn't even try to argue with the officials, whose strict rule it was not to allow families to accompany operation cases.

"Look, nurse," she said, "I know your rules and I know they're right. But this family has got to stay together." The nurse started to argue, but the sick man refused to enter the hospital unless the four Hadjoks trailed along, so the rules were broken.

When the brother-in-law had been sewed up again and had recovered sufficiently, Mrs. Brown moved the entire family, at her own expense, into a Vienna hotel, and one day in a nearby restaurant some interrogators who were interested in how a family withstands the pressures of communism gathered to talk with the Hadjoks.

Janos Hadjok, the father, said bluntly, "Our whole family despised communism from the moment it reached Hungary. Three times we tried to escape. In 1948, when little Johan was a baby, we tried to sneak into Yugoslavia, but we were caught. In 1949, when he could walk, we tried again, but again we were caught and punished by the AVO. On the day the revolution broke we said to one another, 'Now maybe we can have a decent nation,' but when the Russians stormed back we agreed, 'We will leave this cursed business.' And we walked most of the way to Andau."

"Did your children feel the same way?" an interrogator asked.

The question made beautiful Vera quite angry. Tossing her lovely head she said in clipped accents, "In school we were taught the Russian language and Russian history and how great the Russian communist state was. But we all sat there very still and bitter inside. We despised the teachers who told us such lies."

Perhaps such sentiments from a thirteen-year-old girl made some of the questioners think that the interpreter was polis.h.i.+ng them up and that they were not Vera's own words; so they asked for another interpreter, but to him the girl spoke even more forcefully. "Neither Russia nor the communists in Hungary could ever make us believe the lies they told us."

"How did you know they were lies?"

Mrs. Hadjok answered briefly. "At night after we had put out the lights upstairs we would gather in the cellar, and I would teach the children the true history of Hungary. We would discuss morality and the Catholic religion and the lessons of Cardinal Mindszenty. We never allowed the children to go to sleep until we had washed away the evil things they might have heard that day."

There was a moment of silence in the restaurant and finally someone asked, "Did all families do this?"

Mr. Hadjok spoke. "I don't know. You see, we never knew who the AVO were in our community, and it would have been a great risk to tell even your best friend. But I think most families did it, in secret."

"How did you know enough history to teach the children?"

Mrs. Hadjok replied, "Books which told the truth about the great revolution of 1848 were circulated mysteriously and I had one. I made my children memorize it, especially the parts about Louis Kossuth, who was our greatest patriot. They considered this book almost sacred, since it was the only place in their world where they could find the truth."

"Besides," Mr. Hadjok interrupted proudly, "my father knew personally the son of Louis Kossuth, and if we had allowed that tradition to die, it would have been shameful."

An interrogator pointed his finger at beautiful little Vera, who in a kindlier world would have been playing with dolls, and asked, "Do you know who Kossuth was?"

Instantly Vera leaped to her feet, stood calmly beside her mother and delivered an oration which rang out fearlessly in the restaurant. "Louis Kossuth was Hungary's greatest hero, for he endeavored to bring freedom to a nation and hope to its people." She spoke for about ten minutes, a golden flow of emotion learned in a cellar.

When she had finished, one interrogator shot questions at her. "Did Kossuth succeed in his revolution?"

"No, he failed."

"What reforms did he specially want?'

"Freedom, a separate legislature, good judges, breaking up of big landholdings."

"If he failed, what did he accomplish?"

"He showed us the way, for later on."

"How long ago did he live?"

"One hundred years."

The most pressing questions were shot at Vera, and she answered them all. When she sat down, her father said proudly, "And if you questioned her in religion or ethics, she would answer as well. My wife is a proud teacher." Then he added, "She is brave, too."

On the fifteenth of March, which, before Russia took over, all Hungarians celebrated as their day of national independence, it had long been customary for children to appear on the streets in national dress. Adults would wear little rosettes of national colors-red, white, green-in their b.u.t.tonholes, and children would sometimes flash big bright arm bands. But under communism this became unpopular, since there were more important holidays to be celebrated, like Red Army Day and May Day. On the fifteenth of March, in 1953, Mrs. Hadjok surprised her family by dressing her six-year-old son in full national costume with an arm band so big it could be spotted a block away.

"The AVO will see it," friends warned.

"Today he's six," she argued, "and I want him always to remember that on his sixth birthday he was a Hungarian."

Proudly she sent him into the streets, and the first man he met burst into tears. The second was the policeman, who stopped the child and asked, "Where are you going?"

"Today is our national day," Johan replied. "Where are your colors?"

"I wear them in my heart," the policemen answered, and he brought the boy home for fear he might get into trouble.

From that day on, Johan was a Hungarian. In the cellar his parents taught him the fiery old poetry of Hungary and it became his chief joy to declaim it, but they warned him that he must not speak it in public, for the AVO might hear about it. But at the age of eight he entered a speaking contest for boys and girls of ten, and in the big school he dramatically recited an intensely patriotic poem. The effect on the teachers was astonis.h.i.+ng and several wept silently. At the conclusion of his recitation one older instructor openly applauded. Apparently spies reported this teacher to the AVO, for later on he was taken away.

"School was not easy for our children," Mrs. Hadjok said. "We dared to apply for religious instruction, but Vera was flatly told that if she attended such cla.s.ses she would not be promoted. The leader of the school went so far as to forbid her ever to come into the school again if she studied religion. But later on, when the teacher who had applauded Johan's recitation came back from the AVO, he bravely established secret cla.s.ses for religious training, even though he knew that if he were caught again he would probably be beaten to death. He was an excellent man."

The battle between school and parents never relaxed an instant. "The communists had everything on their side," Hadjok explained. "Candy, fruit, games, terror. We had only one thing, the lessons at night."

Mrs. Hadjok said, "We taught them above everything else to trust in G.o.d. But almost as strongly we told them to hold together as a family."

Hadjok explained, "The more the communists tried to destroy our family life, the more we taught family loyalty. It was like their pressing us down all day, in every way you could think of, but at night we grew up strongly again."

"Take Vera," the brother-in-law said. "At six she disliked the Russians. At nine she hated them. At ten she understood the evil of communism. At thirteen she is a holy patriot. She knows and understands more than I do."

"When communist teachers lectured to such children," Mrs. Hadjok said, "the boys and girls knew what lies they were being told before the teacher stopped speaking."

"Weren't you afraid the children would betray you ... by accident, I mean?" an interrogator asked.

There was a long pause in which the five members of the Hadjok family contemplated the studied chances they had taken in preserving their religious and intellectual life under communism. Each member knew exactly what exquisite judgments had been made, what fundamental risks had to be taken, and above all, what complete faith had to be invested in the children. The Hadjoks were unable to speak of these delicate judgments, for to do so would have been to lay bare the very soul of a family, but the interpreter suddenly said with intense emotion, "Perhaps I can explain what a Hungarian family went through. I'll speak in English and they won't be embarra.s.sed."

The interpreter said, "When we watched our children growing up there were moments of unbearable anxiety. We would see our sons come home from school wearing bright red ties and repeating communist lies. When we asked them who they loved they would say, 'Mama and Papa and Brother Stalin.' They would bring us pictures of Stalin to put in our living rooms. And we would know that their teachers were asking them each day, 'Do your parents love Comrade Stalin?' and we would have to make believe that we did. And almost every night when we went to bed, we husbands and wives who had young children would whisper, 'Do you think they are old enough yet to know?' And usually the husband would say, 'Not yet.'

"But the time always came when the mother would cry, 'I won't see my child perverted any longer. Tonight we will tell him the truth.' And the father would protest, 'Not yet! The boy is only eight.' And then mother and father would begin to inspect their child with an intensity that no other parents could possibly know. 'He's a good, honest boy,' the mother would reason. 'He's strong and honorable,' the father would agree. Then there would be more whispering at night and always the mother would be the one who pleaded for the family to take a bold chance and save this child.

"Now the family would look about Budapest, trying to find some other family it could trust. Hints would be dropped, always with the intention of discovering at what age a child could be trusted with the entire security of his family. A man would say to a lifelong friend, 'Can a child of eight-' He wouldn't finish the sentence but the friend would reply, 'I talked to my boy at nine.' That was all. But the mother would have quietly found some other woman who had talked to her children at eight. Or another wife would grow pale and say, 'Not before ten ...'

"You see, this family had to judge the exact moment at which a boy could be saved from communism and yet not too soon for fear the child might inadvertently blurt out the truth and destroy the whole family. Because if the AVO suspected, they simply came around some night and took the father away. Sometimes he was never seen again.

"More whispering, more consultations. I myself have been asked by at least six of my friends, and three times I have partic.i.p.ated in the first family meeting. It was almost always at night, and the parents would bring the children together and they would ask casually, 'What did you learn in school today?' and the child would explain how Russia and Stalin were the only things Hungary could trust in, and the father would say simply, 'That's all a lie, son.'

"It was a terrifying moment. You could feel death in the room, and then usually I would speak and I would say, 'Istvan, do you know what death is?' and regardless of what Istvan replied, I would say, 'If you ever tell anyone about tonight, your father will die.'

"Always the children understood, and they would begin to ask questions, and pretty soon the mother would say, 'We want you to keep in your heart certain things that will help you.' And usually it would be a part of the Bible or a poem of Petofi's.

"But the moment always came when such a father had to discipline such a son. Then the father would take down the strap with the certain knowledge that if the boy wanted revenge on his family, he could have it. Nevertheless, the father had to trust his earlier judgment. I remember when I had to discipline my son. When I was through he stood looking at me, and he knew that I was afraid, but he also knew that since I was afraid I would never have whipped him if he had not needed it ... that more than my own life I wanted to see him grow up to be a good man. Out of such moments our family life was built."

The interpreter paused a moment, then put his hand on little Johan Hadjok's tousled blond head. "This family knew," he said, "that when they started teaching this little fellow the truth he could have destroyed them."

The Hadjoks had been able to follow the English fairly well, and while the group looked at little Johan, Mrs. Hadjok said, "That was a chance we had to take."

It was therefore a tightly knit group that faced the outbreak of the revolution. "Without our saying a word," Mrs. Hadjok said, "Vera and Johan, at the first news, solemnly burned their Russian books. 'We'll never study them again,' the children swore. In many other families the same thing happened."

"But what gave me the biggest thrill of the revolution," Hadjok said, "was when Johan, without prompting, began to recite aloud, as if he was no longer afraid of anything, a poem of Petofi's."

"Who was Petofi?" an interrogator asked.

Johan quickly replied, "Sandor Petofi was the glorious poet of the 1848 revolution, and a brave fighter and a good man."

"That sounds like a recitation," the interrogator replied. "Tell me in your own words who he was."

The restaurant was filled with Hungarians and they grew silent as this fair-haired child of nine looked at the stranger and said in a clear voice, "Petofi was a young actor who never made much money. In the revolution he did fight some, but what he did that was best was to write poetry. From street corners he would recite his poetry, and all over Budapest other people would recite it, too. The poem I like best is this."

In a childish voice, but with tremendous emotion that rang throughout the restaurant, Johan Hadjok declaimed the beautiful and flaming words of Hungarian independence: "Arise, Hungarians, the Fatherland calls you!

The time is now! Now or never!

Live oppressed-or live in freedom.

That is the question to be decided!

By the G.o.d of all Hungarians, we swear, we swear That we will never more be under the yoke!"

When he stopped, the restaurant was silent. Mrs. Hadjok, remembering the years of patient instruction, wept. Mr. Hadjok blew his nose and looked proudly at his son. Some of the interrogators bit their lips, and at adjoining tables Hungarians who had been nurtured on Petofi were silent.

To break the tension one of the interrogators whispered, "Pay no attention. A Hungarian is never happy unless he's weeping."

After the group had laughed at this partly true comment, there was to be a moment even more electric, for Mr. Hadjok said, "Against such children, what could communism do? Does this explain why in all of Budapest you could not find one child who fought with the Russians?"

An interrogator asked, "But didn't some of the students from the Marx-Lenin Inst.i.tute march against the freedom fighters?"

Hadjok looked up in blank astonishment. "They did?"

"Yes."

"Many?"

"Only a few."