The Bridge At Andau Part 6

He could not imagine anyone wis.h.i.+ng to leave Hungary. "The fields are so perfect in early summer," he thought. "And Budapest is such a magnificent city, with the Danube, and the big restaurants and the people."

In the cool night air, with the stars of his homeland over him, he contemplated the kind of job he might get. "I know I have a good record," he reflected. "The captain said so, and so did the other men."

Dreaming of the good things to which he felt he was now ent.i.tled, he dared to propose for himself specific jobs. "What I'd like," he said softly, "would be a job driving a big automobile. I'd drive it all around Budapest and sometimes take important people down to Lake Balaton." He spent some time imagining himself at the wheel of his big car, but it seemed so remote that he began to consider other possibilities: "Maybe a good, clean job keeping records somewhere. I like things to be in order and I'd be good keeping records."

His dogs howled at some unseen object in the mine fields, but on this night Tibor Donath was in an expansive mood, and he did not stop to shoot at any vague or imagined figures. "I'd like to get away from the shooting part," he told himself again. "And beating people up. I've proved that I'm as tough as any of the men. Now I'd like ... well, maybe driving a big car." And he spent the rest of that starry night dreaming of a young man in a handsome uniform, whipping around the boulevards of Budapest.

But instead of driving a car, Tibor Donath was put to work in a job which he did not particularly want, but for which, as events proved, he was admirably suited. One block in from the Danube, on the Buda side, ran Fo Street, the main thoroughfare of the right bank, and on its handsome flank, where the Kossuth Bridge crossed from Pest, stood the prison headquarters of the AVO. It was housed in a sprawling complex of buildings whose five-story faade was nearly four hundred yards long. The first two stories were heavily barred, giving it the appearance of a prison; but it was another feature, not visible from the street, which made this building particularly attractive for the purpose to which it had been put. It had two deep cellars.

It was in the upper of these cellars that Tibor Donath, exchanging the green markings of the border guard for the more important blue insignia of the true AVO man, reported for work. Hiding his disappointment, he went down into the cellar.

"Your duty is to protect the communist government of Hungary from its fascist, capitalist, reactionary enemies," he was told. In a solemn ritual he swore allegiance to the communist leaders of Hungary and then listened in a kind of stupefied amazement as his superiors told him of the many enemies who were daily operating in Budapest. His new job was obviously more important than his last.

"But we shall stamp the enemies out," his officer shouted. "It is our job to track down every one of them. You men have been promoted from the border guards because you have shown that you know how to do this job."

At first Tibor Donath had the nave idea that he was going to prowl the streets of Budapest searching for enemies of the state, but he quickly learned that lesser AVO men were doing that, and that his job was to accept these enemies when they were brought to his cellar on Fo Street. His job was to exact confessions.

But again he was somewhat disappointed, for interrogations were not entrusted to him. "You're too dumb to outwit a real enemy," his superior told him bluntly. "You get the prisoners in shape for the experts to talk to." These experts were older men, often not in official AVO uniforms, but extremely intelligent. Donath marveled at the skillful way in which they were able to lead prisoners into important confessions.

His job, on the other hand, was to accept prisoners as they came in off the street and to see to it that they were willing to talk by the time the experts got to them. His procedure was direct. When a new prisoner in Tibor's cellar arrived, frightened and uncertain of his future, Donath found it effective to explain to the man in absolutely unqualified phrases that he was beyond all hope of rescue. "No judge can reach you down here," Tibor would say coldly. "Your family won't know where you are. We definitely will not let you correspond with anybody for at least a year. n.o.body but me can say how long you will stay here, and I don't care if you stay here till you die. I can beat you, starve you, torture you till you're senseless, and n.o.body will hear you cry or ever know what I've done. I want just one thing from you. Information. But before I have the inspector ask you for any, I'll soften you up for him first."

Always when Tibor said this, the prisoner would cringe, as if he were to be beaten, but that was not the plan. Tibor led the man to a solitary cell just big enough to hold a cot; it had no windows, no water, a steel door with peep holes, and one brilliant light that was never turned off.

"You stay here alone," Tibor snarled. "You sleep on your back, no other way. You keep your hands always flat on the blanket, no other way. And if your back is turned to the door at any time, the guard will shoot." Prisoners were allowed no shoelaces, no belt, no tie. "If you die in here," Tibor explained, "we'll do it."

The softening-up period had been devised by earlier guards and had been found almost miraculously effective. It consisted first in breaking down any sense of time a man might be trying to maintain. Sometimes a day would be nineteen hours long, the next one fourteen, then one of thirty-six, then a night of three hours. And always the flaming light burned in the eyes. When time had been destroyed, the rest came easily.

After thirty or forty days of this, the prisoner would be moved into a cell with the same inescapable light but with no room either to sit or to sleep. He would be kept here without food for three days, going to the toilet as he crouched and then standing in the excrement. Then, when he was starving, he would be fed with heaps of greasy food, which would make him violently ill, and very salty food, which without water would drive him to torment.

Often he would be forced to go to the toilet in his own food dishes. This broke down many men.

At the end of this period, he would again be hauled before Tibor Donath, who would point sullenly to a line of steel-cored rubber hoses on his wall. "Pick the one you want," Donath would mumble. Then, taking the chosen weapon, he would beat the man senseless. At such moments Tibor, who resented the inferior position in which he was still kept, became a gasping maniac, thras.h.i.+ng the weakened prisoner about the head, in the crotch, across the mouth. His eyes would blaze with some inner fury, and then, while he still gasped for breath, he would throw water over the fallen prisoner. When the man could get to his feet, Donath would say coldly, "Next time you'll meet the inspector, and you better talk."

Then he would remand the prisoner to the same routine of meaningless days, blazing lights and total humiliation. Sometimes Tibor's merciless beatings broke bones or wrecked kidneys, but that was not his concern. If bones had been broken, they were free to mend as they wished, and on Fo Street you often saw men with arms jutting off at queer angles, for there were no doctors in the cellars. And if a prisoner died, Donath was empowered merely to close the books on him without any further questions from anyone.

But if the prisoner managed to survive the cellar and graduated into the general compound, then Tibor and his colleagues had terrifying ways of making his life unendurable. There were daily tortures, prolonged beatings, water cures and psychological pressures that were most effective. And there was also Sunday.

Partly because Sunday was a holiday for the guards, and partly because the AVO studiously wished to defile a day still held in affectionate memory by most of the prisoners, Sunday had become a day of special terror. On that day, the guards, after lunch, would idly call out half a dozen prisoners and play games. Tibor was irritated by one of the games, since his inherent lack of strength left him at a disadvantage, but he nevertheless looked on with a kind of savage pleasure when some recalcitrant prisoner had to stand up, his hands at his sides, while a guard would exhibit his prowess by knocking him flat on the floor with a gigantic blow to the mouth. Of course, since the prisoner was forbidden to move, the guard could aim his swing from far back and be sure of landing it on the prisoner's mouth.

On some Sundays Tibor would watch this game, and others, until he became quite excited. Then he would shout for the junior guards to bring out some especially offensive prisoner and he would begin to scream at him and then beat him over the head with the steel-cored hose. Often he would knock the man completely senseless and then kick at him until his face and head were bleeding.

It was Tibor who invented one of the cruelest Sunday punishments. The guards would bring in a dozen prisoners and stand them facing a row of bright electric lights. "Now stand on one foot!" he would command. The combination of intense light and one wavering foot brought forth unexpected reactions. A man would begin to scream, another would faint, a third would start dancing. But no matter what happened, if any prisoner made so much as a single move, all the others would be savagely beaten. Not the one who moved. He was safe. Tibor noticed that when a man on one foot would begin to faint, he would utilize every ounce of physical and moral energy at his command to save his fellow prisoners from another beating.

"There he goes!" the guards would shout. And they would beat the prisoners left standing until they all collapsed.

"There they all go!" the guards would shout as the prisoners fainted and screamed and went mad.

Tibor's other contribution was both extremely simple and extremely effective in subduing difficult prisoners. He stood the man facing the wall where a bright light shone into his eyes. Against the man's forehead he would place the point of a pencil, putting the other end against the wall. "If you let that pencil fall, you will be beaten to death," Tibor warned his prisoners. And there the man would stand, pressing the pencil against the wall with his forehead, trying not to faint because of the bright light in his eyes. Sometimes when a man left this punishment after a couple of hours, the pencil would go with him, imbedded in the thin flesh of his forehead.

There were other aspects of Sunday that even Tibor, when he subsided from his fearful rages, preferred not to think about. Since his early youth he had not cared much for girls, but in the house on Fo Street he began to hate them. Because on Sundays the women guards, who always seemed to Tibor more vengeful than any man could ever be, would drag to their own quarters some male prisoner and force him to undress. Then they would torment him in hideous ways that most of the men guards refused even to talk about. The AVO women used knives and hairpins and cigarette lighters, and the things they did to the male prisoners made even their male colleagues shudder.

"Somebody ought to stop them," Tibor said one day, and this was his undoing, for a spy within the Fo Street prison reported this uncommunist remark to the head of the prison, who called Donath before him.

"Did you speak against the women guards?" asked the official, a thin man with a sharp nose and penetrating eyes.

"I only said-"

"Shut up! Liar!" the thin man screamed. Rus.h.i.+ng up to Donath, he shoved a report under his nose. "Look at this!" he shouted hysterically.

He showed Tibor a study of confessions, and it proved that almost twice as many enemies of the government confessed after a Sunday afternoon with the women guards, as confessed following treatment by Tibor and the male guards.

"Are you an enemy of the government?" this man shouted.

"No," Tibor pleaded. "I've had a good record."

"Yes, you have," the thin man agreed in a surprise move which caught Donath unawares. "And for that reason I'm not going to dismiss you. But you've got to learn that meaningless sympathy for criminal elements who oppose the government is in itself a crime against the government. I'm sending you to Recsk."

Tibor, trained in hardness, stood firm. "Yes, comrade," he said without blinking.

"A year or so at Recsk will prove to you," the thin man said softly, "how despicable and unworthy of the least sympathy are the enemies of our government. You'll come back a better man."

When Tibor Donath returned to his quarters he looked with eyes of incalculable hatred at each of his colleagues. One of them had betrayed him. One of them had caused him to be transferred to the worst prison in Hungary, a place terrible for the imprisoned and the guards alike. For a momentary advantage some foul friend had betrayed him, yet such was the system that he dared not even speak of the betrayal, nor allow his manner to admit that it had happened.

"One of them did it," Donath swore silently to himself as he surveyed his friends. "Some day I'll find out which one, and I'll slowly strangle him, I'll gouge his eyes out, I'll ..." He had to stop his phantasmagoric dreams lest he fall into a screaming rage.

"I'm going to Recsk," he said simply. He had to speak to relieve the unbearable hatred.

None of his friends reacted to the statement, some lest they be reported for having shown undue sympathy with what was, on the surface, merely a routine s.h.i.+ft in a.s.signment, and one because he did not wish to convey his sense of joy in the punishment for which he was responsible. In terrible hatred, Tibor Donath completed his arrangements. That night a truck picked him up for the fifty-mile ride to northeast Hungary, where the infamous prison of Recsk stood.

As he left the headquarters on Fo Street, his friends stood stolidly in the doorway watching him go. Still not a flicker of human emotion crossed their faces, and he in turn sat stiffly in the truck without turning his back to try one last time to penetrate their masks and uncover the man who had spied on him. "I'll find him," Donath swore. "I'll cut his heart out." Indulging in such fantasies, he allowed the full fury of his hatred to consume him, and by the time he reached Recsk he was practically a maniac and well prepared for his new a.s.signment.

The truck that sped Tibor Donath to his disciplinary a.s.signment in Recsk also carried, cooped up like an animal in a quarry box, a political prisoner named Ferenc Gabor, who was also on his way to Recsk, but for discipline of a much sterner kind. Even as he rode he was doubled up into a tight knot, the walls of his cage pressing in upon him on all sides. He had a gag in his mouth and his hands were bound by iron chains. His crime, if he had committed one, had been forgotten. He was identified merely as a man who would not talk, and the last words his brutal guards at the headquarters on Fo Street had flung at him were, "Well, Mr. Silent, you'll talk at Recsk."

I now propose to describe the horrors of this ultimate AVO prison in the words of Ferenc Gabor, a broken man of thirty-five when I met him in Vienna. This is what he said his years in Recsk were like.

"Five kilometers outside the little village of Recsk, northeast of Budapest, we entered the main gate of the notorious prison where I was to live for three years. I was handed a uniform which had to last me as long as I lived there. It consisted of an old AVO suit from which the official leg stripes had been removed, to be replaced by wide red bands which could be seen from a distance. Shoulder patches and other marks of rank had been cut off. I was a figure in khaki.

"Recsk formed roughly a square, one thousand yards on each side, and was known as escape proof. At least only one group of prisoners ever escaped from it. Around the prison grounds ran an intertwined barbed-wire fence nine feet high and charged with electricity. Thirty yards outside that ran a second fence, also charged with electricity. Fifty yards further out was a third fence. These fences might conceivably have been penetrated by a determined prisoner with a rubber-handled wire cutter-except for the fact that between the first and the second the ground had been carefully plowed and harrowed so that footprints would show, and hidden beneath the fresh soil were numerous powerful mines. In addition, the middle fence was studded every fifty yards with tall watchtowers containing machine guns and searchlights.

"On the inner fence, facing the prisoners, were signs which read, 'Warning! If you touch this fence, you will be shot.' On the outer fence, facing any accidental tourist or villager who might wander toward the prison, was a similar warning: 'Government property. Trespa.s.sing forbidden. You may be shot without warning.'

"But it was not the fences that made Recsk intolerable. It was the life inside. Only the most hardened AVO men were a.s.signed here, and since duty at Recsk was for them a kind of punishment, they made our lives so h.e.l.lish that we often prayed for death. Believe me, what we experienced at the headquarters in Budapest was nothing compared to what we went through at Recsk.

"Toward one end of the compound there was a small granite outcrop which rose about 280 feet in the air. We were given the job of reducing this hill to gravel which would pa.s.s through a small sieve. Each prisoner was required to produce two hand trucks full of gravel each day. Since we had no goggles, many men lost their sight from flying fragments, but this did not excuse them from work. The food was kept inadequate to support such work-they didn't care if we died. During the first year the average prisoner lost about seventy pounds in weight.

"If I did not make my quota of gravel each day, I was forced to stand in a clammy cell for the entire night with cold water up to my knees. Then, if the guards wanted to play with me next morning, after I had no sleep, they would make me carry a hundred-pound rock up and down a ladder fifteen times. If I fainted, they resumed the game when I recovered.

"But the worst thing about the punishment was that we knew the AVO were able to corrupt our fellow prisoners. They had planted among us spies who would inform on anything we said, or even seemed about to say. For this the spies got extra food.

"We worked from four-thirty in the morning until nightfall with only a brief rest for lunch, and after work we were marched back to our quarters, which consisted of two compounds containing small rooms, into each of which eighty men were jammed. For three years we were allowed no books, no paper, no pencils, no radio news, no newspapers. We could have no visitors, no mail, no parcels of food, and we were not permitted to tell our families where we were. We did not know for how long we were there, nor for what reason. We lived a life of blank terror, in which we could not even discuss anything with our fellow prisoners, for fear the AVO would know of it.

"Month after month we lived lives of utter exhaustion, too weak to work and too tired to sleep. The only break in our schedule came when the AVO summoned us at night for interrogation or games. Then we were beaten and abused and humiliated. They screamed at us to talk, but they never said what about.

"One night when a sallow-faced guard with pasty yellow hair, whom the others called Tibor, had beaten me with unusual cruelty, one shouted, 'Let's make him the white mare.' To do this, they inserted a broomstick under my knees, then doubled me up into a tight ball, las.h.i.+ng my wrists to my ankles. We were deathly afraid of this punishment, for it placed such a stress upon the stomach and heart that we knew no man could bear it longer than two hours. And if the AVO were particularly playful they sometimes made a man into the white mare and forgot him. Then he died without anyone's caring.

"But even normally, this treatment was almost unbearable, for after a man had crouched on his knees for some time in this position, while his taut muscles were beaten with rubber hoses, he would have to fall over, and then new portions of his body would be exposed to the hoses.

"On this night they had another man and me for the white mares, and after they had beaten him until he was numb all over, he rolled against the hot stove, and his left hand had become so insensitive that he was not aware that it was pressing against the fire. In this way he burned off two fingers and half his palm. He became aware of what was happening only when he smelled his burning flesh. Of course the AVO men knew, but they were laughing.

"One of the cruelest tricks they played on us, however, was a psychological one which cut deeply into one's sense of reason. Each month we were paid a good wage for our work on the rock quarry. When we got our wages the AVO always lectured us, 'This proves that communism does not make slave labor of its prisoners, the way capitalism does.' Then they charged us for our food, our barracks, our electric lights, and for the services of the guards who protected us. We were left enough for one package of cigarettes a month. But on any report sent out from Recsk there appeared the rea.s.suring fact that its prisoners were being paid regularly at the going rate.

"I said that one group escaped from Recsk. There was a tailor who by diligence manufactured out of his old AVO uniform one that looked real. Then from sc.r.a.ps he painstakingly built up a cap, and ornaments, and when he was properly fitted out, he a.s.sembled a group of daring fellow prisoners and a make-believe tommy gun in his arms, boldly marched the whole contingent out the main gate.

" 'We're bringing in some dynamite,' he told the guards, and off his crew went into the woods and freedom.

"The AVO response to this was diabolical. Without making any fuss, they quietly rounded up 250 prisoners, anyone who had been seen talking or loitering at meals or laughing. Those who had fallen below their quota at any time during the last two weeks were also grabbed. It was a sickly time, because the prisoners knew that something terrible was about to happen, and everyone seemed eager to spy upon his neighbor in hope of escaping the dreaded and unknown punishment.

"At first the retribution was simple. The 250 prisoners were herded into a special prison within the prison. Expecting all sorts of extreme punishment, they found what happened to them less than what they had expected, but after a week of constantly increasing pressures-beatings, wormy food, unusual and hateful punishments centering on the s.e.xual organs-it became apparent that the AVO at Recsk had decided to reduce these 250 men gradually to the level of screaming animals.

"They succeeded. The experience of that prison within a prison was so horrible, so far beyond the imagination of man either to conceive or to accept, that within two months there was not a sane man left. And each day when the guards threw the animals their meat, laughing at them as they fought and tore at one another for the inadequate chunks, a voice would announce over the loud-speaker, 'You are in here because your friends escaped.'

"The hatred that was thus built up against the clever tailor and his brave crew was terrifying, but perhaps not even the guards knew how inhuman it had become, for when they caught one of the escapees, some three months later, as he was trying to flee Hungary, they brought him back to Recsk and led him into the prison within a prison. The voice in the loud-speaker cried, 'Here is one of the men whose escape caused you your misfortunes.'

"Within two minutes after the recaptured prisoner was thrown among his former mates, he was torn to pieces."

Among the AVO men who conceived this plan was Tibor Donath. His years at Recsk had hardened him to the point where he was totally incapable of the softness he had once displayed in Budapest. During the long dreary nights in the barrenness and cruelty of Recsk, pairs of guards formed attachments for each other, and whenever a new batch of young guards arrived, the older men would study them attentively. On one such occasion Tibor noticed a handsome young man from one of the country districts and promptly made overtures to him, but the new guard repulsed him, and that week the young man was mysteriously reported for holding out for himself some of the cigarette money collected from the prisoners.

The new guard was severely punished, for he had been in trouble before arriving at Recsk, and when he returned to the AVO barracks Tibor saw with great inner glee the manner in which the young man tried to penetrate the basilisk stares of his friends, endeavoring vainly to determine who had spied upon him. But Tibor's moment of triumph was not unmixed with fear, for the young man seemed so choked with hate that Tibor thought, "I'll have to be careful of him." But before long some other friend secretly reported the young man for some other offense, and he disappeared from Recsk, to what ultimate punishment Tibor never knew.

Sometimes in the guards' games with prisoners Tibor would stand aloof for a long time, watching, with a fascination he did not comprehend, the punishment of some especially recalcitrant enemy of the government. He would not take part in the beatings or the torments, until suddenly one of the new prisoners would remind him vaguely of some schoolboy a.s.sociate, and in great agitation he would grab a rubber hose, and, in blows twice as fast as any other guard used, he would thrash the bewildered victim until the man almost fainted with agony.

"Speak! Speak!" Tibor would scream, dancing about the man like a demon.

But in spite of his moments of apparent aberration, Tibor Donath was far from being insane. He knew what he was doing, and when the wild beatings were ended he would sometimes sit alone in his quarters and feel resentful over the fate that had sent him to Recsk. "What's the use of beating prisoners up?" he mused to himself. He was not sorry for the prisoners. As enemies of the state-and never once did he question that they were members of the criminal element that was trying to destroy Hungary-they deserved no pity. It was what such endless punishment did to the guards that bothered Tibor.

"I'd like to get a desk job," he often told himself. "In Budapest. I'm orderly and enjoy keeping things straight. I'd be good in a desk job." Then the poisoned dream would return and he would have to acknowledge to himself how unhappy he really was. "What I'd really like would be to drive a big car." His shoulders would weave as if he were turning smooth corners fast and he would steer with his hands. In dreams he would be hastening down the boulevard with someone very important in the back seat, and he would be happy. Then a bell would ring, and he would have to admit that he was not in Budapest, but in Recsk.

At such moments he had learned to stay away from prisoners. "If I saw one of their dirty faces now, I'd kill him," Tibor admitted to himself. And he had no special desire to kill anybody, for although no embarra.s.sing questions were asked when a prisoner died, it probably got onto a man's record somehow, and Tibor had learned that in Recsk the most important thing was never to give anybody-not even your closest friend-a single thing to report to the command. Because in Recsk everybody spied constantly on everybody else.

It was while brooding about his exile to Recsk that Tibor Donath discovered a fact which he had not previously admitted to himself. "I'm going to be an AVO for the rest of my life," he mused one day. "And why not? I get good money, the best things in the stores, and if I ever get back to Budapest I'll be able to have a car of my own. This is a pretty good life, and n.o.body'll ever get anything on me again." He forgot the inconveniences of Recsk and thought of the good days ahead, when he could be more of his own master. "I'll have a good apartment in Budapest and a car and maybe an officer's rank. What would I have had if I'd stayed in the village?" He laughed at the comparison and whispered to himself, "Recsk can't last forever. Then ... fun."

It was therefore with a sense of real relief that Tibor Donath learned that his disciplinary sentence to Recsk was ending. His a.s.signment was to the provincial capital of Gyor, where he quickly became one of the ablest sergeants. The brutality of the Gyor headquarters was famous in that part of Hungary, and he did nothing to diminish the reputation.

Finally, in the spring of 1956 he was given a second chance in Budapest. He still did not get the desk job he wanted, but he did buy a car with his increased pay and he did find the acceleration of life in the capital as exciting as he had hoped. "We have got to be on special guard," his officers told him. "Something's happening in this city, and we've got to know about it."

Arrests were much more frequent now than when Tibor had first served in Budapest, but the crowding in the cells had become so critical that prisoners had to be released more quickly. What this meant to a man in Tibor's job was that he was left a shorter time in which to exact confessions, and was therefore inclined to use more brutality and to use it sooner. To add to the congestion, infamous concentration camps like Recsk had been abandoned, so that again the pressure to discharge trivial prisoners was increased, and Donath found himself setting men free whom in the old days he would have kept for incredible tortures.

The general agitation which marked the summer of 1956 escaped Tibor's attention, for the elite AVO spies did not bother to tell him anything, while choice political prisoners who might have something to divulge by-pa.s.sed his authority. All he knew was what he was told: "Something's happening. Find out what it is." But he found nothing, for the dismal procession of students, petty agitators and fools brought before him had nothing to tell.

Therefore, one of the Hungarians most astonished by the events of October 23 was the farm boy, Tibor Donath. "They're firing at the radio station!" an underling reported, and with mouth agape Tibor watched a truck load of reinforcements leave his building for that battle.

When others departed for Stalin Square, "where a big riot is taking place," and to the offices of Szabad Nep, "where they're destroying the paper," Tibor felt that all Hungary was falling apart. This feeling increased during the twenty-fourth, when sickening reports of the previous night's doings filtered down to his level.

"They murdered AVO guards at the radio station," an AVO man who had been there reported. "Murdered them!"

"What for?" Tibor asked.

An officer appeared, ashen-faced, to announce, "The whole city's in revolt. It's got to be put down. If you see anyone who even looks suspicious, shoot him."

a.s.signments were then made and another officer said, "We're going to surround Parliament Square. Weak-kneed politicians will probably make promises if people gather there. We'll make our promises with machine guns. Have you heard what happened to our men at the radio station?"

As the gruesome news acc.u.mulated, Tibor Donath fell into a dull panic. "Why doesn't the government do something?" he asked himself over and over. Noises in the city terrified him and he began looking frantically into the faces of his friends, wondering which one had betrayed him into such a dreadful plight. But in their no longer stolid faces he saw panic like his own. Night was particularly bad, and he ordered all the lights on. When he heard noises from the cells below his office, he thought for one fearful moment that perhaps even his prisoners were joining the frenzy, and he shouted, "Go down and see what's happening."

He was pleased, therefore, when direct action became possible, and on the morning of the twenty-fifth he hauled a machine gun to the top of the Ministry of Agriculture building overlooking Parliament Square. As ma.s.ses of people carrying flags began to come within range of his gun, he whispered to his companions, "We ought to fire now," but they said, "We will, later." But the wait allowed his sense of confusion to deepen, and it was not until the man on his left nudged him that he felt a sense of stability.

"Look at those tanks!" the man whispered.

Tibor Donath stared down at the line of ma.s.sive Russian tanks, their huge guns pointing at the crowd. "They'll keep order," he said rea.s.suringly.

The other AVO man nodded eagerly, and it was with s.a.d.i.s.tic relief that Tibor and his friends saw the AVO men on the Supreme Court roof finally begin firing volleys into the crowd. His sense of reality was restored.

"Now we shoot!" he yelled, releasing the safety catch on his own gun.

Before the next command could be given, Donath with dumb amazement saw a Russian tank turn its heavy guns and deliberately aim at the AVO men on the opposite roof. "What are they doing?" he half screamed. The man on his left gasped, and there was a dull roar as the tank fired. Tibor could see the AVO men on the Supreme Court roof fall backwards from the force of the blast, and he was too weak to fire his gun.

Then, as his horrified eyes watched the Russian guns slowly change direction and end their traverse facing him, he began to scream, "They're going to fire on us!"

The AVO man on his left did not bother with words. Deserting his gun, he dived for shelter, but Tibor stayed where he was and began firing. Forgetting the impending doom of the Russian guns, he madly sprayed machine-gun bullets into the crowd below him. Each human being in that crowd he personally hated. Somehow they had caused this idiotic, this outrageous falling apart of the world.

A tremendous explosion shattered the walls about him, but in a terror which consumed and yet directed him, he s.h.i.+fted to the abandoned gun on his left. More bullets were sent into the stampeding crowd, while a second blast of Russian sh.e.l.ls tore at his security.

When the gun was emptied, when the rubble had collapsed about him, he dumbly rose and stumbled across the roof. Looking down for the last time in stupefied amazement at the Russians and at the dead Hungarians littering the square, he left his post. "What's happening?" he muttered to himself.

With the instinct of a clever animal, Tibor ripped off all AVO insignia as he descended the Ministry stairs. He did not depart by the main door, but slipped into an alley and then another and on down a back street far from the Danube until he came at last to Koztarsasag Square, a most ill-named square, considering the use to which it had been put: Republic Square was where the communist party of Hungary had its headquarters and where the AVO had one of its most diabolical underground prisons.

Tibor Donath remembered having visited this headquarters once when things were going well in Hungary. Then everything had seemed neatly ordered, with intelligent men directing the nation. Now there was chaos. A man in a gray suit was shouting to no one in particular, "d.a.m.n Rakosi and Gero. They've taken a plane to Russia."

"Where's Rakosi?" another man yelled, not having heard the news.

"What are you doing here?" a communist official asked Tibor.

"The Russians fired on us," Donath said.

"Everybody's firing on us," the official snapped. "Our own police, our own soldiers, our own people."

"What's happening?" Donath asked weakly.

"You d.a.m.ned AVO are all crazy," the communist shouted. "Go down in the cellar where you belong."