The Bridge At Andau Part 7

Bewildered by the confusion in which guns were being hauled into window emplacements by men who knew little about guns, and in which orders were being shouted where there was no one listening to carry them out, Donath slipped down into the cellar, where he was to spend six days of increasing terror.

About two hundred other AVO men were there at one time or another-the number fluctuated-and many prisoners. Occasionally an ashen-faced AVO man would appear with shocking news, "They hung one of our men at the Petofi statue."

"But I was there only a few minutes ago."

Or some super-tough AVO man would swagger into the cellar with a captured freedom fighter, and he would begin beating the boy until an older man, aware of the desperate situation in which they found themselves, would growl, "Get back on the streets."

Among the prisoners who suffered a special h.e.l.l in this cellar were some women and children, and one day Tibor saw that some of his wiser colleagues were staying close to the women.

"What are you doing that for?" Tibor asked.

"When the time comes for us to leave this cellar," the older AVO men explained, "one of these women walks out ahead of me."

"Do you think there'll be shooting?" Tibor asked.

"Look!"

From a window which could be peered through if one stood on a box, Tibor saw with horror that all the riffraff of Budapest-the kind he used to thrash with rubber hoses-had gathered in Republic Square. "Why don't the tanks drive them away?" he wondered, but then his last memory of how the Russian tank had behaved recurred, and he concluded that if the world had gone mad his job was to save himself.

"Do you think they'll let you through?" he asked the AVO man who planned to use the woman as a s.h.i.+eld.

"Of course," the older man said. "They always do."

But Tibor had a better plan. Looking again at the wild-eyed fools in the square outside, he had a premonition that perhaps they were going to shoot if any AVO man appeared. So he went over to another group of prisoners, who flinched in expectation of a beating, and said to one about his own size, "I'll take your clothes."

He was not a minute too soon, for through one of the front windows a hose was thrust into the cellar and water began flooding the refuge of the AVO men. Another was jammed through a second window, and it was clear that if the flood of water continued long, those in the cellar would have to evaculate, whether the men standing guard outside intended to shoot or not.

At this point Tibor Donath slipped out a back door and down another series of alleys, but he was so fascinated by what was going to happen in the square that he rashly doubled back toward that point, standing inconspicuously in his new civilian clothes at the edge of a crowd that was about to witness one of the major events of the revolution.

It was these events in Republic Square to which I alluded in the opening paragraphs of this section. They were a blot on the revolution, and since there are incontrovertible photographs of what transpired, Soviet Russia had the opportunity of reproducing them in a white paper which attempts to prove that decent officers of a decent government were callously murdered by capitalist criminals.

As the waters rose in the cellars of the communist headquarters, whose upper floors were already occupied by freedom fighters, the trapped AVO men had no alternative but to drown or surrender. They chose the latter, and from the front doors of the ominous building there issued forth about a dozen typical AVO men. They had been guards at Recsk, where they had doubled men up into white mares and killed them with kicks. They had been watchers in the deep prisons at headquarters, slas.h.i.+ng and beating with rubber hoses. They had been border guards, shooting and tracking down with dogs men who would be free. They were the s.a.d.i.s.ts, the monsters, the perverts and the murderers.

A dreadful silence greeted them as they stepped into Republic Square. Men who had suffered under their terrible ministrations looked at them. No one moved forward to touch them. Instinctively the crowd moved back, as if still terrified by the power of these inhuman jailers.

It is possible that the tragic ma.s.sacre of Republic Square might have been avoided-although this is only speculation on my part-if a young freedom fighter had not spotted, in the rear of the AVO procession, the prisoners who had been kept underground for months and even years.

"Look at what they do to us!" the young man shouted.

And from the prison came women and children starved nearly to death, men too crippled to walk, men with blue welts across their faces, and men whose minds were deranged. A ghastly sigh went up, the pathos of a generation.

Then one of the older AVO men appeared, pus.h.i.+ng a woman in front as a s.h.i.+eld, and this set loose the awful fury of the crowd.

Some of the AVO men were clubbed to death. Others were shot. A few tried to run but were caught and killed. Some of the dead were strung up by their heels. An outraged society had suffered enough at the hands of these inhuman monsters, and its revenge was overwhelming.

For days no one would bury the dead AVO men. Buckets of lime were thrown on them by health patrols, but even this decency was not accorded two fat bodies that lay in Republic Square for a week. People came to see them and workmen would stand over them and weep bitter tears of frustration, recalling the ten years of fraud and terror under which they had labored to support such AVO men.

The reason these two bodies were not disturbed was that across their chests had been pinned, for the public to see and know, doc.u.ments found on the men when they were shot. The first body was that of a major whose papers stated that for his meritorious service to the communist party his monthly salary was being raised to 18,000 forints.

"I get 800," a man from Csepel said as he looked at the doc.u.ment.

The other man was not an officer, and his pay slip read 10,000 forints a month.

Nothing that was said about the AVO caused more bitterness than these two official doc.u.ments. Workmen were outraged to discover that men who had contributed nothing but terror to the nation had regularly received more than twelve times the salary of a man who made bicycles, or bread, or shoes.

I cannot condone the ma.s.sacre at Republic Square, but I can understand it. The great revolution of Budapest would have been cleaner if Republic Square had not happened, but it would have been too much to expect men and women who had suffered the absolute tyranny of the AVO not to have retaliated. One of America's finest and gentlest newspapermen, the dean of our corps in Middle Europe, said bitterly after he had reviewed far less of the AVO terror than I have reported, "I was in Budapest at the time, and although I believe that revengeful death accomplishes little, I devoutly believe that the human race would have been better off if Hungarians had a.s.sa.s.sinated every one of the 30,000 AVO. The world's air would have been a little cleaner."

But beyond revenge lies the necessity of trying to understand why communism requires an AVO to perpetuate its system. From what I have seen of communist regimes, I am satisfied that each communist country has its exact equivalent of the AVO. The reader can be absolutely certain that a similar force operates in Russia, in Bulgaria, in Latvia, in North Korea, in China and wherever else communism has been in operation for over one year. Evidence from escapees who have fled these countries is unanimous in defense of this contention.

Why must communism depend on such dregs of society? We must answer either that communist philosophers are inherently evil beyond the capacity of a normal imagination to conceive-which I am not willing to claim-or that no matter on what elevated plane communism begins its program of total dictators.h.i.+p, it sooner or later runs into such economic and social problems that some strong-arm force is required to keep the civil population under control. It is this latter theory that I accept.

What happens is this. When communism is wooing the workers in Csepel, all kinds of exaggerated promises are made if they seem likely to awaken men's aspirations and their cupidity. These promises are couched in such simple terms and such effective symbols that they become immediate goals of the revolution, and I think we have seen in Hungary how eagerly the fulfillment of those goals was awaited when communism did triumph.

But the promises were so vast and unrealistic that there never was a chance of attaining them, and probably the organizing communists who made the original promises knew then that they were totally beyond any hope of realization.

Review briefly what communist agitators had once promised the Hungarians who appear in this book: consumer goods such as they had never known before, increased wages, increased social benefits, shorter hours of work, improved education for everyone, a greater social freedom, and a government directly responsible to the working cla.s.ses.

Under communism such promises were never even remotely capable of attainment, for although Hungary had the natural wealth wherewith to produce the new consumer goods required under the communist plans, the communists lacked either the organizing ability or the honest intentions needed for the translation of raw materials and labor into consumer goods. Any system-either state socialism or enlightened capitalism-would have had to work intelligently and hard for at least ten years to achieve what the communists promised. Under communism, with its irrational production, its gross favoritism and its downright incapacity in management, there was never a chance of success. Within two years the people of Hungary realized that the promises which had seduced them would never materialize, and that instead of freedom they had purchased only tyranny.

When an awakening of such magnitude begins to spread across a nation, the communist leaders, who from the first have been aware of the impracticality of many of their promises, must take steps to silence the protests that naturally begin to arise. At first this is simple. The police pick up and sentence to long years in jail those intellectuals who begin to see through the empty promises.

But when this relatively simple task has been completed, the police must next begin to arrest workingmen who are asking when their pay increases will begin, and housewives who want more bread and cheaper shoes for their children, and clergymen who have started to protest the earlier round of arrests. Soon the ordinary police begin to balk at such senseless arrests, so a special police must be organized.

I find it difficult to believe-and for this reason some Hungarians say I am naive-that when an AVO is first inst.i.tuted in a communist country, its communist leaders intend it to become an instrument of national torture. I rather think that frightened bureaucrats call it into being with the firm intention of controlling it and keeping it a rather simple force which will operate to protect their position. Later, like Dr. Frankenstein, they find that they have created an uncontrollable monster, which ultimately entangles them in its evil grasp.

"Not so," reason my Hungarian friends. "When communism took over our nation, every important leader had already been trained in Russia. Rakosi and Gero were Soviet citizens. In Moscow they had been carefully taught that communism must rely on terror, and when they arrived to take control in Budapest, they already carried in their pockets precise plans for the AVO. When they built it, they knew what it would become. For they knew without it communism could not exist. Proof of our reasoning goes beyond the personality of those horrible men, Rakosi and Gero. Proof is that our first AVO officers were trained in Russia. Our terror did not mature, as you suggest. It was transplanted, fully grown and ready to operate.

"Furthermore," reason my friends, "if any communist leader in Europe succeeds in taking his country into communism, he will have to rely upon his own special AVO. And it will not occur by accident. It will be organized carefully, and its initial cadre of officers will definitely have been trained in horror in Moscow."

I am not sure who is right, I in my belief that an AVO matures by a process of inevitable deterioration in a communist society, or the Hungarians who point out that Lenin preached the introduction of terror and the liquidation of opposition in the first days of a communist regime as a calculated strategy of power. In either event the end is inevitable total terror.

But what I am sure of is this: If j.a.pan were to go communist tomorrow, as some of its citizens desire, within a year it would have one of the world's most terrible communist secret police. If Indonesia goes communist, it will know the same sullen fury as Budapest knew. If the communists I have known in India succeed in taking that vast land into communism, they should realize that with the inevitable collapse of their cynical promises will have to come a secret police that would terrorize Amritsar and Delhi as they have not been terrorized since the day of Tamerlane. I am sure that communism must have an AVO to silence the protests of the people it has defrauded.

From what has been related so far, we can see how subtly the presence of an AVO poisons the entire life of a society. The process is one of interlocking incriminations. In a factory a spy ring reports on each workman. Within this spy ring, inner spies report on the work of lesser spies. The AVO itself is ridden with spies, and even the upper circles of the communist control groups are checked constantly by their own spies. There was in Hungary no prison cell so remote but what the man in the next cell might be a spy, there was no AVO post so insignificant but what some other AVO man was spying upon it.

One of the awful aspects of interrogating Hungarians regarding their life in communism is their admission that they had to take into constant consideration the fact that their neighbor, or their schoolteacher, or their butcher was an AVO spy. The number of men and women I have met who were betrayed into weeks of brutal AVO treatment by intimate friends was a constant shock to me. In fact, this studied tearing down of the fabric of normal society was perhaps the AVO's outstanding contribution to Hungarian life. Their goal was to incriminate every living Hungarian, and many of the dead. When everyone was incriminated, then any normal social relations.h.i.+p was impossible, and only the AVO could thrive. It is against such a conclusion that we must judge the men and women who gathered in Republic Square that November day and finally came face to face with the evil which had corrupted the entire nation. That an outraged citizenry should have risen to smite their tormentors should be no surprise.

In studying the AVO dictators.h.i.+p in Hungary, I repeatedly found that my senses had been numbed by the magnitude of the story and that, like the world at large, I had reached a point of cynicism at which I muttered, "Well, the camp at Recsk was probably bad, but not that bad." Any mind has difficulty in focusing upon the planned corruption of an entire nation.

But on three occasions, when I had reached such numbness, I found that some trivial question of mine would lay bare a minor story of such intensity that it would illuminate the entire subject, and I would for a moment perceive what communism in Hungary must have been like. For when the mind has abused its elasticity in trying to engorge a horror of national magnitude, it can still accept the limited story of one man.

One Sunday afternoon in Vienna I was talking with a st.u.r.dy Hungarian coal miner about conditions in the mines at Tatabanya. We discussed wages, working conditions and how a miner qualified for a paid vacation at Lake Balaton. ("Never the miners, only the bosses.") This big workman was so clear in his answers and so unemotional in his att.i.tude toward Hungary, that at the end of a most rewarding interview I pointed to his rugged physique and said, "Well, at least one man seems to have prospered under the regime." I thought that had ended an excellent interview, but it was the phrase that actually launched it.

"You should have seen me when the AVO got through with me," he said.

"Did they arrest you?"

"Yes. They held me for thirty-three days. When they let me go I could barely walk, and my wrists were as thin as this."

"They give you bad treatment?"

"The worst," he said simply and without rancor.

"What for?"

"They saw my suit."

"What about your suit?"

"It was an American suit. An old one, but the only one I ever had."

"Where did you get an American suit?" I asked.

"That's what they wanted to know."

"What did you tell them?" I pressed.

"The truth. During the war I had been deported by the Germans as a forced laborer. I wound up in Linz, where the Americans found me. Before I could get back to Hungary I worked for them for a while, and an American engineer bought me this suit at the PX."

"So what did the AVO do?"

"They said that any man who had an American suit must be an American spy."

"Then what?"

"They beat me every day for thirty-three days, and starved me."

"And all because you were wearing an American suit?"

"Yes."

"You mean to say an AVO man could pick you off the streets and hold you in prison for thirty-three days simply because he didn't like your suit?"

"He could have held me for thirty-three years."

Even more deeply moving was a casual conversation which to me still epitomizes the AVO terror. More than anything else I stumbled upon, this accidental account remains in my memory. I was interviewing a Hungarian housewife whom I had met at the border and whose fine, warm face had led me to think, "There's a woman I'd like to talk to. I'll ask her how women faced the revolution." During our discussion she gave me much valuable information which I have used in the section dealing with housewives during the days of peace. She was eminently sensible about everything, so free from a spirit of revenge and with such a warm good humor that I was congratulating myself upon having found a woman with a perfectly average story, free from all emotional complications.

But as I was putting away my notebook I happened, by the merest chance, to look down at the woman's right hand and casually I asked, "What did you do to your hand?"

"The AVO broke it," she said simply.

"Those fingers?"

"They broke them with a rubber hose."

"And those two holes in the back?"

"Lighted cigarettes."

"Why?"

"A friend of mine escaped over the border."

"Did you help him?"

"It was a girl. I didn't even know about it."

"But they arrested you?"

"Yes."

"What for?"

"On the chance that I might know something."

"Was it pretty bad?"

"When I said I didn't even know the girl was going they shouted, 'You liar.' Then a man punched out my teeth."

There is no point going on with her story. It was cruel to the point of nausea-thirteen months of endless brutality and persecution-yet there was nothing unusual about it. Other prisoners had their hands broken and their teeth punched out. But there is one aspect of Mrs. Marothy's story which was different.

Most of the names in this book are fict.i.tious for the reason that the people involved are still terrified that the AVO will track down their friends and relatives and torture them endlessly. Each of the people whose stories are told here will recognize himself, for in each instance at the end of the interview I said, "Now you make up a name for me to use." They understood and did so.

But when I finished talking with this particular woman she said boldly, "Go ahead and use my name. It's Mrs. Maria Marothy. I suffered so much at the hands of these beasts that this can be my only revenge. Let them know that in freedom I hold them in contempt." Mrs. Marothy found a new home in Ohio, and I can imagine her walking into a store in some small town and shopping in broken English. But I fear that if the storekeeper, or one of the other customers, were to ask her, "What happened to your hand?" no one in Ohio would be prepared to believe her answer.

There was one feature of Mrs. Marothy's story which I myself was unable to believe. After she had explained her broken hand, she added, "Maybe another story would show you how much we despised the communists. Who do you suppose is going to come out with us?"

"Is it someone I might know?"

"You know him."

"Who?"

"Imre Horvath, Jr."

It is difficult to explain to an American the profound shock this simple statement made both on me and on the listeners at our table. We were stunned. Because Imre Horvath, Sr., was probably the most universally detested Hungarian communist. During the height of the Budapest revolution this shameless diplomat had the gall to rise in the United Nations plenary session in New York City and claim that the Russians had a right to return and that all good Hungarians welcomed them, since the uprising was merely a civil disturbance engineered by fascist warmongers. When news of Horvath's p.r.o.nouncement in the United Nations reached Hungary the rage against him was extreme. Many refugees told me that they would have killed him if they could have got to him. He was unquestionably their most despised enemy.

"Is his son leaving Hungary?" I asked.

"Indeed!" Mrs. Marothy a.s.sured me. "He lived in our apartment house. He knew what the AVO had done to me, and he was ashamed of his country. When he heard about his father's speech in the United Nations he swore he would leave Hungary forever."

"Did he do so?"

"Can you keep a secret?" Mrs. Marothy asked.

"Of course."

"He has left Budapest. He will join us tomorrow."