Outcasts (36 page)
O
N ONE OR TWO
evenings during the week, Bela and his friend Laszlo Imre went to a social club where dances were held for young singles. Organized by the Catholic church, it was an ideal place for the two handsome young men to meet eligible young women. The church-sponsored socials were intended to give hope to young people to rebuild their lives, marry, and start families. But most of these young people had seen too much and they were fed up with the deprivation and suffering of the many years of war. The prevalent feeling was still "let's live for the moment because who knows what tomorrow will bring."
Bela and Imre were naturally attracted to the women who wanted to party. When things developed to the point where the female partner indicated her willingness to meet one of them privately, the two young men even had a furnished apartment to take them to. The "love nest" was in an abandoned building with a distinct feeling of openness: the walls had bombed out holes and one wall was completely missing. The entire apartment was like an open, covered veranda. But it had been a relatively warm summer and they could continue to use it for several months into the fall. It was just one of many such buildings, abandoned since being bombed, declared unsafe - but it made a quiet, secure love nest.
With the exception of his exhilarating social life, Bela's life in Budapest became quite routine. He had a steady job at the clock factory - a loathsome, tedious job, but one he hoped would eventually lead to a trade. On Saturdays he continued to travel to the countryside to trade blocks of salt for bacon, butter, ham, and eggs on the black market.
But his sense of security melted away on the day Bela received a letter ordering him to report to the nearby Hungarian army barracks on Ulloi ut. Since the devastating experience in the American-run prisoner-of-war camp, he had sought to divest himself of his military past - to irrevocably cut those ties. Now, it seemed, his years at military school kept a grip on him that he couldn't seem to eradicate.
Bela had little choice. As ordered, he reported to the army barracks. He was directed to the inner office, where he noticed a first lieutenant overseeing the operations.
The first lieutenant looked familiar. Then, slowly it dawned on Bela: the man, named Ferenc Rokus, had dated his sister, Picke, back home. For a while, the two were very much in love.
Bela realized he couldn't greet Rokus or make any sign of recognition. This was simply the reality of their time. If Rokus had become an ardent communist, he couldn't admit to knowing the Aykler's without denouncing them as being part of the old world order. Once the denunciations happened, it would be a matter of hours or days before Bela would be shipped off to labour camps in Siberia. Not a day passed that Bela and Imre didn't learn about someone being taken away, with no hearing and no possibility to defend themselves. He felt faint.
Bela handed over his papers and looked away nonchalantly. Feri looked at him and smiled.
"Don't you recognize me, Berci? How is Picke?"
Bela smiled back, feeling a genuine warmth emanating from Ferenc.
"It's good to see you," he replied. "I believe my parents and Picke are either in Austria or Germany somewhere because they left before me - I've lost touch with them."
After reminiscing a while about the past in Nagyszollos, Bela asked quietly, "Could you tell me what is going to happen? Have I been called in to be sent to Siberia or what?"
"No way," Rokus replied. "There is a shortage of non-commissioned officers and we are reorganizing the army right now and recruiting anyone we think can contribute to that."
Bela was grateful for the reassurance, although still a bit distraught about being forced back into military life. He would desperately miss his lovers in Budapest. Still, it was far better than his job of spray-painting clocks. After registering he received his orders, was given the rank of sergeant, and was told where to pick up his new uniform.
Bela as a refugee in Austria.
Three days later, Bela reported to a commanding officer at the Nyugati train station at 5:00 a.m. There, on the platform, were hundreds of newly arrived former prisoners of war. Bela first noticed the acrid, choking smell emanating from the group, who had evidently not washed in a long time. Bela learned that most had been in prisoner-of-war camps for at least six months, some as long as one year.
Some wore army issue shirts and pants - their clothes were threadbare and dirty. They had nothing with them other than the clothes on their backs. The one thing they all had in common was a tin can hanging from a button or button hole, attached by a single string or a wire. Bela recognized from his own experience that this tin can was the most prized possession that any prisoner of war could have: a tin can in which they got whatever was being passed out, be it water, a bit of soup, or gruel. A container to sustain their strength, their life. He saw in them a reflection of his own past life.
Everyone was ordered to board the train. Bela and other noncommissioned officers sat separately in a regular passenger compartment. Bela didn't know the other men - his future colleagues - but was grateful that they were separated from the others and didn't have to endure that unbearable smell.
The former prisoners of war were ordered to board cattle cars, where benches had been loaded. All the passengers on that early morning train, whether in the passenger cars or cattle cars, seemed to be relieved when they realized the train was heading west instead of east. Bela and other noncommissioned officers sat separately in a regular passenger compartment.
Many hours later, the train pulled into Szombathely, where more officers were waiting for them. Sergeant Aykler was assigned a platoon of thirty men. They were given two wagons with four horses to take the platoon to their final destination. The platoon was provided with one machine gun with a short row of twenty-five to thirty bullets and thirty single-bolt action guns (First World War era) to be handed out later to each soldier. Each gun was supplied with only five shots of ammunition. Bela reflected on the symbolic meaning of this: the lack of trust demonstrated by the Russian occupying forces toward the new Hungarian army. In contrast, the Russians had tanks and trucks, and each soldier carried a submachine gun that disgorged seventy-two bullets within seconds.
The final destination of the platoon was a village called Henye. The men were all quartered at homes in the village.
The villagers of Henye reluctantly took the soldiers in - not less than two to a home. Most of the homes did not have furniture or heat in this room. All the soldiers were given iron bed frames and a sack to be filled with straw as a mattress. Bela, their commanding officer, had to make sure everyone was provided with a metal bed. He gave his men a little speech about how they were here to win the villagers over with their correct behaviour, not to cause any problems for the locals.
Bela was assigned the best spare room in the village - a front room in a spacious house owned by a family called Nemeth.
All the men in the platoon were older than their commanding officer by at least three to four years. The army supply depot provided them with rations: two sacks of beans, a sack of flour, and some lard. It wasn't much to feed the men, especially since there was at least a kilogram of small stones in the sacks of beans. Bela thought whoever had sold the army the beans had cheated the supply depot.
Bela learned that the village was constantly being raided - livestock was stolen on a regular basis. It was time for this to stop or they would have nothing to rebuild their farms with.
Bela set up a security zone in the three surrounding villages: Henye, Pac, and Alsohid. The men of his platoon worked in teams, and each team was assigned to the houses at each end of the villages they were determined to defend. There was still a curfew in existence in the region - nothing moved after eleven at night until five in the morning.
Within one week, the platoon captured two Russian deserters who had murdered a peasant in the nearby village. When the prisoners were taken into the nearby Russian command post, the commanding officer took out a pistol and shot one of the men in the head at point-blank range. The other was sent to prison. While the body was being dragged out of his office and the blood washed up, he ordered two glasses and a bottle of vodka to toast the platoon's good work in capturing the renegade soldiers.
Through a translator, Bela was told that these two had been on a rampage, robbing and raping for two weeks. The murder had outraged the Russian commander. Yet, despite sending scouts out to find the deserters, his men were unable to apprehend them.
"Good work," the commander kept repeating. Each time they toasted, he slapped Bela's back in a bold expression of praise and admiration.
The capture of the Russian deserters was a tremendous coup for the platoon.
Instead of being looked upon with suspicion and resentment, they were perceived as the defenders of the local populace. Bela made arrangements to have the men fed at least once a day by the locals.
It was a time of tremendous political turmoil and battles. The Communist Party, backed by the occupying Russian troops, was attempting to consolidate power by first allying themselves with popular parties and then amalgamating these popular parties into the Communist Party.
Each time in his relatively short life that dramatic changes had occurred, Bela had been somehow able to find a way to mould the situation, to transform the disastrous events to his advantage. But this changed when he was named commander of a border guard unit near Szent Gotthard. He realized that he would not be able mould situations any longer - the nature of the work was so black and white, while Bela was beginning to think in greys. The main function of the border guard was to make sure only those citizens with proper identification papers were able to leave the country. The guard duties included sifting through the personal data of each returning refugee, especially anyone with a military past.
The command of the unit was shared with a sergeant named Patak - the two men took turns commanding the border patrols for one week at a time. A small guard house was their command headquarters.
Every ten days, the border guard commanders received updated "watch lists" of those formerly enlisted Hungarian men - officers as well as non-commissioned officers - who were to be taken off the train and interrogated upon their return. The problem was that no one instructed the border guards as to what kind of information they were looking for while interrogating them. While Bela was in command, he identified a few of the men on the watch list, but if they were with their wives and small children, didn't pull them off the train as instructed. In two instances, he found his father's signature on one of the repatriation orders. Bela instantly memorized the place - underneath his father's signature was an Austrian town called Nussbach. Both men in question were low-ranking corporals. That week Bela realized that his days at the border patrol were numbered - surely someone else would soon recognize his father's signature as well.
Each time Bela returned as commander to the inconsequential little border-crossing station, he started to suspect that something was amiss with his co-commander Patak. The men assigned to Patak would complain bitterly to anyone who would listen about his brutality. They said Patak would order men and women off the train on a whim, hardly looking at the list. After finding blood spattered in several areas, Bela suspected that there was truth in what he had heard about the brutal rapes and beatings that took place. But Bela wasn't supposed to listen to rumours, so he snuck back to the guard house one evening to surreptitiously find out if he could verify what the men were saying. A woman's heartbreaking cries could be heard from a distance. Bela didn't go to look through the window - he couldn't bear to listen. The screams haunted him all night, long after he was kilometres away.
Hedy in Canada, circa 1960.
The next day, Bela confronted Patak. He couldn't report what he had heard - he wasn't supposed to be near there - but he could make a formal complaint about the blood inside the guard house. Possibly it would end there.
