By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  For its fencing community, it was a heartbreaking time. The previous year had been Hungary’s most successful ever, with five gold medals at the Rome world championships, and sufficient silver and bronze to win it the coveted “Grand Prix”—marking it as the best fencing nation in the world. It was similarly dominant at under-twenty-one level.

  When news of the Uprising reached the Olympic team it was at training camp in Tata, some forty miles from Budapest. “It was unbelievable to hear about shouting, people dying, buildings on fire,” one fencer recalls. “Everyone was in a state of shock.” Would they be allowed to travel to Melbourne? What about uniforms, visas, bills? What about afterward?

  Béla Bay, the overall captain, assembled his team and told them, “My friends, neither I nor anyone else can tell you what is going on in Budapest or in the rest of the country. I have no idea how or when these events will end. I know only one thing: we are here to do our best at the Games. I will not allow anyone to upset that aim. Now—back to training.” A week later they received permission to travel from the Ministry of Sport.

  Once in Melbourne, it was hard to concentrate. Not only was news filtering through from the thousands who had fled Hungary, but both fencers and coaches were approached with offers to desert their team and continue their careers elsewhere. Many were tempted, and more than half the Hungarian delegation at the Games took time to travel in the “free world” before returning home. Others never returned, while many fencers who were not even at the Games seized their chance to leave for a new country.

  By 1956, the “great old saber team” of the 1920s and 1930s—Sándor Posta and Ödön Tersztyanszky, then Piller, Kabos, and Petschauer—had been followed by the “big team” of Kovács, Gerevich, Tibor Berczelly, Rudolf Kárpáti, Rajcsányi, and Imre Rajczy, then by the young hopefuls Mendelényi, Delneky, and Zoltán Horváth. Now Attila Keresztes, Orley, Dániel Magay, and Jeno Hamori all left (the last two to join the Nobel Prize nominee Éde Teller at his atomic energy research institute in the United States). More important, the best coaches from the Toldi Miklos Institute departed for other countries: Csizmadia and Béla Somos to Germany, Béla Balogh to Italy, Resolovics to Austria, Béla Imregi to Britain, Adam to Holland, Imre Hennyey to Canada, Rajczy to Argentina. János Kevey was already in Poland. Csaba Elthes, who for many years would coach the U.S. saber team, emigrated to New York, as did Csajághy and Niederkirchner, while Dánosi went to Detroit, Nicholas G. Töth to Colorado Springs, Pokay to Buffalo, Marki and Julius Palffy-Alpar to San Francisco. György Piller, head of the Hungarian Fencing League from 1931 to 1947, settled in San Francisco.9 This exodus was unpredented in sporting history. And others would follow.

  Not all the coaches who left Hungary had been saber masters. Béla Rerrich, for example, had early given up the idea of being a sabreur—“It was more difficult to get into the Hungarian team than to win an Olympic medal,” he wrote to me. Instead, after starting the sport in 1929 under Gerencsér, he adapted to become a foilist, twice winning the Hungarian junior championship. One day, returning from a senior competition, he told Gerencsér that he had been eliminated by dishonest refereeing. “Right,” said his coach, “we’ll make you an épéeist.” The strategy worked. Rerrich would become national champion four times and by 1937 was in the team for the world championships.

  By 1956 he had retired from competition and was a respected épée coach; with the Soviet invasion he seized his chance to leave but deliberately did not make for America—“too big a place to make champions”—and settled instead in Sweden. In the whole of that country, with its population of about 7 million, there were about one hundred fencing clubs and at most two thousand fencers. The center of the sport was Stockholm, where fencing had taken root about 1880 and whose two main clubs had some two hundred regular members. When Rerrich arrived, the city had just two masters. By the mid-1960s, his pupils were winning medals at junior championships; in 1968, one of his fencers, Ferm, won the modern pentathlon world title; and by the 1970s, Sweden had become the finest épée nation in the world.

  In 1973, in the Göteborg world championships, one of Rerrich’s épéeists, Hans Jacobsson, took second place. In 1974 and again in 1975 the Swedish épéeists took the team gold while another of their squad, Rolf Edling, was champion in 1973 and 1974. In 1977 the team came first again. In 1980 it was the turn of Johan Harmenberg to become Olympic champion; in 1984 Björne Vaggo took the silver. Rerrich went on teaching until well into his eighties, dying at eighty-seven in June 2005.

  Hungary’s three great champions of the 1950s: Aladár Gerevich (whose son Pál was to become saber world champion in 1977) (illustration credit 17.2)

  Pál Kovács and his two sons, Attila and Tomás, both world team gold medalists (illustration credit 17.3)

  Rudolf Kárpáti, pictured receiving homage from his defeated opponent, Mario Ravagnan of Italy, during the 1960 team saber event. (illustration credit 17.4)

  Such dedication is unworldly, an attribute that was also true of my own master, Béla Imregi, a remarkable athlete ranked in the top ten in Hungary in the decathlon, who became a senior coach in skiing and tennis as well as in fencing. At the time of the Russian invasion Imregi was a member of the revolutionary committee for sport. He was also a major in the Hungarian army, and, condemned to death by the Russians as a class enemy, fled to London. He had coached épée and women’s foil with the Olympic team in 1948, but Hungary’s reputation for saber entailed his being asked to teach what was his third weapon, and for the next thirty-five years he did so with great brilliance, producing even so champions in all three weapons.

  To Imregi, fencing was the highest way of life. Like Italo Santelli, he had trouble learning the language of his adopted country. In “Bélarese,” as his fractured English came to be known, he would say, “Necessary you sleep with saber under pillow.” As long as you loved fencing, he would do anything for you. In 1972, in the run-up to the Munich Games, he took his most promising pupil (now a professor of cardiology) on holiday with his family, teaching him free of charge throughout the summer. The pupil duly defeated the eventual silver medalist—a Hungarian.

  I joined Béla’s salle in 1977. I was already over thirty, but under his tutelage enjoyed my best results. One evening, having won the British title the previous weekend and feeling pleased with myself, I went to the club for my usual lesson. Imregi sat me down and for twenty minutes demonstrated that I had yet to learn the correct way to hold a saber.

  He had little interest in personal advancement, almost none in financial compensation, and was not primarily concerned that his charges won: they had to fence. Pupils would be invited back to his home in the southeast of London for lessons in his tiny garden or in the house itself, his living room ceiling scarred by ill-directed cuts. Passersby would stop to marvel at the Peckham Park bandstand he regularly used as an impromptu fencing strip, the clash of steel replacing more familiar melodies.

  He was stubborn, quick to anger, passionate in his beliefs. You crossed him at your peril, and once crossed he was slow to forgive. He had a formidable list of enemies, even if many of them were ignorant of their elevation. Beneath his famous beetle eyebrows, his eyes were full of mischief. On one occasion, when a fencer playfully slapped him on the back, Béla—then seventy-eight—fell prone, seeming to die on the spot. A few anxious seconds later he jumped to his feet, delighted with his trickery. Again, in hospital with various tubes and wires plunged into his chest, he pointed to them: “What this? One BBC, one ITV?” A week of training missed, and the errant pupil would be met with “Hello, my name Imregi. Who you?” He gave up teaching only in 1991, when he was eighty-three.

  A host of such stories are told of other coaches of the diaspora—not always fondly: when the American sabreur Peter Westbrook suffered his near-fatal neck injury, his Hungarian coach, Csaba Elthes, simply sat down, lit a cigarette, and muttered, “Typical: I create champion; then I kill him.” Another time Elthes stopped teaching a teenage pupil to say, “Go ph
one your mother. Tell her to come collect you now. There’s no point teaching you. You never make fencer.”

  Elthes was the most successful master ever to teach in the United States. Born “de Elthes,” a Hungarian nobleman, in 1912, he became a doctor of law in 1936 and was assigned an important post in the Ministry of the Interior. He had been made to take up fencing on his thirteenth birthday by his father, who explained that a man of his class would in all likelihood be challenged to a duel and must learn to defend himself. The best way to avoid a challenge was to have the reputation of being an expert duelist. “I had no love for dueling,” Elthes later explained, but conceded that “It made people think twice before they spoke ill of another.” In 1933 he enrolled at Budapest University and became a pupil of László Gerencsér. By 1938 he was competing internationally.

  During the war Elthes served as a cavalry lieutenant on the Russian front. Provisions were so inadequate that he spent three months scavenging for food. At one time he was ordered to attack the Red Army positions armed only with his Sunday dress sword. The sole enemy he admitted fearing was the Russian cavalry: they had better horses. It was during the war that he learned to recognize an important sound—that of Russian airplanes approaching. Later, back in Budapest, he would hear the sound again and saved his wife’s life and his own by going early to one of the few bomb shelters in the city. During those times, he said, he once drank tank petrol neat when he could find no alcoholic alternative.

  After the war, by now in his mid-thirties, Elthes started to fence again. In 1951 he came fifth in the national championships, but his career was cut short when, the following year, the Committee on Athletics refused to allow him to travel outside Hungary because of his “political instability.” Finally denounced in January 1957 after he had taken part in the October uprising, he abandoned his wife and daughters and fled to Yugoslavia, where he spent eight months in an internment camp before making his way to the United States. By 1960 he was a U.S. Olympic coach. His influence on his adopted country’s fencing was extraordinary. Between 1970 and 1986, no fewer than 106 of the 116 finalists in the national championships were his pupils. His teams won the championships twenty-four times in twenty-five years.

  Csaba Elthes had the appearance of an American Indian chief. He walked with a pronounced limp, the result, according to unkind observers, of a drunken accident back in Budapest—though others insisted he had taken a bullet in his knee during his escape. It was actually the result of a riding accident. He died, still teaching, in 1997. Up to the end, he never lost his acerbic tongue. On one occasion, teaching at the Fencers Club on Seventy-first Street and aware that a crowd of experienced sabreurs was watching him instruct a particularly unresponsive pupil, he stopped the lesson to pronounce, “I not only have to put technique into his body, I have to put a brain into his head!” “Sorry,” said the student. “Too late!” replied Elthes. On another occasion a cockroach scuttled across the salle floor. Elthes squashed it under his shoe. “Aach!” he exclaimed theatrically, “Pleasure fencers!” Those who didn’t train seriously were beneath contempt.

  WHEN A COUNTRY LOSES SO MANY TEACHERS OF HIGH QUALITY within a few months, what happens to those who remain? For years one used to see at world championships a slight, withdrawn figure who, with his black mustache, balding head, and reserved manner, reminded me of a bank clerk or maybe some younger, shyer brother of Groucho Marx. One couldn’t tell if he were a coach or held some managerial position within the Hungarian team, but I at least imagined, observing the respect he was given, that he might be some political commissar, responsible for reporting on the team’s behavior. I could not have been more wrong.

  His name was Béla Bay, or, more affectionately, “Béla Bacsi” (“Uncle Béla”), and he had saved Hungarian fencing. His father was a nobleman from the far east of Hungary, now Romanian Transylvania, and Bay grew up in his father’s sprawling forests, where he learned to hunt. When his parents divorced, he moved to Budapest with his mother, training as a lawyer. Taught to fence by László Gerencsér, before long he was accomplished at all three weapons, winning the national title twice at both foil and épée and reaching the Olympic épée final in 1936, the year before he graduated. By the time the war came he was captain of his club. As such, he was ordered to expel all Jews. He duly summoned every fencer whom he knew to be Jewish and made each write out a letter of resignation—but without dating it. Thereafter, whenever a visiting official asked after a particular fencer, he would date the letter and present it; meanwhile the Jewish members fenced on. Other Jews he hid in his flat in Budapest or in the homes of friends. He also made sure that his father’s forests were put to good use, so that by war’s end scores of Jews had Béla Bay to thank for their lives.

  After the war came the Soviets. Bay realized that to be an aristocrat in the new Hungary was at best to court unemployment, possibly a labor camp. Fencing offered a lifeline, so he gave up law and turned to coaching. At first he feared that the Communists would view the sport as decadent and upper class, and do away with it entirely. He helped his new rulers see that sport could be of propaganda use. It was a simple equation. Fencing events involved four weapons, offering the possibility of one gold medal for each individual event, plus another five for team events—a total of twenty-four golds. His logic prevailed, and fencing was reprieved.

  In 1948 the Communists appointed István Kutas as unofficial sports commissar. Kutas was not a minister but rather a Richelieu-like figure who exercised the real power while officials made the day-to-day decisions. He kept his position for more than twenty years. Kutas soon took a liking to the cultured and obliging coach who would take him wild boar–hunting on his old estate, and Bay was appointed overall captain of all international fencing. Kutas was no fool; he had a good eye for talent, and in 1952 Hungary returned from the Olympics with sixteen golds. At first he told Bay that he wanted the old military schools like the Toldi Miklos Sports Institute kept closed. (The Soviets regarded the Hungarian military as suspect, as they had fought against them during the war.) But Bay turned even the schools’ closure to advantage.10

  In 1951 two leading fencers told him in desperation that under the Communists they had no hope of getting jobs suitable to their qualifications. “Do the one thing you can do better than anyone else,” he told them, “teach your sport.” One of these men was György Piller; the other was József Hatz, a onetime army colonel who went on to train Ildikó Rejtö, Olympic foil champion in 1964.

  Bay argued with Kutas that to replicate Hungary’s achievements with new, Communist-trained athletes could take twenty years. Why not restore the old system, he cajoled, putting top athletes into a special military sports academy? Soon a “sports military unit” was created, with top coaches from every discipline as well as amateurs of talent. Thus Rudolf Kárpáti, saber gold medalist in 1956 and 1960, by profession a musicologist, was commissioned into the army. Years later he died a general without ever having seen active service.‖

  Hungary was thus able to continue as the top saber power regularly winning in foil and épée as well. There was hardly a blip on the graph of success. A new generation of masters, such as Hatz at foil, Imre Vass at épée, and János Szucs at saber, grew up and prospered in the new Hungary. Bay was always the technician, insisting that his pupils learn a wide repertoire of movements. The advent of electric foil suited the Hungarians, who produced a young, fit, and fast team. Then came the October invasion and the mass exodus. Bay could have emigrated—traveling out of the country was relatively easy for him—but he chose to stay. Why?a

  When I was last in Budapest, I talked to Jenö Kamuti, twice world and twice Olympic silver medalist and arguably Hungary’s most successful male foilist. A surgeon by profession and currently director of one of the largest hospitals in Budapest, he had been one of Bay’s favorite pupils. I asked him what had governed his old master’s decision to stay when so many others had left.

  We were stretched out on the grass outside a sports hall
about three miles from Budapest; both of us had been taking part in the veterans’ world championships. Kamuti, dressed again, had loosened his tie and grinned in recollection. There were three reasons, he said, why Bay had never left. First, by 1956 his mother was old and unwilling to move. He could not leave her behind. And he was obsessed with hunting, which he was still able to do in forests he knew well. Most of all, he had told his protégé, “Fencing saved my life. I have a duty to give something back. If I leave Hungary now, fencing here could die.”

  He also feared that in the midst of the upheaval of 1956 there might be civil war, that the Soviets would come in, and that his country would end up as a Soviet state. Was he sympathetic to the Communist government, then? Kamuti shook his head. “No, no: he made a pact with communism—he didn’t agree with it.” The politicians tried to get their top sportsmen to accept the system, but Bay had a different agenda. He told his pupils not to ram their heads into the wall—not to take the system on headfirst. They should work around it, as had he.