by John Hersey
On Monday, November 18th, Fekete heard at the factory that trains were going to start running again the next day, and he decided that the time had come to try to escape.
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Fekete’s new acquaintances in the hotel in Veszprém were so open and warm, and they listened to him with such visible emotion, that he felt once again, as he had in the cellar at home, a poignant shock of emergence from isolation. These people had confidence in him! And he trusted them! One of the men said that he admired and envied Fekete for his courage in attempting to leave the country—that only the dangers of the frontier and fear of a Russian prison held him back—and others agreed.
Now Fekete felt safe in asking what these people had been hearing about the frontier.
The consensus of their opinion, based on reports that had drifted back from the border, was that the best region in which to try an escape was around a town called Kapuvár, about eighty miles northwest of Veszprém. Here the worst dangers were natural: It would be necessary to go through swampy land in cold weather.
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The Feketes rested a full day in Veszprém. The schoolteacher suggested that they go to Celldömölk, the first large town on the way to the Kapuvár swamps, by automobile. She said she had in her class the son of a taxidriver whom she knew to be an honest man; the Feketes could ride with him. Fekete asked her to arrange this, and she did. Early in the morning of November 22nd, the Feketes were picked up by the driver, a taciturn man of about fifty, in a black Russian-built Pobeda. Fekete considered trying to arrange the fare in advance, but he decided that this might be embarrassing; after all, the schoolteacher had said the man was honest.
The black taxi set out across flat farm country on a broad paved highway, one of the main arteries of Hungary, which was bordered in places with rows of poplars and locusts. It was a lonely drive through an empty land, for there was hardly any traffic—not a single car, and only a few trucks—and the farmers were not in the fields. Fekete, who had travelled widely in the country as a lawyer and a politician, in war and peace, had never seen a crisis before that had caused the farmers to stop work. Nowhere had winter rye or wheat or cover crops been planted.
The drive to Celldömölk took two and a half hours, and when the driver set the Feketes down in the center of town, he asked for eight hundred and eighty-two forints. From his former trips, Fekete knew that this fare was quite normal for the distance, and he gave the driver nine hundred forints and told him to keep the change—a tip that Fekete would have thought twice about if money and budgets had meant anything to him any more.
Now Fekete had no idea what to do. He took his family to the railway station, simply for shelter; no trains were running in the direction of Kapuvár. Then he walked out in the town alone. Near a market place, he saw an open farm truck, an old three-ton Hungarian diesel with a cloth canopy over the back; the driver, a peasant, was standing by the cab. Fekete approached him and said, “Which direction do you take?”
“Your direction,” the peasant said. “I know where you want to go. Hop in. Let’s go.”
Fekete said that the farmer was very kind but that his wife and children were at the station.
The man told Fekete to go and get them and any others who might be waiting to go toward Kapuvár.
Fekete ran off to the station, and there he found, besides his family, two coal miners who wanted to leave the country.
When the Feketes and the miners reached the truck, the driver was in the cab, and the motor was running, and in the back were a number of villagers who had been to market. Fekete’s party got aboard, and the truck left Celldömölk. The villagers said they were from a collective farm about twelve miles north of Celldömölk, and were heading back there now. They estimated that it was twenty miles to Kapuvár from their farm. There is a perfectly good Hungarian word for collective farm, szövetkezet, but to Fekete’s surprise these peasants used the Russian term kolkhoz, and used it with the same contemptuous force that Fekete’s friends in the city gave it. In Budapest, the lawyers’ groups set up by the Communists were also widely called “collective farms,” with this same Russian word, for laughs.
At the farm, the truck dropped the Feketes and the miners. Fekete reached for his wallet, but the driver waved him off and said, “Good luck.” He was about to drive away when he turned back and beckoned to Fekete, and said, “Don’t let them forget us out where you’re going.”
The Feketes and the miners walked through a cold noon hour as far as the next village, which was called Kenyeri. As they walked, the miners told Fekete that this was their second try. They had been caught by Russian soldiers in their first attempt to cross the border, near Szombathely, farther south. The Russians had turned them over to Hungarian frontier guards, and these Hungarians had taken them a few miles back from the border and set them free, and one of the guards had said, “Be more careful next time.”
As the group entered Kenyeri, a woman accosted them in the main street and said, “You must hurry. The milk truck from Répcelak is unloading. It can take you farther.”
Fekete was disconcerted at the thought that his group could be so easily recognized for what it was. The truck was about three hundred yards up the street, and he and one of the miners started to run toward it. All at once, Fekete saw in the street, on the near side of the truck, a policeman holding a bicycle and talking with two armed civilians. At the sight of the uniform and the guns, he was suddenly afraid, and he pulled the miner with him into the front yard of a house that was surrounded by a high board fence. The two men were standing there, unsure of what to do, when a peasant woman came out of the house and asked what the matter was. Fekete said, “We saw a policeman. We don’t want to be caught.”
The woman went to her front gate and looked up the street, and then said, “Dear God! That’s our policeman. He wouldn’t hurt a flea. It’s perfectly safe to go on. Ask him how to get to the border. You’ll see.”
Fekete and the miner went on up the street, at a walk. The policeman nodded benignly to them. They asked the driver of the milk truck if he would give the party a lift, and he said he would be glad to, but he was not quite ready to go, and he suggested that they wait for him on a street corner about a hundred yards ahead.
Fekete went back for the others and took them to the corner. It was cold. In a few minutes, a peasant woman came out of her house and invited them inside to get warm. In her house, she fed them all soup and bread, and when it came time to leave, Fekete wanted to pay her for the food, but she refused the money. Indeed, when they were in the street and about to board the truck, one of the miners told Fekete that the woman had drawn him aside and pushed a hundred-forint note into his pocket. He had fished it out and tried to make her take it back, but she had said that he and his friends would need it up the line.
The driver took the two little girls in the cab with him; the others climbed up into the back and sat on empty milk cans there. Suddenly, Fekete felt tears well up.
Elvira Fekete asked her husband reproachfully, as if he were a small boy, what his trouble was.
He leaned toward her and said, in a low voice, “Everybody wants to help us. I never thought the whole Hungarian people could be so equal. These miners are really our friends. Everybody is together. Why did that woman want to give us food and money? She never saw us before, and she’ll never see us again! It’s all amazing!”
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In the summer of 1933, in his seventeenth year, having finished grammar school, Vilmos Fekete attended a Boy Scout World Jamboree in Budapest, and in talking with English and German Scouts he found that he had pretty well mastered the second and third languages he had studied in school. After the Jamboree, he sent his name around to the various hotels in the city with notice that he would be glad to serve as a tourist guide for English- and German-speaking visitors. That autumn, he beg
an studying law at Peter Pazmany University, in Budapest, and from then on for several years he earned spending money by working as a guide and, later, as a clerk in his father’s law office. In 1938, when the International Eucharistic Congress was held in Budapest, Fekete had his last big fling as a guide, because after Hitler entered the Sudetenland few tourists ventured into Central Europe. Fekete received his law baccalaureate in 1939 and his doctorate in 1941. He entered private practice with his father, and because he served as counsel to an association of small leather-goods tradesmen who sold holsters, belts, and saddlery to the Hungarian Army, his military service was at first deferred, but on October 7, 1942—four days after his marriage to Elvira, whom he had met at a law-school party—he was drafted, and was assigned to desk work in Szeged, near the Yugoslav border. Army life disagreed with him, and he developed asthma, and in February, 1944, he was given a medical discharge. He resumed his law practice. The Soviet Army entered Pest in January, 1945, and Buda the next month, and at once rounded up, as prisoners of war, all the Hungarian men it could find who were or had been soldiers. Fekete was picked up on February 17, 1945. He was interned with five thousand men of various nationalities in a school on the Pest side of the river until mid-March, when he heard that a Czech mission had arrived in Hungary, and that everyone who claimed Czech nationality was being assigned to the mission, which promptly turned all pseudo-Czechs loose. Upon being asked his nationality by a Russian in an interview on March 16, Fekete knew what to say: He was a Czech. Where were his documents? Sorry, he said—taken from him by a Russian soldier. The Russian sent him to join a band of seventeen men for delivery to the Czech mission; five of them were real Czechs. Two days later, he was at home with his wife, who was seven months pregnant. Fekete, a liberal idealist who had always considered himself mild, gentle, and sickly, was surprised to find during this experience that his nerves were steady under stress.
Fekete entered politics as a member of the Smallholders’ Party. This party, a holdover from before the war, had a long record of representing the peasants’ interests against the landlords. In the first postwar election, in November, 1945, which was altogether open and free, it received fifty-seven per cent of the popular vote, while the Communists received only seventeen per cent. The Soviet Army and secret police were still in Hungary, however, and during the next two years, as Fekete gradually rose to membership in the central committee of the Smallholders’ Party, he saw many of the men he regarded as the best in the Party pushed out, discredited, or arrested, while by infiltration and pressure the Communists drove the surviving Smallholders further and further to the Left. Fekete was one of a group that broke with the Smallholders’ leadership in the summer of 1947, and just a month before the second postwar election, he and his friends set up a new party, the Independents, and Fekete was elected to Parliament with forty-seven of his colleagues—a large number, considering the shortness of their campaign. The Communists, who by then had an efficient machine, seated a hundred members of Parliament, the Smallholders about seventy.
So wildly and quickly had the Independents’ fire spread that it was clear to the Communists that the new party would have to be suppressed, and the job of liquidating it was given to the secret police. This was when Fekete fell into his nightmare time; somehow he survived it sane. For five years afterward, he tried to resume private law practice, but nothing came of that. In 1953, discriminatory taxes were levied against private businessmen and professional men, and Fekete, who was earning about twelve hundred forints a month, found himself obliged to pay six hundred and fifty forints of his earnings in taxes. He dropped his practice and took what he could get—a job at a cannery in the Ferencváros section of Budapest, where he was mostly engaged in arranging contracts with shopping centers and restaurants. He worked surrounded by food and got thinner and thinner.
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There was no cover over the back of the milk truck, and it was bitterly cold. Along the way, the driver stopped to pick up three men and three women who were also headed for the border. Two of the men were in filthy, sooty clothes, and wore a kind of harness over their shoulders; as soon as they were settled on the cans, the miners and Fekete congratulated each other and touched them, for they were chimney sweeps, symbols of good luck. Each New Year’s Eve in Budapest before the war, chimney sweeps used to go from restaurant to restaurant, often carrying suckling pigs under their arms, and people would rush to touch them for luck. Now the miners laughed and said the trip across the border would be easy.
The truck arrived at a milk-and-cheese plant in Répcelak at a little after four in the afternoon. The village was about twenty-five miles from the border, the driver said, and it was obvious that the Feketes and their friends would not be able to cross the frontier that night; they would have to find a place to sleep. Fekete, who still had a fair amount of money, asked a passer-by in the street whether there was an inn in Répcelak. The stranger was friendly; like everyone else along the way, he knew, without being told, where these people were going, and he said that they had better not stay in Répcelak overnight, because there were quite a few hard-core Communists in the village, who might make trouble for them.
Fekete remembered seeing along the highway, not far back, a signpost pointing to a village called Vamoscsalad, and he also remembered that in Budapest the father of a schoolmate of one of his daughters had once spoken of having relatives in that village. This was a rather tenuous connection, but on the strength of it the Feketes and their friends the miners walked four miles through the twilight to Vamoscsalad. They found a village of farmers’ houses, round about which were ranged, in scattered strips, the lands the people worked. Fekete knocked at the door of the first house the party came to, and asked the farmer who answered if he knew such a name as that of his daughter’s classmate’s father.
“Do I know it?” the farmer said. “Three quarters of the village has that name.”
Fekete then asked if the farmer knew of a family, among the three quarters, that owned a young man who was now working in Budapest and had a little daughter.
Why, the farmer said, directly across the street!
The Feketes and the miners received cordial shelter that night from the mother and father of a man who was a virtual stranger to Fekete. The farmer and his wife gave their guests a hot supper—and, better than that, they gave them advice. They said there had been numerous reports in recent days of a strongly reinforced Russian border guard on this side of the swampland around Kapuvár. There were said to have been some shootings. It would be best, the hosts thought, to take a local train that paralleled the border, and attempt their crossing farther along, where the frontier was said to be much less carefully guarded.
At one point during the evening, Fekete said that as far as he could observe, few farmers seemed to be leaving the country. “Almost none,” the old farmer said. Fekete asked why that was. “Because they cannot leave the land,” the old man said. “They used to say we peasants were slaves of landowners. No, it’s deeper. We are slaves of the land.”
There were three beds in the farmhouse, and the Fekete family was given two of them. The miners slept out in a barn
The next morning, when it came time to leave, Fekete offered the farmer money for the family’s and the miners’ food and lodging. The farmer refused it, and, gripping Fekete’s slender hand with his hard one, he said with great earnestness, “No, I owe you a debt. You will risk your life to get out. You are of the intelligentsia. You must explain to them in the other countries everything that has happened. Tell them not to forget us!”
At seven o’clock, the Feketes and the miners caught a local train, consisting of only four cars, from Vamoscsalad. There was nobody else aboard who seemed to be border-bound. The passengers were workers and peasants. The train went for only about half an hour, as far as a place called Hegyfalu. There the group had a three-hour wait for the next train. More and more people gathered i
n the station to take it, and among them were about forty who appeared to be headed for the border. Peasants and railway officials talked freely with them about the frontier, and confirmed what the old farmer had said the night before. At the moment, the best place to cross seemed to be near a village named Repcevis, some distance up the line. In that sector, the border patrols were Russian and Hungarian troops working together. Every few hundred yards, one Russian walked with one Hungarian. In the last few nights, there had been wholesale crossings near Repcevis, with no loss of life.
Somebody warned Fekete not to let himself be cheated at the frontier. He told a story about a border guide who had accepted two thousand forints in advance to take a party into Austria and who, on hearing shooting, had run away, abandoning even women and children. Hungarian soldiers had found the group. Things had turned out well, however. The soldiers had finished the guide’s work—led the people to the border and sent them across with good wishes.
Was there any danger of secret police along the way? Yes. The Avo had been setting up check points at various railway stations—a different one each day—but the stationmasters were in constant communication with each other by telegraph, and the conductors would warn the passengers ahead of time if there was any danger.
At last, the train came. It was five cars long and was already packed. There seemed to be many travellers to foreign lands. The Feketes and the miners had to stand in an aisle. At each station, conductors and trainmen went along the platform, stopping at the doors of the cars and quietly speaking to the passengers inside: “The next station is clear. Go forward.” The railway officials did this, that is, until the train reached a place called Bo, five stations before Repcevis. There, as they went from door to door, they said, “Avo at the next station. You will need documents at the next station.”
