by John Hersey
Three hundred passengers got off the train, and it went lightly on. Vilmos Fekete was among the most eager to get off, for he never wanted to see the Avo again.
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On the evening of September 16, 1947, two weeks after Fekete had been elected a member of Parliament, he and his wife paid a visit to his father. While they were talking, there came a knock on the door. As a kind of reflex, the Feketes went into a bedroom and shut themselves in. Fekete’s father, opening the door, found two plainclothes policemen on the landing, and Fekete could hear one of them ask the father whether his son was with him. Quite calmly, the older man said that his son lived on Logodi Street, as doubtless the gentlemen already knew; perhaps the gentlemen would find his son there. The Avo men left without making a search. Fekete and his wife spent the night in the apartment of a friend.
Fekete knew why the Avo wanted him. About two months before, on July 22nd, two hundred members of the central committee of the Smallholders’ Party had convened in Budapest to discuss the national election that was to be held at the end of August. Many of the delegates were worried because the Party’s incumbent leaders had been going further to the Left than the membership wanted, or even knew about. The committee sent a delegation of twenty men to call on Zoltan Tildy, the President of Hungary, who was the titular head of the Smallholders’ Party. The single representative from Budapest in that delegation, and its spokesman, was Vilmos Fekete, who told the President that the central committee felt that the Party’s leaders had drifted far from its rank and file, and that the committee was afraid the Smallholders had lost the confidence of the public and would lose the election. Tildy said he did not see things so dark; he believed the Party leaders were taking the proper course. The delegation returned to the committee, and Fekete, after reporting Tildy’s words, proposed a resolution censuring the Party leaders. Some of those leaders, including several Cabinet Ministers, appealed to the central committee not to take this action, and it adjourned without voting on the resolution. But the next day more than half the central committee resigned, and the dissidents formed the Hungarian Independence Party.
With only a month to go before the election, the Independents set up a slate of candidates, all of whom had the official approval of the elections board, dominated by the four principal parties—the Communists, the Smallholders, the Social Democrats, and the Peasants. Fekete and his friends began to campaign in the countryside; because Fekete had exercised his English and German during his days as a tourist guide, he was given charge of the Party’s relations with the foreign press. On Election Day, the Independents discovered that the Communists were making wholesale fraudulent use of blue forms that had been issued for absentee voting—driving in cars from town to town and voting over and over. In the days after the election, the Independence Party gathered proof of these frauds, and Fekete had the evidence in his apartment.
The morning after the visit from the two Avo men, Fekete sent his wife home, instructing her to take the vote-fraud material to a friend’s house. He himself went to the headquarters of the Independents. On the way, he bought a newspaper and read the surprising news that he had been arrested the night before, along with seventy others, all designated as Fascists. At the Independents’ headquarters, he learned that most of the seventy had only been held overnight. One of the Party leaders telephoned the Avo on Fekete’s behalf and asked what the police wanted of him. The chief of the Avo himself got on the phone, and said he simply wanted a brief interview with Fekete; he gave his personal word of honor that the man would be free within an hour.
On the strength of that promise, Fekete voluntarily went to the headquarters of the secret police, at 60 Stalin Street. The interview lasted six weeks, and Fekete was set free a little less than a year later.
That morning, the chief of the Avo told Fekete that he wanted only two things of him—admission that the Independence Party had perpetrated vote frauds during the election and that through his contacts with the foreign press Fekete and the Independence Party had received funds and instructions from outside the country. Upon hearing this, and realizing that he was in for something far more serious than an hour’s chat, Fekete made three important decisions: to speak only the truth as he understood it, and never to make anything up; to shut his lips firmly rather than say anything that might be dangerous to his friends or his family; and never to speak another person’s name.
As for the first question, Fekete replied to the Avo chief, it was not true that the Independents had been guilty of vote frauds; it was, in fact, the Communist Party that had perpetrated such frauds, and the Independents had proof of them. As for the second, he had been merely a press-relations officer for the Independents. He could speak a little English and German, so he had been given the job of interpreting to the foreign correspondents what the leaders of the Party said. That was all.
The chief pressed his questions, and elaborated them, and when he grew tired he turned the interview over to three subordinates, and when they grew tired they were replaced by three others, and they by three others, and this went on for three days and three nights, with an hour off now and then. Fekete clung to his three rules. Finally, this first question period ended, and Fekete was taken to a small, damp room in the cellar, which contained nothing but a bed and a bare two-hundred-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling directly above the bed. There was no window. There was a peephole in the strong door.
Fekete, who had heard about such things, understood that he was to be honored with the breakdown treatment. This form of slow torture, which was based on the empirical observation that nervous breakdowns often follow periods of severe insomnia, consisted simply of keeping the victim awake until, on the verge of a breakdown, he would be ready for even the most bizarre variants of that well-known form of therapy, confession. The brilliant bulb in Fekete’s cell was kept on all the time, day and night. Whenever a passing guard, peeping through the hole in the door, saw Fekete asleep, he woke him up. From time to time, Fekete was taken upstairs for relays of questioning.
Fekete kept his sanity during the following weeks by concentrating on his three rules as if they were all that a human mind was supposed to contain. He did not let his thoughts ramble in daydreams and memories. He learned to sleep deeply for five or ten minutes at a time. He dozed standing up. As the days passed, he began to derive more and more courage from his interviews. Telling only the truth as he saw it meant that his answers never changed, and that he never gave his inquisitors openings to force inconsistencies from him. They grew angry with him now and then, and he took this as a sign that they were breaking down, not he. He grew thinner than ever, and physically weak, but his nerves and mind remained sound.
One day toward the end of his sixth week in prison, during questioning by the chief himself, who had often threatened Fekete with a thrashing if he didn’t co-operate, Fekete was amazed to hear himself say, in his quiet voice, “If it would make you feel better to beat me, why don’t you?” It was perfectly clear to Fekete that the moment the chief began to beat his body, Fekete would have got the better of the chiefs mind. The chief did, in fact, fly into a rage, and he beat Fekete into a bloody, unconscious heap.
The next two sessions, which followed periods of recuperation, were also beatings.
The day after the third beating, the chief summoned Fekete to his office and said, “You are no longer important to us. Your party has no more influence. You understand, of course, that a powerful organ of the state cannot now simply release you and say it has made a mistake. But we are willing to change your charge from a political crime to a civil crime. You will sign a document saying you falsified a document for a friend.”
Fekete said he would sign the statement and then would say in court that he had been forced to sign it—that he had been beaten just before signing it.
The chief said he wouldn’t dare.
Fekete signed the statement, and in
the civil tribunal on Marko Street, a few days later, he told exactly what had happened in the secret-police building. The court acquitted him.
But Fekete was in for a new shock. He was told that prisoners who had been acquitted in civil trials initiated by the secret police had to be remanded to the Avo building for their release. Fekete was taken back to 60 Stalin Street. He was not released; he was returned to his dazzling cell. Three weeks later, in December, the chief instructed him to sign a paper reiterating his previous admission and repudiating his repudiation of it. Fekete said he could not sign such lies. The chief said he would find ways to make him sign. Fekete said, “What would be the use of that when you know I would say in court all over again that you made me sign it?”
The chief then asked Fekete how he would feel about starting afresh—signing a statement to the effect that he had not actually falsified the document but that he knew it was false?
Fekete signed this statement. He was transferred to the civil prison and was held for eight months awaiting his second trial.
During this time, Elvira Fekete, who had been notified that her husband was alive but who did not know whether he would ever be freed, went to work as a bookkeeper to support her children. She was obliged to sell many of the family’s belongings, including some of her husband’s most precious stamps.
At Fekete’s second trial, in August, he told the court that he had been forced to sign the new Avo paper. By that time, the court knew its duty better than it had back in November, and it found Fekete guilty and sentenced him to ten months in prison. Since he had already spent more time than that in jail, he was to be set free—and he finally was, after one more night in the bright room in the cellar of 60 Stalin Street.
Fekete immediately appealed his case. The appellate judges heard his appeal in 1950; they summoned and questioned a number of witnesses. It was by then all too evident that the case of this one man was unimportant to the government. The Independence Party had been wiped out. What was more, the Smallholders’ Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the Peasants’ Party were practically defunct. Zoltan Tildy, the former President and leader of the Smallholders, who had been so sanguine before the 1947 elections, had been ousted in disgrace. There was no longer any problem about vote frauds, for Hungary had long since had its last multiple-choice election. At any rate, the appellate court—a Communist court—reversed the judgment of the civil tribunal and declared Vilmos Fekete innocent of all he had been charged with.
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Such a crowd of people bound for the border had detrained at Bö that for a long time there was the utmost confusion. It was about noon. No one seemed to know what to do. Soon the crowd began to sway and stretch, and small groups split away from it, and after a while Fekete and his family and the faithful miners found themselves on a side street of the town, in a cluster of about thirty people surrounding a farm boy of seventeen or eighteen, a native of Bö. The boy told the travellers that the border was something like fourteen miles from the town, and that there was no natural frontier here; the border simply ran through open fields. It was best to cross at night; very many people were crossing the border every night. Someone asked the boy if he could lead this group of thirty to the border, and he said he could, but he thought they should wait until the early afternoon to leave Bö, since there was to be a funeral that afternoon at two and the whole village would be at it; while the funeral was in progress, it would be easy to go off unnoticed through the fields behind the houses. In the meanwhile, he said, the people—all thirty of them—were welcome to come and wait in his family’s home, and he took them there. They quite filled the small farmhouse. The boy’s family gave the people bread and tea and milk; they said they had been doing this every day for two weeks. When Fekete and one or two others offered money for the food, the peasants, with stoic generosity, refused to accept it, saying that the escapees might have to give money to the border guards or be turned back. The peasants changed into their best clothes for the funeral and left.
Then the boy took his charges out the back door of his house and led them across fields on which could be seen the dead stubble of autumn grains. The country was unremittingly flat. Near the villages that the party passed, and along the roads, stood bare locusts and poplars. The land looked grim under a gray sky. There were occasional flurries of delicate snow. In one way, the extreme cold was a blessing: the ground was firm and not muddy.
More than half the group of which the Feketes and the miners were a part consisted of young men in their late teens and early twenties—Freedom Fighters and youths who were fleeing because they had heard that the Russians were indiscriminately deporting able-bodied men to the Soviet Union. There were six children in the group, the oldest of whom was Klara Fekete and the youngest a baby about three months old that two men carried in a blanket slung from a pole. Mostly, the people were of the laboring class; a few were white-collar workers. Nobody spoke to anyone else. The party moved in a long file and every head was down as the walkers watched their footing on the furrowed ground.
As dusk fell, the young guide’s course seemed to grow erratic, and Fekete had a feeling that the boy was lost. During the last of the light, the party approached a road that lay across their way, and saw the headlights of an automobile coming from the left. Someone in the group shouted in alarm that it might be a carful of soldiers, and everybody threw himself on the ground. Almost at that moment, the car stopped and turned off its lights. Fekete and the others lay silent on the frozen ground for what seemed a very long time—probably about a quarter of an hour, in fact—during which it became entirely dark. Finally, the people heard the car’s motor start up, and it moved slowly along the road without turning on its lights. When it was certainly gone, the party moved on.
Now that it was dark, the guide passed word back along the line that there should be no smoking. He also informed his followers that some lights they could see not far away were those of a village called Szakon; he was not lost, after all. In the darkness, the walking was hard over the rough fields. Two by two, the young men began to help the women and children.
At about seven o’clock, the group approached another village, Gyaloka, which the guide said was the last big settlement before the border and was about three and a half miles from it. He led the party straight to the village, and at one of the first houses they reached he said he would go in and arrange for everybody to have a rest. Someone asked if he knew the people who lived in the house. He said that he didn’t, but that there was nothing to worry about, because in the villages along the frontier every Hungarian, without exception, helped his fellow-Hungarians on their way.
The house belonged to a tradesman, who, with unemotional hospitality, led the whole party into the capacious kitchen of his home. His guests had been walking for five hours in freezing weather. The tradesman’s wife prepared hot tea. The children took off their shoes and hung their socks by the kitchen stove. The guide went out in the village to get information, and in a few minutes he came back with three men and a story.
The story was that some people headed for the border had driven into Gyaloka in a car about an hour before, and had told of seeing a troop of soldiers in the dusk in a field near Szakon. They had stopped their car and turned out their lights; the soldiers had deployed by the road. After dark, the driver of the car had started it up and got away safely without turning on his lights. The guide had put the villagers’ minds at rest about the troop of soldiers.
The three men were peasants, about thirty years old, wearing waterproof coats and cloth caps. They said they lived in a cluster of houses right on the border and knew the countryside well; in fact, they had already taken three parties across to Austria during broad daylight that very day, and they would take this group across, too. The young man who had led the party from Bö whispered to Fekete that he would start out with the three to see that they were going in the right direction, and Feke
te, remembering the story of the runaway guide, was glad to hear this. He took up a collection of about two thousand forints from the party in the kitchen and offered it to the boy, who refused it, saying he was not a professional guide; he had only been doing what he felt was right. But Fekete said that refugees would have no use for forints in Austria, and finally the boy took the money.
One of the three men now gave the party a briefing. Between here and the border was the zone of danger. Nobody was to speak from this point on, or smoke, and if anyone had to sneeze or cough, he should do it into cupped gloves, as quietly as possible. The party would walk very fast—almost run. No one should lag behind, because it would be easy to get lost.
During this speech, the Feketes’ nine-year-old, Magdalena, began to weep, and afterward, when her mother tried to get her to put on her shoes and socks, the child said she didn’t want to go out in the night. Couldn’t they wait until the next morning? Magdalena grew increasingly frightened, and finally Fekete gave her a sedative called Legatin; a doctor whom the Feketes had met in the basement of their apartment during the fighting had given him some for the children, to tide them over the bombardments. Magdalena soon became calm.
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At eight-thirty, the party started out on the final leg. The three men led the group at very nearly a dogtrot. The young man from Bö went with them for about a mile, and then, quite satisfied that the guides were trustworthy, he turned back for home. For Elvira Fekete, who was wearing heavy overshoes, the pace was trying, and before long she began to have palpitations of the heart, but she could not stop to rest. Two strong young men gripped her arms and at times almost carried her.
