by John Hersey
It took better than an hour to reach the constellation of houses at the border where the three men lived. The party halted while one of the three ran into the hamlet to find out where, at the moment, the Hungarian soldier and his Russian sidekick were who had been assigned to the few hundred yards along the frontier at this point. He discovered them supping at a tavern that stood among the houses. He ran back to the group and said that if someone would give him a hundred forints, he thought he might be able to make good use of the money. A collection was taken. The guide returned to the tavern, managed to get the Hungarian soldier aside just before the pair set out to renew their patrol, and, in return for the money, got an assurance from the soldier that he would take his Russian colleague westward for their first sweep, leaving the area to the east of the houses free for the guides and their party. The Hungarian told the guide, furthermore, that his party should not be alarmed at the sound of shooting; he had to demonstrate to his officer that he was being vigilant, and he would do a little shooting at nothing—certainly not in the direction of the party.
The guide returned and whispered the good news, and the group set out on their last dash. Soon there was indeed some shooting off to the left. The people came to a dry ditch in a flat field, and one of the guides said, in what seemed a startlingly loud voice, that the ditch marked the line between Hungary and Austria.
Upon crossing the ditch, Fekete felt empty of emotion. He consciously told himself that he ought to have grand feelings, but all he felt was weariness and cold.
The guides took the refugees a hundred yards farther and then told them they could stop to rest in perfect safety. They could smoke now. There were some lights about five hundred yards ahead, and a church tower with an illuminated clock, and Fekete, who had not owned a watch since 1945, read and announced to his wife the time of their arrival at that place: twenty minutes past ten on the evening of November 23, 1956.
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One of the guides told the refugees to go straight to the lights, where they would find people waiting to help them. Again Fekete took up a collection, and the thirty people gave the three guides a thousand forints apiece. When it was all over, Fekete had about eight hundred forints left, and he was sorry he had them.
As the party approached the Austrian village of Lutzmannsburg, Fekete could see many people on the roads that converged on the place—some with children, a few carrying small suitcases. All these walking people, and Fekete’s group, too, made their way to a school near the church. The school building was already crowded with something like three hundred refugees, and still more were pouring in.
In the school, the Feketes were fed a hot meal of stew, bread, and tea, and then they were taken to a classroom on the second floor, which contained a teacher’s table and several straight wooden benches for scholars. On the walls were pictures of animals, a relief map of Austria, and a map of Burgenland, the province of Austria that adjoins Hungary. Within a few minutes of the Feketes’ arrival, there were more than fifty refugees in the room. A party of Austrians brought in some straw-filled mattresses for the children to sleep on.
The director of the school, a brisk, short man in a black hat and coat, entered the room and made a stiff but affecting speech of welcome. The Red Cross, he said, had offered to send a harvest of food and a regiment of staff to this negligible village, to receive the refugees from Hungary, but the people of Lutzmannsburg had not wanted to accept help from the outside world; they had wanted to give their guests from Hungary food from their own cupboards and greetings with their own hands, and this they had been doing day and night for two weeks now, and they were glad that they could do it but sorry that what they did was so crude and so poor.
After the schoolmaster left the room, the exhausted refugees settled down to sleep. The room was so crowded that Fekete had to sit up on the floor with his back against a wall. Suddenly, as the room grew quiet, one of the refugees, a young man, began to sing the Hungarian national anthem, and at the sound Fekete felt all the emotions surge up in him that he had expected to feel at the moment he crossed the border. He struggled to his feet and saw men and women and children getting up all the room, and they all stood and sang and wept together.
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At eight o’clock the next morning, November 24th, the refugees at the Lutzmannsburg school, and some who had spent the night in a movie theatre down the street, were loaded into a caravan of buses and driven for three hours through gently rolling farm country, where winter cover crops had been planted, and through a number of small towns, whose shop windows seemed bursting with richness, to a huge, gloomy gray stucco barracks at Eisenstadt, close to the former Esterházy estate, where Josef Haydn once wrote music. Here the Austrian police registered the names, ages, and home addresses of the single men and the heads of families while the women and children were taken off to wash and eat. Afterward, with the other heads of families, Fekete was given a blue nylon bag—like the bags that some airlines give passengers on overnight trips—marked, in English, UNITED STATES ESCAPEE PROGRAM, and containing a bar of soap, three handkerchiefs, a razor and a shaving stick, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a towel, a comb, a mirror, and several packs of Hungarian cigarettes.
At noon, the crowd of refugees was loaded into buses again and taken to a train waiting at a railway station, and the Feketes were directed to a coach at the front that was reserved for families with children. At the entrance to the coach, an Austrian policeman in a gray uniform bent over Magdalena, frightening her at first, but then he smiled and put his big hands on her waist and lifted her up into the car and patted her on the bottom. It was warm in the car. The train stood on a siding for two hours. An Austrian came to the door of the car and announced that the train was headed for Vienna. At last, it moved.
On the way, at the station in Bruck an der Leitha, a lady Red Cross worker came through the car giving out fruit and candy. As she passed along the aisle, Fekete saw several parents begin to cry, but it was only when the lady in uniform held her basket out to his own children, and they asked him a question, and tears came to his own eyes, that he realized what was causing the distress: His children, and all the Hungarian children in the car, had no idea what oranges and bananas were, for they had never seen them before.
The train stopped at Schwechat, near Vienna’s airport, and a Red Cross man announced in the car that there was no more room for refugees in Vienna; the train would have to wait here until someone higher up decided where it should go. For twenty-four hours, the refugees sat in the cars. From time to time, volunteers brought goulash, cheese, wurst, sardines, lemons, hot milk, tea, bread, and a surfeit of candy. Now the car was overheated. It was nearly impossible to sleep in it. Finally, late the following afternoon, November 25th, the people were told that their train would go to a refugee camp at a place called Traiskirchen. It started to move through the dark at about seven, and two hours later it stopped at a country station.
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Three weeks earlier, on the chilly Sunday morning of November 4th, Dr. Viktor Wlach, an official of the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, received a telephone call as he was shaving. He was summoned to the Ministry by that call, and there, at noon, he was directed to take three men—named, as it happened, Sturm, Litchka, and Spitchka—to Traiskirchen to organize some kind of habitation for about a thousand refugees who were expected to cross the border from Hungary that night.
Traiskirchen had been the seat, in Austria’s more martial days, of the country’s West Point—a vast compound of a dozen buildings, named after Mozart, Beethoven, and other former residents, temporary or permanent, of Austria. The place was dominated by an enormous imitation palace, decked with baroque shells and spilling cornucopias and round female torsos—a nightmare of pretentiousness, whose every great apparent stone had been carefully shaped in cement veneer over cheap underlying bricks. All this, when Wlac
h and his team reached it, was a set of roofed ruins. After the end of the Second World War, the place had been used as a barracks by Soviet Occupation troops, who, on retiring from Austria, had been careful to break every window, rip out most of the plumbing, remove every trace of kitchen equipment, and generally scorch the earth of the grounds. Some of the roofs had later been used for sheltering a huge waste of furniture that had once been requisitioned for military use and was supposed to be awaiting return to its myriad owners. The sewage system of the academy had long since broken down, and soil pipes in the main building were backed up to the third floor. Wlach, a man of explosive energy and tongue, commanded Sturm, Litchka, and Spitchka to arrange illumination, build a roomy latrine, and gather straw to spread on the floors for temporary bedding. Wlach shouted all day, both into a telephone and into the open air. He called the gendarmerie, the local police, student organizations, the Red Cross, and even the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. As it was Sunday, places of business were closed; nevertheless, things soon began to happen. Three electricians appeared from somewhere with nearly a mile of wire. Farmers all around gave their winter’s hay, and a neighboring monastery called Heiligenkreuz contributed several stacks of it, too. A trailer truck brought milk for three hundred babies. Bread came by the carload from bakeries and restaurants in Vienna. A start was made at removing the congestion of furniture. Eight young ladies showed up with typewriters. Nobody was paid, or expected to be, because Wlach had not been given a single schilling of money, and toward dark, when the wrecked academy swarmed with volunteers carrying contributed goods here and there, Wlach roared to a man standing near him, “Do you see all this? Man is not as bad as he appears!”
The first refugees arrived at midnight. By five o’clock the next morning, the Traiskirchen Refugee Camp had fed, registered, and bedded four thousand six hundred dead-tired Hungarians.
In the days that followed, the bare shell of a camp was gradually improved. The Austrian government, which at the moment could ill afford the cash, devoted two hundred and eighty thousand dollars to its repair and furbishing. Windowpanes were installed, toilets put in order, a local telephone exchange set up, and double-decked beds imported—first, old Army ones of iron, and then better ones of wood. Someone devised a chapel that could readily be converted into a movie theatre. Agencies of mercy descended on the place: Caritas, an Austrian Catholic charitable organization, took over the reception of new refugees, as well as camp welfare; the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, abbreviated for the tongues of Central Europe to ICEM—an international agency with headquarters in Geneva, which for several years had been shunting the Continent’s homeless wanderers back and forth—took over the task of moving refugees on for relocation in other countries; the Swedish Red Cross, liltingly multilingual (but Hungarian was not one of the languages; no one at the camp save the Hungarians could speak Hungarian), took over the kitchen and, eventually, other administrative functions; officials representing the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees came to co-ordinate and placate and keep things on a high plane. Most inspiring of all was the generosity of several nations, which kept draining Traiskirchen’s supply of refugees as new ones came. Switzerland set an example in the very first days by declaring that its territory should be regarded as an extension of the area of asylum, rather than as a begrudged haven for selected refugees; in other words, Switzerland would take any comers, just as Austria was being obliged to do. The Swiss simply sent trains and told the Austrians to fill them. This was an unprecedented act in the history of refugee movements. Other nations, perhaps spurred by this example, broke other old rules of the refugee trade. Britain and France announced that they would take unlimited numbers of refugees. Norway began taking tubercular patients. And even the glacier in the commodious halls of the United States Consulate in Vienna, consisting of visas frozen solid by the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act, showed signs of thawing, drop by drop.
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Because Traiskirchen had only five buses with which to unload the trainful of refugees that arrived on the evening of November 25th, the Feketes had to spend a long final hour in their car, with its steam-fogged windows. During the wait, Fekete was given some green cards, two for each member of his family, to fill out. Then, at last, the family was taken to the camp.
Getting out of the bus, the Feketes were received and checked off by a tall, stick-thin, middle-aged woman who was dressed in what could only have been a Girl Scout uniform and whose plain, maidenly face was touched by something that looked to Fekete suspiciously like saintliness. Just as his children had been given far too much candy in Austria, and were getting pale on it, so he felt he had had his fill in two days of charitable grins, but this face struck him as offering the true welcome of love. He saw, too, in the receiving force a priest with a different sort of face—of a kind that barely tolerates the pain of being alive.
The Feketes were lucky; they were sent to a room with only eight bunks—in a small building called the Steltzhammerhaus, where families with children were being housed just then—and were spared the huge bunkrooms of the main buildings, where up to a hundred men and women, mostly total strangers to one another, were stacked two deep in bedroom intimacy. The Feketes were given blankets and a bucket of coal for the stove in their room, and, in company with a mother and two children they had never seen before, they went to bed at midnight.
Early the next morning, after cleaning themselves and their clothes as best they could, the Feketes went out to see the camp. Fekete’s first impression was that there were too many people in it; the second thing he noticed was the predominance of youth. More than half the refugees were very young men—either workers or students—of the sort who had staged the revolution, and Fekete wondered: How had they, who had lived so long under strict indoctrination, developed notions about freedom for which they were willing to die? Then he thought: A political system is nothing more, in the end, than a system of human relationships, and what these boys understood of politics was simply that they—and all the Hungarians they knew—were being treated badly as individuals by other individuals who had taken charge of things, and they had come to believe that freedom is the sense of being treated well and that life without that sense is not worth living.
Fekete learned that he and his family could draw any clothing they needed at a distribution center in the camp that was run by the British Friends Ambulance Service. He said to Elvira, “Those should go first who haven’t anything. We can wait.” Fekete also learned that he could send free cablegrams or telegrams, of not more than fifteen words each, anywhere in the world, and he sent three. The first, to his father in Budapest, said, “WE ARE WELL. GIVE US A SIGN OF LIFE.” He had no idea whether that one would get through. The second was to a brother of Fekete’s father who had emigrated from Hungary to Neukirchen, near Salzburg, at the end of the Second World War, and it said, “WE ARE WELL. COME AND SEE US.” And the third, to a sister of Fekete’s mother who had gone to Buenos Aires many years before, said, “WE ARE WELL. GIVE HELP. SEND MOTHER MESSAGE.” All three gave the Traiskirchen camp as the Feketes’ address. That day, Fekete also sent home an eighteen-page letter, enclosing his eight hundred forints; he had little hope that the letter would reach his family—and it never did.
The next day, November 27th, the Feketes went to the Quakers’ clothing warehouse, and among mountains of wool and seas of linen and beaches of shoes they found the things they needed most—decent overcoats and underwear for the whole family. There were clothes in the Quakers’ great hall from all over the world. The givers of the world had sent what looked like several years’ supply of overcoats for the entire population of Hungary, but it had apparently not occurred to them that Hungarians wear underclothing. Of this there was a desperate want, for the refugees had come across the border without baggage. The underwear at Traiskirchen was largely brand-new—store-bought by the Red Cross and other agencies.
In the clothing warehouse, Fekete heard English spoken, and German, and poor German, and he perceived that the young helpers, like the clothing, had come from the corners of the earth. There had gathered at Traiskirchen, indeed, as at other refugee camps and at border shelters all through Burgenland, a New Bohemia of camp helpers—young, rootless idealists. There were bearded boys from art schools and the merchant marine, girls who had been trying to write in Paris, rich kids on grand tours, students from Oxford and the Sorbonne and Rome on vacation or simply out on hooky, conscientious European nobility, and some naturally noble but poverty-stricken youths, themselves former refugees, from Europe’s deep pool of wanderers. The young man in charge of the clothing distribution, Joseph Nold, was a Canadian schoolteacher who, crossing the Channel from Dover to Dunkirk on his way to a job in a private school in India, had met some Quakers who said they were going to Austria to lend a hand; he had decided to join them and had simply cabled the school in India that he would be one term tardy. His tact and energy and his even temperament had eventually made him the head of the clothing warehouse. Among the helpers in the clothing hall and elsewhere in the camp were a girl who had been a stenographer in the Philadelphia law firm of Montgomery, McCracken, Walker & Rhoads, and had decided she would like to see a wider world than that, and had been dutifully touring Europe’s museums when she suddenly found herself in an American consulate saying she wanted to go and help the Hungarians; a German countess; a big, bearded East Prussian of twenty-three who as a child had walked to West Germany and, after some time in a refugee camp, had escaped, apprenticed himself as a printer’s compositor, and worked at that trade three years in Germany, then had gone on to work as a printer in Helsinki, a lumberjack in Lapland, a carpenter in Norway, a poultry farmer’s helper in England, and a work camper in France and Germany, and between times had spent his earnings on quite elegant skiing holidays in Switzerland and Norway and Austria; and a New York girl who had once earned an M.A. in primary-school teaching at the Bank Street College of Education and who, though she couldn’t speak a word of Hungarian, was now in the process of setting up a wildly progressive kindergarten for Hungarian children, with free painting and unstructured play and a healthy concern for such things as the attention span and major muscular motility.
