The Bridge at Andau: The Compelling True Story of a Brave, Embattled People by James A. Michener
In 1944 Hungary entered into a one-year Nazi terror, which can be precisely defined. If one was an average, well-behaved citizen, the Nazi occupation was not too bad. Everyone testifies to that. It was disagreeable, and Hungarians came both to despise and to ridicule the Germans, but life was not intolerable. But if one was Jewish, the Nazi terror was hideous beyond description, and the worst accomplished by the AVO fell short of what the Nazis did. It was this German terror that was automatically extended by the homegrown regime of Ferenc Szalasi for a brief period in 1944.
In addition to those three terrors which extended over the entire nation, there were two others of sometimes awful character that touched only parts of the country. In Transylvania, to the east, mixed populations consisting of Hungarians and Rumanians have frequently in history been shifted back and forth between those two nations. When Rumania controlled Transylvania, Hungarians living there had a miserable life, and when the converse was true, Hungarians proved that they could be just as beastly overlords as the Rumanians had been the year before.
The same situation prevailed along the southern border, although this time it was Hungarians and Serbs who bedeviled each other, and if the worst incidents of both the Transylvanian and the Serbian troubles are collected, they surpass in horror the AVO terror.
Therefore one would not be well advised to use careless superlatives in describing the AVO terror. It has had its precedents in Hungary.
But the peculiar horror of the AVO terror and the characteristic which sets it apart as particularly loathsome is this. In each of the preceding terrors there was little sanctimoniousness or abuse of truth. Turks had come to Hungary to convert the citizens to Islam or to rule them harshly if they rejected the new religion. When Hungarians refused to accept Islam, they knew what to expect, and there was no mouthing of platitudes, no corrupting of speech to prove that what was happening was pleasant for the Hungarians.
In the Nazi terror a grim power which had occupied Hungary handed down simple rules for the governing of a nation and the occupation was not labeled an experiment in brotherhood. It was a cold-blooded, efficient military operation, and if one happened to be a Jew, it brought death.
Even the Horthy dictatorship avoided the worst abuses of the AVO terror, and certainly it fell far below communism and its perversion of common sense. It did not defraud the peasants on Monday and then try to convince them on Tuesday that this was to the peasants’ benefit. It was a calculated policy of repressing large areas of the population, and it ended as it had begun, in revolution.
And of course the Transylvanian and Serbian miseries were the openly declared retaliations of people who had been at enmity for centuries. No oily words could have glossed over the hatreds that exploded in those areas.
It remained for the communist terror, as administered by the AVO, to debase Hungarian life and at the same time to announce that this was being done as an act of friendship. When Russia introduced her terror into Hungary she stole the produce of the land and called it “elevating the peasants.” She victimized the workers and called it “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” She corrupted every institution of government and called it “the new society.” She stole from housewives, contaminated children, allowed the old to die in poverty and called it “world brotherhood.” And through the AVO she declared war on every Hungarian citizen and called it “peace.”
The first five terrors in Hungarian history were honest brigandage and murder. The Soviet terror was a sanctimonious cynicism. It remained for Russia to introduce into the terror business a completely new dimension: hypocrisy.
For this reason the AVO terror can be termed the worst in Hungarian history, since it did the most damage to the social institutions by which any nation must be governed. It is this crime of loathsome sanctimoniousness which will do Russia the greatest damage in her future intercourse with nations like Italy and India. The fundamental hypocrisy of her position has been laid bare.
As one of the Hungarian intellectuals has said, “Terror as terror is cruel, but terror clothed in hypocrisy is really unbearable. Our revolution proved that.”
I talked with well over a hundred Hungarian refugees and was always careful never to be the one who first brought up the question of the AVO, yet in almost every conversation the dreaded name was mentioned. At such times I tried casually to follow the diabolical avenue wherever it led. Under no possible circumstances can I accuse myself of having sought out stories of AVO bestiality. They grew out of any normal discussion of life under communism.
This naturally led me to query the foundations upon which the AVO was built. I found that the non-officer personnel was often from backward rural areas. (“This brute was so illiterate that when he was sent to bring ten of us out of the compound he didn’t trust his own ability to count. So he made us lie down on the ground, one by one, so that he could go back and forth checking his figures.”)
Many were homosexual, some had been petty criminals and a surprising number had minor physical defects which they tried to hide. One characteristic of the AVO damns communism and makes it doubly hypocritical: the typical AVO officer had been a bully boy for the Horthy regime, a servile tool of Hitler’s Nazi occupiers, and a brutal operator for the Szalasi dictatorship. These were all fascist governments, and fascism was supposed to be the deadly enemy of communism. But when the Soviets assumed control, they adopted into their system the worst elements of the fascist police force and called them good communists. Many of the AVO didn’t even know what communism was.
Some officers, however, were dedicated party members and many had acquired good educations. Those who progressed most rapidly in the system were apt to be graduates of the Moscow school of terrorism, and their loyalty to Russia was unquestioned. There is no record of any of them having betrayed the Soviets during the fight for freedom.
AVO men were selected at first with scrupulous care, their loyalty to communism being the prime requisite, their ability to administer punishment impersonally being the next. But in the later years, when the corps was expanded to more than 30,000 uniformed members plus untold spies, some diminution of quality undoubtedly took place, and there are verified accounts of young men who were impressed into AVO services against their wishes.
A young university student told me the steps whereby a friend of his was converted into an AVO spy who would report on professors and fellow students. “In 1952 the AVO said to this fine young man, ‘You will be our operative in the University.’ My friend refused, so the AVO said, ‘If you don’t, we will kill you.’ He was a man of principle, so he said, ‘Go ahead.’ And they added, ‘We will also kill your father and your mother and your sister.’ So he became, unwillingly, an AVO spy.
“But he was not a good spy. He wouldn’t report all he saw, so they devised a most diabolical trick. They said, ‘We have placed a second spy in your classes … to check on you.’ Then you see what his problem was. If Janos Balint makes a suspicious argument in class, must I report him? If I do, he gets beaten up by the AVO. But if I don’t, perhaps Janos Balint is the second spy and he is saying these things only to test me. It was after such confusion that my friend considered suicide, but with fiendish cleverness the AVO were able to judge when a man would think of suicide and they called him in. ‘If you commit suicide,’ they warned him, ‘we will kill your entire family.’
“So for five years my friend went through this spiritual agony. He had to tell enough to keep the system going. He had to judge every incident as to whether the offender was the second spy. And he had to try to guess whether there was indeed a second spy. But do you know what was cruelest about it all? I was his closest and dearest friend. He had trusted me all his life and I grew to be his only safeguard against insanity. We would analyze these things together and if ever there was a man in trouble who could trust another man, he should have been able to trust me. But there would come moments, unexpectedly, when he suddenly looked at me in terror. Something I had said made him ask himself,
“Then we would look at each other in silence. And the terrible veil of suspicion that communism clothes us all in would descend between us, and after a while he would begin to weep, not because he had distrusted me but because the AVO had so corrupted all of life that a man could no longer trust even himself.”
When the revolution struck, most AVO men remained loyal to the Russians, but this did not prevent some of the more wary from escaping into Austria and seeking refuge in countries overseas. At least two got to Canada, and I suspect that more than four reached America. On December 7, Hungarians queueing up for visas at the American consulate in Vienna spotted an AVO man standing boldly in line, waiting for his clearance to the States. He disappeared when challenged. In late December, an American businessman appeared on the border in a daring rescue mission which saved several Budapest Hungarians from the AVO. Later, while he was celebrating in Vienna with some of the people he had rescued, they suddenly froze to silence. A dark figure had passed near the group, and the frightened Hungarians whispered, “That man is an AVO.” But before the accusation could be checked, the accused had flown to the United States.
Any figure on the total number of AVO men can only be guesswork. Most commonly heard is a total of 30,000 plus 2,000 top-secret plain-clothes men and another 5,000 loosely attached spies. From all reports that I have heard, probably not over 200 were killed during the revolution, in spite of the national fury against them. This means that about 36,800 survived to be used again by the new communist regime.
After the Russians had reconquered Hungary, the Soviets undoubtedly sent some AVO men to intermingle with the refugees and to make their way into Austria, where they were to establish some kind of discipline and a grapevine between Vienna, Paris, Montreal and New York. On the night of December 6, such a team struck boldly in Vienna and severely beat up a leading Hungarian refugee from whom they needed information concerning the whereabouts of one of the Esterhazy family. On that same day Austrian police tracked down a clandestine radio with which the AVO cell in Vienna was maintaining communications with their Soviet-controlled headquarters in Budapest.
The AVO mentality was so alien to normal experience that observers frequently asked, “Were such men peculiar to Hungary?”
They were not. We know that similar organizations operate in all communist nations surrounding Russia and in Russia itself. It is one of the dismal characteristics of humanity that in any society there is an irreducible minimum of men and women who enjoy sadistic work and who would volunteer for it if the opportunity arose. Communism is the form of government which surrenders its governing obligations to such men.
If communism attained power in any nation in the world tomorrow morning, by tomorrow night it would have initiated its own AVO of psycho tics, murderers and sadists.
And lest Americans smugly think that they are exempt from such a danger, let me be specific. If communism in America required an AVO—and it would—we could easily find men and women who would enjoy kicking a Negro to death or shooting down small businessmen as they tried to flee to Canada and freedom.
But what happened to Tibor Donath? After he had spied in horror upon the retribution in Republic Square he hid out for ten days, until he was certain that the Russians would recapture the city and establish a new communism. Then he smartly reported for duty at headquarters, where he sustained a great shock. “The AVO have been disbanded,” he was told. But he regained his composure when he found that a new special police group was being formed.
“In view of your record, you can be an officer,” the communist official assured him. “You’ll have a car. Your job will be just about the same, but this time you’ll wear a blue uniform, and we’re going to call you ‘R Troops.’ ” It is these “R Troops,” the former AVO, who now patrol Soviet-occupied Hungary.
7
The Man from Csepel
A few months before the Budapest revolution, the communist government of Hungary published an official guide to the country, composed by devoted communists and fine-tooth-combed by a board of strict AVO censors, whose job it was to see that it contained only material hewing to the party line. In view of what was shortly to take place, the passage on Budapest’s industrial section of Csepel was ironic.
“Csepel,” wrote this apologist in early 1956, “is the largest of all these industrial areas.… The Rakosi Metal Works of Csepel includes eighteen factories and one hundred and fifty shops. The radial drills, vertical boring and turning mills made here are exported to many countries of the world, as are Csepel motorcycles, bicycles, sewing machines, kitchen utensils and pumps. In Csepel are also an oil refinery, a leather works, a felt mill and a paper mill. Along with this industrial development has gone the building of department stores, a hospital and clinics, and a splendid sports hall. A statue of a worker reading in the park of the housing estate is a symbol of the new Csepel—a result of the long struggle of the workers of ‘Red Csepel,’ who, in 1919, were the first to join up in the workers’ battalions to defend the Republic of Councils. The Csepel workers remained faithful to their traditions also later on; by resisting the evacuation order of the Nazis in 1944, they saved the important factories and their equipment.”
If, when erecting their statue of the happy communist worker reading his Karl Marx in the cool of the evening, the Russian leaders of Hungarian communism had wanted an ideal subject to pose for the statue, they could have selected no one better fitted than Gyorgy Szabo. At thirty-five he was an unusually handsome skilled worker in the Rakosi Bicycle Works. He was about five feet ten, a lean, rugged, gray-eyed, dark-haired workman with deep lines in his face showing a resolute character and a dimple in his chin showing a love for the good life. He had a sturdy wife and three healthy children. Szabo describes himself more simply. “I was,” he admits, “the classical type of communist worker. I even looked like one.”
From the age of seventeen, Gyorgy had worked in Csepel, as had his father before him, and his mother. Since he was a son of proletarians, he was not only attracted to the secret communist party of the 1940s; he was also the kind of workman the reds were seeking. Accordingly, he began to listen to the subtle invitations he and young men like him were beginning to receive.
“It sounded good to me when they said, ‘When we take over, you won’t work like a slave.’ Our life in Csepel in those days was very hard and we liked their next promise: ‘When we run this factory, you won’t work for a man in a big automobile. It’ll be the workers who own the automobiles … and the factory too.’ ”
Szabo was also intrigued by the promise that under communism there would be committees, formed only of workmen, who would determine work loads and pay. “That made sense. Under capitalism somebody in the office simply handed out decisions, and we had to obey them. The communists also said that each year we workmen would get paid vacations at the swanky resorts on Lake Balaton, where in those days only the rich could afford to go. We were promised better houses. And before long every man was going to have a motorcycle.”
The promises of communism were so inclusive and so cleverly worded that in 1944 Gyorgy Szabo, who was then exempt from military service because he was working in the munitions part of what was later to be renamed after the contemporary communist leader, the Rakosi Metal Works, secretly joined a cell of communists. In this exciting and dedicated group of men, Szabo imagined himself to be working for a communist Hungary in which the vast promises of his party would be fulfilled.
In the spring of 1945, when Szabo was twenty-four years old, the communists launched a major propaganda drive which was destined to end in their controlling Hungary. Szabo says, “It was very exciting. Of course, we understood that not all the promises could be put into operation right away, because Hungary had to be rebuilt after the destruction of the war. And it was explained to us that we needed Russian guidance for some years, since they knew what communism was and we didn’t.”
So although Russian planes and guns had d
Szabo, a good communist, understood the necessity for such overtime. “We were told that we had only a short time to make ourselves strong before the capitalists and reactionaries would try to capture Hungary and revive the bad old days.”
Nor was Szabo immediately disturbed when he realized that each month the norms which determined how much work a man should do were being quietly upped. “I didn’t worry about it because I had become a Stakhanovite and had even won a medal for doing more work than any of the men on my shift.”
Looking at Szabo’s powerful hands and strong physique, you can believe that he led the pack. He would be a good worker under any system, and with little imagination you could picture him at the Boeing works in Seattle or on the Ford assembly line at River Rouge.
“I have always loved my job,” he admits. “It was good work, and until I got married I didn’t realize how little money I was getting paid. But when I did take a wife, I asked for a vacation and was told I was too valuable and could not be spared. Then I saw that all the people who got the paid vacations at Lake Balaton were the same types that used to get them before. The managers got the vacations, and the Russian advisers, and the AVO spies and the party bosses. But the workers rarely got there.
“And the same types of people had the automobiles, and the fur coats, and the good food. I did not speak to anyone about this, for I was beginning to be afraid of the AVO spies. But one day a friend of mine from the Rakosi Bicycle Works, without saying a word to anyone, escaped to Austria. The AVO picked me up on suspicion of having helped him, and for two days it was pretty bad. They beat me almost all the time, but in the end I convinced them that I had nothing to do with his escape. After the beating they gave me a little card with three phone numbers, and if I ever heard anything about my friend, or anything else, I was to call one of those numbers and report it. Every once in a while the AVO would check to see if I still had the card.”