Escapes from Behind the Iron Curtain

by

Zoltan Bartok

              I dedicate this book to all of you who helped me during my quest to find a way out of hopelessness, to find a way to a better life in the free part of the world, and to all those who had been patient with me during the years as I struggled to free my mind from the conditioning forced upon my generation in communist Hungary after the 1956 revolution.

Like the “good Samaritan” I encountered in the Trieste harbor after my first escape in August of 1973, some of you may have been real Angels. Miraculously, you came just when I needed you, and did exactly what needed to be done so that I could move on with my life.

Thank you.

Foreword

          If you were born into freedom and have never experienced anything other than freedom, it is possible that you do not appreciate being free. However, think twice before you get involved in a revolution to establish socialism /communism. You do not understand how that system works until you've lived in it. In case such system is established, the majority of those who fought for it will regret their efforts. Remember what Jacques Mallet du Pan said back in the 18^th century: "the Revolution devours its children". If the revolution brings dictatorship, there will be only one dictator, the rest will have lost their freedom. Even if true socialism is established, the leaders will dictate the terms, they will decide who gets what and how much... Well, if you enjoy being a subject, go ahead and throw your freedom away. Careful though, you may never be able to regain your freedom if ignorance destroys the last bastion where you can still be yourself.

Introduction

In 1949, I was born into a Hungarian family at a time when the world started turning upside down. Communism was transforming the sleepy feudalistic society, challenging people to leave behind hundreds of years of traditions and the comfortably simple way of life inherited from their ancestors.

We lived in a small village in the northeast of Hungary. My mother was a daughter of peasants. She scored the highest marks throughout elementary school but that was where her education ended. She married my father when she was only eighteen and became a mother and a housewife. My father, fourteen years older than my mother, also came from a peasant family.

I had two brothers, nine and twelve years older than me. I was a late child. My father was already forty-six when I was born. My older brother took part in the revolution of 1956, fighting against the Russians on the streets of Budapest. After the tanks crushed the revolt, he had no choice but to defect to the West. My other brother finished a four-year trade school, moved to the city of Ozd where he got married and settled down.

Both my grandfathers had lived in the USA shortly after 1900.

My mother’s father left for the New World way before my mother was born. He engaged my grandma and told her: “Look, we are so poor. Let me go to America, work there for a few years, save as much money as possible, and when I return, we can get married.” That’s exactly what happened. He had worked in the mines of Pittsburg for about four years. Upon his return, he bought some land and married grandma. Together they built a house and made a living working the land.

After my father was born in 1903, his father left him, his brother and his mother behind, boarded the ship Carpathia in Trieste, a city then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and sailed to the New World. I never knew this grandfather as he died shortly after his return to Hungary at the beginning of the Second World War. He must have sent money back from America to support the family, that’s probably how my father was able to go to school to become a forest ranger.

As I understand, my father had a pretty good life before the communists took over Hungary in 1948. Like most of the population, he lost most of what he had owned as a result of collectivization and nationalization. He did not like the new regime, and he openly rebelled against it during the uprising of 1956. He received his share of the punishment from the communists. He was jailed for a while and then stripped of his right to continue working in his profession. Thanks to some friends who had been more flexible adapting to the new system, he was able to find work at a power plant nearby, earning just enough to support my mother and me.

As my mother knew very little about the world, she could not give me more than food and pure, genuine motherly love. My father did not educate me, either. He clothed me but, unfortunately, that was about all.

After the revolution, during the second half of the 1950s, my father became more and more bitter. He not only did not care about me but he often made the statement to my mother, in my presence, that I was just a burden for his old age. At that time, being the sensitive kid I was, it was very painful for me to hear his grievance. I used to run out of the house, sit under one of the apple trees in our small orchard and cry. I wished I was already a big boy so I could run away from home, going far-far away, and never return.

I thought my father would miss me then. Of course, now I understand him. Working in three shifts in a gas filled chamber - instead of walking miles every day out in nature as he used to before losing his job as a ranger - was killing him. Besides, he did not even trust me during those years and he did have a legitimate reason: fear. Rumors spread that in neighboring villages secret police broke through doors in the wee hours of the night, took the man of the house away who would either never be seen again or would return home days later beaten into a bloody pulp. The reason for the cruel punishment: the kid had said something bad in the school about the communists which he or she must have heard at home, most likely from the father.

The state wanted to have control over the minds of the new generations. The communists used whatever methods they needed to intimidate the population so parents would not pass on their own ideas to the children.

There I was, growing up in a vacuum.

It appeared, even for a child, that what the communists wanted was void of the true essence of life, that it was inhumane and that their teachings were full of contradictions and lies. The very negative effect of their dictatorship was all around us. There was no joy, there was no happiness. Even those who gave up their principles and joined the party for a bigger piece of bread were miserable. If they smiled they did it only because if they did not, they would have admitted that their heart was not in it, which, of course, could have landed them in jail.

Not being able to identify with the ideas of the communists, and at the same time not receiving basic essential guidance from my parents, I had little understanding of myself, and of life, even at the age of twenty-four when I ventured out into the world, leaving my homeland behind.

The “sabotage”

It was mild and beautifully sunny on that day at the end of October in 1966. Class had just begun at eight o’clock and I was sitting by the window, looking out, watching the dry leaves falling from the trees.

“Daydreaming again?” Somos, my teammate for that day’s experiment, put his hand on my shoulder. “Come! We have our assignment.”

It was the Geiger-Muller counter.

           We just could not wait for the teacher to give us the instructions. We turned the switch on. The instrument first gave out some crackling sound and then a few seconds later the tube burned out with a flash. The teacher must have heard the noise we created; he was there in a second.

“Sabotage!” he shouted after glancing briefly at the smoking tube.

          First I thought he was joking but soon we realized he really meant what he had said. He summoned both of us into his office. While continually threatening us with the police, and repeatedly calling us ‘counter-revolutionists’, he created a report in which he stated that we intentionally burned out the counter tube. Otherwise we would have waited for his instructions, he pointed out.

         We suspected he had communist party affiliations but would have never thought he would consider our mistake anything other than what it was. He quickly called it to our attention that he knew the calendar very well and that on the tenth anniversary of the 1956 ‘counter-revolution’ – as it was called at that time - our action couldn’t be anything but politically motivated.

         He made us sign the report and then he kicked us out.

“I can’t have anyone like you in my class. Go home and tell your parents to cough up the money to cover the damage you caused. Don’t bother coming back unless you have the money.”

         Somos and I went to the city park and sat down on a bench.

         “That tube probably costs a fortune”, Somos said. “I bet it’s at least five times what my father earns in a month. There is no way I could tell him about what happened. He would surely kill me.”

         “Same here”, I responded.

         “I have a plan”, Somos continued. “I have been working on this for some time. I have studied the map… You know where the Yugoslav and the Austrian borders meet the Hungarian border… Well, there we could escape and go West.”

         Somos was two years older than I was so I thought he knew what he was talking about.

         “Hey, let’s go!” I said happily.

         ‘Finally, here is my chance to go far away,’ I thought. Exactly how and where to, I had no idea but I began to feel like a hero.

         “Tomorrow is the first of November. At home we get the money for the train and bus passes. This money should be enough for the train ticket to go down to the southwest border.”

         “It’ll probably take us a whole day to get there”, I interrupted him. I was not complaining. I was actually excited about the trip.

         “That’s no problem. At least it will be dark by the time we arrive… There is a nine o’clock train leaving from Miskolc to Budapest. So on your way to school tomorrow morning, don’t get off at Kazincbarcika. You’ll arrive at the Miskolc station by half past eight. I’ll be there waiting for you. We buy the tickets only to Budapest to make sure we arouse nobody’s suspicion. In Budapest we have to go over from the East to the South Station. There, we’ll buy tickets to Zalaegerszeg where we arrive late in the afternoon. There is a local train running between Zalaegerszeg and the border village. However, we have to get off that train about ten kilometers before the border. You know, there is a ten-kilometer wide border zone along the Yugoslav border and the border patrol will probably get on the train to check the passengers traveling into that zone. I know the station where we have to get off. From there we’ll walk in the dark along the railway tracks and cross into Yugoslavia at the end of the tracks. Next day we’ll walk a few miles west, passing the point where the three borders meet, and the following night we can escape from Yugoslavia to Austria. It’s that simple. Of course, we’ll immediately ask for political asylum in Austria.”

         “Sounds great”, I said with enthusiasm. I began to think that it was not even a bad idea to be part of this sabotage thing. In fact, if it hadn’t happened by accident, we should have invented it.

         “So you are coming?” Somos asked seriously.

         “Of course I’m coming. We’ll meet at the Miskolc station at half past eight in the morning. You can count on me being there for sure.”

The first attempt

Next morning, when my mother was giving me that money for the passes, my hands were shaking a bit. She put her palm on my forehead and asked whether I was coming down with a cold.

“You’d better stay home today and go see the doctor”, she said.

I assured her I felt perfectly all right and ran out the door. As I looked back from the street corner, I saw my mother standing there in front of our house looking after me. Her instincts must have whispered something to her.

           I met Somos at the Miskolc station.

           “I’ll go first to buy the ticket,” he said. “You’ll wait a few minutes and then you’ll buy yours, too.” He talked very quietly to make sure no one could hear us. This in itself was enough to get me even more excited. ‘What an adventure,’ I thought, ‘what an adventure.’

           As there were not too many passengers on the train, we found an empty compartment that we could have for the two of us all the way to Budapest. Before getting on, Somos told me not to talk about our plan in the train because it could be bugged. So we said almost nothing until we arrived in Budapest. There, we grabbed a sandwich at the station buffet, got on a tram, and arrived at the South Station in time to catch the next train for Zalaegerszeg.

          “In the unlikely event that we get caught,” Somos told me on the platform while we were waiting for the train to pull in, “we’ll say that we are visiting relatives in Bajansenye. That’s a village in the border zone. We are visiting the Kovacs family.”

            “The Kovacs family”, I repeated. “I will remember.”

           The train we boarded was extremely slow. It stopped at even the smallest villages. By the time we arrived in Zalaegerszeg, I had had all sorts of thoughts going through my mind. I thought of mother with the anxious look on her face as she saw me off at the gate in the morning. ‘What will she think when I fail to arrive home even with the latest train?’ I wondered. ‘Perhaps this escape is not such a great idea after all. Being such an anxious type, she will go crazy not knowing what happened to me.’

           “What’s wrong?” Somos asked me after we got off the train. “You look like you are ready to cry.”

           “Nothing,” I said quietly, shaking my head.

           I followed Somos to the station building, holding my school bag tightly to my chest with both of my arms. The evening was cold and we both had just a thin jacket on. The night could be even colder, I thought.

           “Hey, wait a moment!” I said.

           Somos turned around and looked at me with a despising smile on his face.

“I bet you’d rather just go home now,” he said. “Isn’t that right?”

           “Well…” I hesitated. “Maybe we should, indeed, just turn around… Won’t they be looking for you, too?”

           “Look,” Somos replied. “You can turn around if you want but I’m not going back. I’ll go on alone if I have to.”

           ‘Why am I such a kid?’ I thought. ‘What happened to my enthusiasm? Is this all the adventure I wanted?’

           “So, are you coming or going?” Somos asked. “You have to make up your mind… We can’t stand here forever. We have to hurry and buy the tickets. I think that’s our train right there on the next track… Besides, you don’t have enough money to go back.”

           ‘Didn’t I want to go far away? Here is the chance…’

           “All right,” I said trying to sound firm. “Let’s go!”

           Inside the station there were a lot of uniformed people, mainly of the military and of the police.

           “Don’t worry, they are not looking for us,” Somos whispered into my ear seeing the anxious look on my face.

           As I was too nervous, and my teeth were chattering from the cold, Somos insisted that he buys the ticket for me, too.

           We barely caught the local. As soon as we boarded, it began to move.

           The train was short, the steam engine and a total of two cars, both very old. The one we got into had a wood stove right in the middle.

           We sat close to the stove that was so hot its top was glowing red.

           Being exhausted from the long trip - and from the excitement -, I immediately fell asleep. When I woke up, I saw a soldier standing right in front of me.

           “Give me your identity book!” I heard the soldier saying.

Another soldier was already examining Somos’ ID.

           “No kidding!” laughed the soldier paging through my ID after I handed it to him. “You come all the way from Borsod county, huh?!”

           “That’s right”, I replied.

           “And where are you going?”

           I was still not fully awake so I had a hard time recalling the name of the village Somos told me about.

           “I asked you a question,” the soldier raised his voice.

           Suddenly, I remembered. “Oh, it’s Bajansenye,” I said in a hurry.

           “Bajansenye…” The soldier repeated looking at my ID book again. “And just why are you going to Bajansenye?”

           “Oh, we are going to visit some relatives there.”

           The soldier, hardly older than me, glanced at Somos. “So you two are together?” he said when he turned back to me.

           “We are.”

           “And what’s the name of your relatives?”

           “The Kovacs family,” I replied in a somewhat shaky voice.

            The soldier turned to an old woman who was sitting just behind me.
           “Mama, you live in Bajansenye, right?”

           “I do, my son, why?” replied the old woman.

           “Do you know the Kovacs family there?”

           “In Bajansenye?” said the old woman. “There is no one there by that name. I would know. I’ve lived there all my life.”

           The soldier, while turning back to me, took his machine gun off his shoulder and pointed it at me.
           “In the name of the Hungarian People’s Republic,” he said very seriously, “you are now under arrest.”

           The exact same thing happened to Somos and we were forced to leave the train in handcuffs at the next station.

           It did not take long until I figured out that we had slept through our journey and entered the border zone. Actually, I felt some sort of a relief.

           The soldiers used the telephone at the station office and about an hour later a huge military truck arrived. We were transported to the base right on the border and locked up in a jail cell that was actually an extension of a sleeping quarter. The cell only had a door made of iron bars so we could see the soldiers in their quarters and, of course, they could also see us. There were a couple of two-level beds in the cell.

           “Since it’s only the two of you,” the young officer who locked us in said, “you are free to choose. I recommend the top ones in case it gets colder during the night. I’ll have someone bring you dinner. Tomorrow… we’ll see.”

           It was actually pretty warm in the cell and the mattress was fairly comfortable.

           “Not bad,” remarked Somos while we were eating.

           Beef stew with rice and pickled cucumbers. I really enjoyed that dinner. And the soldiers bought us a second portion after we finished the first one. I guess they sympathized with us.

           While we were eating, Somos whispered some instructions to me:

“It’s obvious that we were arrested for attempting to cross the border illegally. Of course, we must not admit that, indeed, that’s why we were on that train… If we admit it, we’ll end up in prison… We have to say that we just wanted to take a trip to Bajansenye and then turn around and go back home.”

           “We have already lied about Bajansenye,” I whispered back.

           “It does not matter,” Somos insisted. “We have to say our destination was Bajansenye. It’s better to be accused of not telling the truth than of an attempt to cross the border.”

           I could not follow his logic but I was not able to think straight, either, so I just agreed. I was hoping that next day the authorities would take us home.

           The authorities released us from the military jail the next day, indeed, but instead of taking us home, they moved us to a police jail in Zalaegerszeg, the biggest city in the region.

           On our third day being locked up, a policeman came for me and took me to a dusty, almost empty office. He made me sit at the old desk and then he left, locking the door from the outside. Instinctively, I turned around to look at the two windows. Both had thick iron bars on the outside. Not that I really wanted to escape. After all, where could I have gone all by myself?

           A few minutes after the policeman left, I heard the key in the lock again. At this time, a middle-aged civilian entered. He was short and thin. He wore a long raincoat and he had a huge hat on his head. As he came closer to me, I saw the very angry expression on his face. His nose was like a razor blade, that’s what I remember most about him. Just by looking at me, he gave me goose-bumps. And he did look at me for quite some time before he finally opened his mouth.

           “So, you thugs are celebrating, huh?!” he said in a raised voice.

           I did not even dare looking at him.

           “I’m talking to you,” he yelled at me leaning over the desk. “Answer me!”

           “What… can I say?” I stuttered.

           “Look at me!” he shouted. “And tell me the truth! Understood?”

           I nodded in a hurry.

           “Now… that’s much better,” the detective said in a somewhat softer tone. “Open that drawer in front of you… You see the pencil and those sheets of paper? Grab a sheet and  write down everything. I want to know what your exact plan was. I’ll be back in ten minutes. Have your story written down by then.” He left in a hurry.

           First I wanted to write everything the way we planned but then I remembered what Somos told me. I definitely did not want to go to prison so I wrote that we just took a trip to see how the country looked around Bajansenye. I also wrote that when the border patrol woke us up, we wanted to come up with a more believable reason, that’s why we lied about the Kovacs family.

           “Is that all?” the detective asked when he saw the two sentences. As soon as he finished reading, he crumpled the paper and threw it into my face. “Now I want the truth!” he shouted. “Grab another sheet of paper and write everything the way you planned it. I hope you understand. I’m not going to tell you a third time.” He put one of his hands on his hip in such a way that I could see his handgun under his coat.

‘He would not shoot me,’ I thought. ‘Besides, I can not change my story now.’ So, I wrote the same two sentences again after he left.

           He was real mad when he saw I did not change my confession. He shouted all kinds of abominations while pacing up and down in the room.

           “Look!” he said. “I know exactly what you wanted to do… You wanted to walk along the railroad and cross into Yugoslavia and then into Austria. That’s an illegal act punishable by several years in prison. If you continue denying your plan, I’ll make sure that you get the maximum sentence allowed by the law. I can’t waste any more of my time for you hoodlums. I was going to leave on my vacation… and then you two show up. Don’t make it difficult for me boy because I’ll tear your arms out… Now, go ahead and write the truth, nothing but the truth.”

           When he came back, he did not even want to see my confession again. With an ugly smile on his face, he held up a piece of paper and said: “Here, we got what we need. It’s your friend’s confession. He admitted that you wanted to escape. So there is no point in you denying it any longer. All I need is that you write on a clear sheet of paper exactly what your friend wrote and we are through. Go ahead, I’ll wait.”

           I sighed. Finally, this circus came to an end… and it was not me who succumbed.

           After I wrote what the detective wanted, I was taken back to the cell.

           “You, chicken,” Somos said after the guard locked the door on the outside. “Why did you confess?”

           “I did not,” I protested. “You did.”

           Somos shook his head in disbelief. “Hmmm… He tricked us both it seems.”

           “What’s going to happen now?” I asked. “How long are we going to be kept here? My mother must have gone crazy by now.”

           “There is nothing we can do,” Somos replied. “We just have to wait, that’s it.”

           We did not really have to wait too long. Later in the afternoon, two policemen took us to the train station where the four of us boarded a train for Budapest.

           These policemen were surprisingly friendly with us. And they were in such a good mood. I guess the assignment to take us to Miskolc gave them a couple of days of breaking out of their usual, boring duty. They even took off our handcuffs after we boarded the train and settled in an empty compartment that had already been reserved for us. “Keep out! Police”, read the label taped onto the glass door outside. So even though there were two more seats vacant in the compartment, people walking by in the narrow corridor, looking for seats, just glanced at the label and walked on.

           “We’ll arrive in Budapest shortly before midnight,” one of our escorts said after the train pulled out of the station. “There, we’ll take the tram to the other station.”

           “If the trams are still running at midnight,” commented the other one.

           Now that I think back, I can tell these two were simple folks. They probably had never been to the capital city before. No wonder they were having fun… They spoke in a dialect that sometimes was difficult for me to understand. Somos and I tried not to look at each other; we would have surely broken out laughing if we did.

           One of them left. He said he had to use the restroom. When he came back he had two bottles of beer in his hand. He handed one bottle to his colleague.

           They drank the whole bottle in one long gulp.

           “Don’t you boys know any good police jokes?” one of them said later.

           “Of course, we do,” replied Somos.

           “Let’s hear them!” said the policeman.

           Finally, we no longer had to hold back. We laughed heartily after every joke. Well, not necessarily because the jokes were that funny.

           “Hey, you!” one of them said pointing at me. “Here is twenty Forints, go and get two more bottles of beer. Oh, heck, get four. You boys must be thirsty, too. The buffet is in the next car.”

           “Make sure you come back,” said the other one.

           “Don’t worry about him,” Somos said. “He is happy to be under arrest.”

           I was the only one who did not laugh at that comment.

           The thought of trying to escape did not even cross my mind. I was happy we were heading home. I hoped I would spend the next night in my own bed.

           Later they sent Somos to get four more beer. Shortly after Somos left the compartment, the train pulled into a station and came to a stop. It was a short stop, hardly more than a minute, and the train began to move again.

           “What’s taking him so long?” one of the policemen asked looking at his watch. “Shouldn’t he have come back by now?”

           “There must be many people in the buffet. He has to wait in line,” the other one replied casually.

           “No, I think he should be back already. I’ll go and see.”

           Just as he stood up, Somos showed up at the door with the four bottles in his hand. I must admit, I was thinking what the policeman was thinking. I suspected Somos jumped off the train at the station.

           ‘Somos,’ I thought to myself, ‘you are no less of a chicken than I am.’

           We all got drunk and we all fell asleep. The janitors had to wake us up long after the train arrived at the South Station in Budapest.

...  

Click PART 2 (in the menu, upper left)

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