I actually fell asleep as it was rather warm in the truck. The driver woke me up when we were passing through a small town. I looked into his eyes and nodded. He pulled over and let me off in front of a buffet.

I glanced around after the truck moved on. There were two men eating in a standing position at an elevated small round table in front of the buffet. Inside there were a few other people waiting in line.

It was already broad daylight, the sun was coming up.

I saw some people about a hundred feet away on the other side of the street. I crossed the street and walked in that direction. As I suspected, the people were waiting for a bus. I did not have to wait more than a minute before the bus arrived.

It was the right bus for me. The sign showed it was going to Subotica.

I gave a large enough Yugoslav Dinar bill to the driver and said ‘Subotica’ the way I heard the man in front of me saying it. I found a seat and sank in putting my knapsack under my knees. I heard two women talking in Hungarian behind me.

I fell asleep even before the bus started rolling. I woke up from time to time to adjust the position of my head on my shoulder.

By the time we arrived in Subotica, I felt somewhat rested.

I rushed to the nearest bank where I saw the currency exchange sign. I got seven hundred Dinars for my hundred German Marks. Plus I had another two hundred Dinars I had been able to buy from a friend before I left Hungary. (Officially, without a valid visa to Yugoslavia, it was not possible to convert Forints into Dinars in Hungary during those years. Whether Forints could have been exchanged for Dinars in Yugoslavia risk free, I did not know. As I expected, exchanging the German Mark, I was not asked to present a passport.)

Nine hundred Dinars should be more than enough to get me to the Italian border, I figured.

First, I had a big sandwich at a buffet and then I bought a bottle of orange juice.

I went back to the bus terminal to see the schedules. I was planning to find a bus to Koper and then from Koper to Trieste, getting off at Kozina, a couple of miles before the Italian border. At this time, I wanted to cross the border on land, lurking along the road after leaving the bus.

I was disappointed to find that the only quick way going west was through Beograd, the capital of Yugoslavia. This meant a huge detour of first going south. I bought the ticket for Beograd.

When I arrived in the capital city late in the afternoon, I looked at the timetables in the terminal. There was a bus to Trieste, via Kozina, with a stopover in Koper. I only had about half an hour to grab something to eat.

The bus was full. There was loud music from the speakers. People trying to communicate had to shout. I dozed off from time to time but the noise made it impossible to sleep. Only hours later, when night fell, the driver finally turned off the music.

It was a long and tiring ride. We stopped at a few places. During these stops, we had enough time to use the restrooms or even to grab a sandwich or some other snacks.

After midnight, I was getting very tired. Unfortunately, my neck already hurt badly from the odd positions I had slept in so I had to keep my head upright. This meant that I could not sleep anymore.

Finally, we arrived in Koper in the wee hours of the night.

Everyone had to get off because a cleaning crew showed up to collect the garbage that was all over the bus.

I was surprised to see the crowd when I got back from the restroom. So many new passengers boarded the bus that there was hardly any more room left even to stand. I squeezed myself back on the bus and stood close to the door.

‘Must be guest workers commuting to Trieste,’ I thought.

At another stop even more people got on. We were jammed so bad, my body was held in a standing position by passengers around me. I was so exhausted that in spite of the frequent curves, when my head would sway from one shoulder to the other, I often fell asleep for short periods.

I thought the bus would stop for a few minutes in Kozina and I would have a chance to get off. Well, I was never fully awake after we left Koper and that almost got me in trouble. I do not know whether the bus stopped in Kozina or not. All I remember is waking up to hear the driver shouting about passport control.

Suddenly fully awake, I violently forced my way to the door and yelled at the driver.

“Kozina! Kozina!”

I figured we were approaching the border. I had to get off.

(Today, I wonder whether my green card would have been adequate to slip through the border inspection. I doubt it. The Yugoslavs would have surely arrested me for being in their country illegally.)

The driver turned on the light, made a face and waved his hand towards the back of the bus. I did not understand what he said but I was sure he meant that we already left Kozina.

“Stop! Stop!” I shouted desperately.

The driver made another face, pulled over and opened the door.

The bus moved on and in the early morning light I saw that we had just left some houses behind. ‘It must be Kozina,’ I thought.

I quickly started walking in the direction of the border. The bus was already far away when I saw another vehicle coming towards me.

‘What if it’s the border patrol?’ the alarm went off in my mind.

I saw trees to the right. I got off the road and ran to hide.

Rusty bullet shells

After the vehicle passed, I decided to stay in the edge of the woods because the morning light was getting stronger. I thought as long as I can keep an eye on the road and maintain my distance I should cross the border in about an hour.

I left Eger two days earlier on Monday and by Wednesday morning I was exhausted. As I walked in the woods, I was probably not fully awake. Otherwise I would not have gotten lost. I have no idea of how it happened but by the time the sky turned bright blue, I found myself wandering in a real forest, not knowing how I lost sight of the edge of the woods and what direction I took from there. I tried to orient myself by the position of the sun. The problem was I could see only small portions of the sky through the crowns of the very tall trees so I could only guess where the sun might be.

After a couple of hours of desperate wandering, I came upon an opening in the forest. I was on the slope of a mountainside where the trees had been cut down for high voltage electric wires. At one end, the strip of the opening that I estimated to be less than a hundred feet wide ended high up on a ridge. At the other end it got lost in the forest as it curved. I had absolutely no idea of where I was. Well, at least I could see the sun. I concluded that I should go back the way I came.

I was very tired. My ankles, especially the one I hurt Monday night, were swollen and very painful. I had long ago thrown away the empty bottle after I drank the last drops of the orange juice. I was very thirsty and my eyes were hurting as well.

After about another half an hour of almost aimless wandering, I found the same opening again with the electric wires. The sun was up high and the air was hot.

Back in the forest again, trying to find a new direction, I struggled on.

On a small opening, I had to sit down in the grass to rest for a while. When I looked to my left, I saw a few rusty bullet shells. A couple of feet from the shells, there was a human skull with the eye-holes looking straight at me. With a shiver through my spine, I quickly got to my feet and walked back into the forest.

I walked for another hour or so when the trees thinned out. Soon there were only a few bushes here and there. I was going down a dry, grassy slope. After every one or two hundred feet, stones of all sizes were piled up into straight fence-like dividers.

I had already stepped or climbed over at least a hundred of those stone piles, some as high as three feet, when finally I saw some houses down in the distance at least a mile away. The stone piles and the bushes blocked most of my view but I was able to go straight toward the settlement.

Finally, I was down on flat field walking on grassy ground with no more stone piles. Looking to my right, I saw vehicles on a road that came in about a forty-five degree angle to the direction I was taking toward the houses. There was another road near the houses. The two roads crossed about half a mile ahead of me.

When I was getting real close to that intersection, I started having a strange feeling.

Sure enough, when I reached the intersection, the traffic sign showing the name of the settlement read Kozina.

So, after a half a day of going nowhere, I got back to where I started from.

‘Just like a few weeks ago trying to find the Yugoslav border in the rainy night,’ I recalled. ‘Well, once again, at least I did not get completely lost.’

Truly, my morning adventure could have ended much worse.

I still had plenty of Yugoslav money in my pocket so I went inside a restaurant I found there by the road. The waiter and the few people eating there kept looking at me as if they had never seen another white man. I pointed at a meal on the menu that I recognized as chicken with potatoes and I knew how to say orange juice in Russian so ordering my lunch was easy.

While waiting for my meal, I went to the restroom. When I saw my fairly long hair in the mirror, blown in every direction by the wind, and the fine sand that had built up on my face, especially on my forehead, I understood why people stared at me. I washed and went back to my table.

The orange juice came in a huge glass. Once I started drinking it, I could not stop until the glass was empty. A minute later, I thought I would die. Was it the sugar being absorbed into my system at a high speed? I do not know. My chest began to feel squashed and my heart almost stopped. Finally, after about another minute, I recovered.

The stale-looking chicken with the dried-out boiled potatoes tasted like manna from heaven.

I armed myself with another bottle of orange juice and decided to try crossing the border again. ‘At this time I will go left of the road,’ I told myself.

I walked along the road for a few minutes. I recognized the spot where I got off the bus in the morning. Looking at the forest on the other side, I saw that further ahead the edge of the woods distanced away from the road.

Left of the road, I saw a mountainside covered with bushes of all sizes. ‘If I reach the ridge,’ I thought, ‘looking down on the other side of the mountain, I might even see the Bay of Trieste deep down in the distance. As long as I can follow that sight, I should be able to cross into Italy.’

I left the road when I saw no vehicles coming and soon found myself fighting my way through a forest of dwarf pines. The trees grew so close to each other, the needles kept tearing my clothes and slashing the skin on my legs. Some of the trees were dying and had rusty colored stiff needles that were especially brutal on my clothes.

After a while I began to feel like I did when I was in the middle of the swamp, not knowing whether I should continue or just turn back.

It took me at least an hour to get through the pines. The slope kept changing in altitudes so when I looked back I could not see Kozina.

By the time I was somewhere on the ridge, the trees were tall and I was in a thin forest. At least I could see the sun often and that helped me keep the direction.

I arrived at a steep mountainside from where, indeed, I caught a glance of the shining blue waters of the sea. I estimated the distance to the bay to be about ten miles. Based on how I remembered the map, I expected the border to be not far from where I was.

The meal and the orange juice gave me new strength and I tried not to pay attention to my aching ankles.

As I started descending on the mountainside, I often slipped on the dry stony ground. There were times when my feet went out from under me causing me to slide ten or twenty feet, triggering an avalanche of dirt and dry leaves along with me.

After a few minutes of going downhill I came upon a strange narrow road cut into the mountainside. It appeared to me that the road was covered with a thick layer of old sawdust. The sawdust seemed to cover the steep ground below the road at least twenty feet high.

When I stepped on the road, the surface felt kind of cushiony, something like stepping onto a well-inflated air mattress. I carefully stepped closer to the edge on the other side wondering whether the sawdust was firm enough to allow me to climb down. Well, it was not. Suddenly, I started falling as the wall of sawdust collapsed under me. I must have fallen twenty or thirty feet and when I landed I was buried by a ton of sawdust that just kept falling from above.

I thought it was over for me. After my initial panic, I started digging and made it out alive. It took me long minutes to clean the dirt and sawdust from my hair and from my clothes. I even had sawdust in my nostrils.

I thought I had crossed the border.

I continued my descent and soon I was walking on a flat surface. The trees were tall but the forest was not too thick. From time to time, I could see the sawdust covered strip high behind me. As long as I could see that strip, I knew I was keeping in the right direction.

There was a shallow creek in my way. Instead of crossing it, I walked along its bank. ‘It must be flowing down into the sea,’ I thought. ‘Even if it curves here and there, it should lead me to Trieste.’

The creek later descended into a deep ravine. I followed the water by stepping from stone to stone.

The ravine eventually came to an end and the creek was even with the ground again.

It was about mid-afternoon. I was getting very tired again. Of course, I could not care less as I was sure I could walk whatever distance I still had to walk to the city of Trieste.

I saw a narrow pathway crossing the creek and then running along the water on the other side. I stepped on a few stones to clear the water and continued my walk on the path. Near the water, I saw prints of boots in the soil.

‘It must be from the local forest ranger.’ I thought and expected to see the ranger station soon.

I could hardly bear the pain in one ankle anymore but even that did not bother me. I smiled and I felt like singing something.

All of a sudden, a few feet ahead of me, from behind a small dirt pile, two uniformed men emerged.

“Stoi!” they shouted, pointing their machine guns at me.

Although, I saw the red stars on their caps, first I could not take them seriously.

“Stoi!” they shouted again.

“Stoi?” I wondered out loud. “That’s Russian.”

Finally, it dawned on me that I was captured by Yugoslav soldiers.

I collapsed onto the ground and I laughed bitterly. I just could not believe it.

One of the soldiers kept pointing his weapon at me while the other one searched my knapsack.

“Are you Hungarian?” the one paging through my ID book said in Hungarian.

“I must be dreaming,” I said loudly, also in Hungarian. “Where am I?”

“You are about one hundred feet from the Italian border.”

“And you are talking to me in Hungarian?”

“I am from near Subotica, from a small village close to the Hungarian border. Everyone speaks Hungarian there. Were you trying to escape to Italy?”

“Yes, and I thought I was already in Italy.”

“You have just admitted that you were trying to cross the border illegally. You are now under arrest.”

“You must be joking,” I said in disbelief. “You are Hungarian and you want to arrest me? Please, don’t do that to me! I must get through here. You see my green card there? I am trying to get back to America.”

The other soldier, still pointing his gun at me, lost his patience.

“He does not understand a word, I must translate.”

They spoke in their language for a while.

“Please, let me go!” I said when the Hungarian speaking one turned back to me.

“Sorry, I can’t do that. This guy is from Macedonia and he is happy we caught you because we get five days of leave. Finally, he can go back to see his family.”

“Come on, it’s about my freedom…It’s about my life,” I begged.

“Why did you not walk in the forest? Why did you have to come on the road?”

“I must go on!” I raised my voice. “If you don’t let me go in peace, I will run for the border.”

“If you run, we will shoot you. You’d better not run. I’d hate to kill you.”

“Would you really kill me?”

“Look,” he changed the tone of his voice, “if I was alone I would let you go. The problem is he wants that vacation real bad, he would surely shoot you if you run.”

I gave up.

I was handcuffed and escorted several miles until we finally reached a building somewhere. I was handed over to other soldiers. I was given some food and then they locked me into a dark cell. I did not mind the darkness but the wooden cot was very hard.

I fell asleep in a heartbeat.

From late Wednesday afternoon, I slept until someone woke me up close to noon the next day.

Milk chocolate with nuts

Again, I was given something to eat and then a military jeep transported me to Koper where I was handed over to prison authorities.

The prison was a square shaped building with a huge yard in the middle. I was put in a cell with about ten other inmates. The door was made of metal bars to allow fresh air in during the days when the temperature was warm. An outside heavy door was closed in for the night.

Most of the inmates were young, about my age or even younger. They were always very noisy, talking and laughing a lot. They usually gathered in two groups, sitting on beds. Most of them spoke a Slavic language of which I understood very little.

In a corner, there was an older man who was in bed most of the time. I never saw him saying anything.

The first day, the youngsters found someone among themselves, a blond boy by the name Hans, who spoke fairly good English. With Hans translating, they asked me many questions. I told them how I was caught and brought in.

“Don’t worry,” Hans said. “I am here for the third time. I came from East Germany and I also tried to escape into Italy. They caught me three times already. The law here is such that you will be sentenced to eight days for the illegal border crossing attempt and then they will let you out. You can try again.”

“Are you serious?” I asked in surprise. At the same time I felt miserable because somehow I just could not believe that I would really be allowed to go free. Besides, even the eight days sounded to me like a life sentence.

“You see all these other guys? They are from Bulgaria, Romania, even from Poland. A couple of them are Albanians. Most of them have been in here before. Eight days. You’ll see.”

Late in the afternoon, the guard opened the bars and took the older guy from the corner. About half an hour later, the older guy was brought back. His nose was bleeding and he had fresh bruises all over his face. After the guard locked the bars, he went to bed and covered his head with his blanket.

“We don’t know anything about him,” Hans informed me seeing the startled look on my face. “I am told that he has been here for many days and that he gets beaten at least twice every day. We asked him questions but he never says a single word.”

We had decent food for dinner.

My first night was peaceful, I slept well.

The next day, I was taken to an office for questioning. An older uniformed man asked me the questions in broken English.

After I told him everything exactly the way it happened, he smiled holding up my green card with two of his fingers.

“I think you are lying… Go back to your cell.”

Later that day, a guard I had already seen came to our door and asked if we wanted anything from the canteen.

“Only if you have money, of course,” Hans translated for me.

“Yes, I’d like some chocolates,” I said. “You have my money in my knapsack.”

“How many?” the guard asked.

“Four or five bars,” I replied.

When the guard came back later, he handed me five huge chocolates each weighing one kilogram.

“No! I meant five small bars,” I protested.

The guard smiled and put the chocolates on my bed.

“Milk chocolate with nuts,” he said in English. “They are good for you.”

‘Of course,’ I thought, ‘they can’t just steal my money. They make me spend it.’

I broke one of the bars into pieces and shared it with everyone. The older guy just shook his head when I offered him a piece.

“Now that your interrogation is over, it’s easy sailing from here,” Hans told me. “You’ll see how fast time goes. In the meantime, you can stand by the bars during the day and watch a tiny portion of the blue sky. I would hardly call this a prison.”

On my fourth day in captivity, the guard came for me again.

“Wow!” I heard Hans saying as I was leaving the cell. “No one has ever been taken twice since I’ve been here, except, of course, this poor old mate.”

I was led into a small empty room with one plastic chair in the middle.

“Sit down!” said the guard.

I waited for quite some time. Finally, two young civilians entered the room. They were dressed elegantly in dark suits. One of them stopped by the closed door while the other one approached me from behind.

I was about to turn my head when my chair was kicked so violently, I fell down onto the floor.

“You may sit back!” the man who kicked me said in English.

After I seated myself again, he walked around to face me.

“I guess you don’t like to be treated roughly,” he said with a smile. “Frankly, I would hate to hurt you again. However, I will have to if you don’t tell me the truth.”

He had a slight accent, otherwise his English sounded perfect.

“I already told the truth yesterday,” I said. “That other officer wrote down everything. I hope he understood me well.”

“He understood you all right. That’s why he called the secret service. He thinks you are a CIA agent.”

... 

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