History’s atrocities rate as entry-level: we have improved on our patrimony. Although my years as an early teen in the outermost circle of the Gulag spoke against it, a new book has shocked me. The result was to give you access to Recsk: The story of a forced labor camp (G. Böszörményi). A difficult undertaking for, as a survivor put it “living in an American milieu (teaching economics) I must be silent because they would not believe what I went through.”

Unfortunately, if you think that what you find below is “history” you are wrong. You are even more off the target in case you assume that whatever was in the past is gone and therefore it is of no relevance for the present and the future. In the case of some building blocks of the “past” the idea that the past is gone might fit. As far as the Bolshevik-determined-past is concerned, the assumption is wrong. It is off beam because the guilty remain unexposed and even less have they been held accountable. Therefore the villains you encounter below are around, directly or through their off-spring in power, or at least well off for they have been allowed to hold on to their loot. Accordingly, they regret nothing and have never even been forced to whisper a perfunctory “sorry.” With the political criminals being around the kind of “history” you encounter here is not a chapter in a closed past. Much rather it is an encounter with the well-camouflaged personal background of the current ruling classes of Central and Eastern Europe.

What follows is not a usual book review. Works are reviewed to recommend them or to counsel an approach with an eleven-foot-pole. While “you” could buy the book it would do little good as it is in Hungarian. Given the topic, the venue (the Stalinist camp of Recsk /pronounce “cs” as in wretched/) and the victims (no ones kin) it will never be translated into a major language. So the purpose here is not a review but to abbreviate the tome to shed light on a matter that knows no boundary in time (past, present and future) and in location (here, there and anywhere). Probably only a few of you will believe the “future” and the “anywhere.” During Stalin’s rule the writer’s parents admitted to have ignored the purges because “it could not happen here.” Since then, to the author, “it could not happen” equals the naiveté of fools.

By relying on the book to paraphrase participants, the piece will let reflective inmates and unrepentant guards speak while the strict rules of quotation will be ignored in the interest of brevity. Much here will border on the absurd and that commences with incarceration. Note that items that you associate with confinement (a reasonable investigation, then a trial, followed by a lawful sentence) are missing. Thus a denominator connecting the cases and guilt by the régime’s standards will lack. Sloppiness? No. It is a module of the real-life’s absurdity made into a system that, by design, these do not appear.

Now, to a few sobering remarks for those who find what follows insane and as such hard to believe. Terror might strike irrationally – as it, indeed, has since liquidation by categories became government policy. Unlike its official justification, terror is, in itself, rational. The less predictable the more effectively it controls an intimidated society paralyzed by it. The writer recalls adults discussing why we were where we were. The attempts to discover the policy so as to guess our fate have failed for they did not realize that terror is, in itself, a policy. Even when the enemy seemed to be clearly defined it was in fact not so. A leading Nazi said “I determine who is a Jew.” Had the war ended with National Socialist victory, the implications – everybody was a potential “Jew” – would have been devastating for many who thought themselves to be safe.

Some of the lunacy encountered will cause smiles. A case in point is the fate of the recently deceased George Faludy, arguably Hungary’s greatest modern poet. (His CV: as a secular leftist Jew he achieves prominence when around twenty. Emigrates to escape the Nazis, becomes a U.S. soldier and returns after the war to Hungary to “build democracy”. He winds up in Recsk and flees after Moscow crushes the Revolution of 1956. Faludy returned to Hungary after the collapse of Soviet rule.) This is how he relates his road to Recsk: after the pick up by State Security (AVH) he was taken to Andrássy Street 60. [The feared-famous building once the HQ of the Nazi Arrow Cross Party. Expanded by the buildings around it, “60” fittingly became the Communist AVH’s (State Security) base. Today “No. 60” houses the House of Terror museum that is strongly resented by the Left.]

After “treatment” the famous kid was taken to Gabriel Péter, the AVH‘s boss. Faludy, still not understanding the process, asked whether he had read his file. It got a glance.
“Is there a rational allegation in it?”
“None.”
“So I get out.”
“No, they brought you in and this is where you will croak.”
“Why?”
“We do not need idiots.”
“Why am I an idiot?”
Péter grabs his blood soaked shirt to shake Faludy: “You ask this, you, the dummy who came back from America into this sh.t.”

 
Arrest

Let us begin with who the inmates were and how they passed through tyranny’s sewage system of terror to its terminal cesspool, Recsk. All classes and political backgrounds were represented because a socially homogenous camp would have been harder to manage. The range went from the democratic Left to Jews – for whom it was often a repeat performance – ex-officers, aristocrats, businessmen, clerks, unschooled peasants, the intellectual élite, such as a leading surgeon. (Notably missing: Nazis.) No wonder that a 19-year-old felt that somehow he is lucky. If he would not be in converting a mountain into pebbles in Recsk, he would be in a “boring” school. Here he can learn from the country’s best minds. With their last energy inmates lectured about music, literature, nuclear physics and whatever was professorially represented. [I am also thankful for an education by grown-ups sharing my fate.]

Working with the material makes three characteristics stand out. (1) The illiteracy of the socially outcast guards with 6 years of schooling. (2) The inordinate number of Ph.D. convicts. (In one case ten men who pulled a horse-cart held 14 degrees.) (3) A large percentage of the inmates were in the resistance once in 1944 the country was occupied and the Arrow Cross took power. Their representation exceeds by far their weight in the general population. Therefore it is natural that those telling their tale often mention that the warm-up in Dachau, Mauthausen and with the Gestapo had helped them to survive Recsk.

Arrest generally led the victim to “No. 60”. A few took a special route. Like the Flag Officer who went over in 1944 to the Red Army. While discussing the setting up of Hungarian combat units, the Political Commissar of the front declared that the Germans are finished. The General said that they will last till “Easter.” (The forecast was six weeks short of the actual date.) This was an insult of the Soviet Army. A bit similar is the tale of Dr. Zoltán Sztáray. He recommended that unproductive mines – their costs were 3-4 times too high – be closed. Prisoners, he was told, will soon work there and so the cost problem will be overcome. His negativism cost Sz. his freedom. Our acquaintance, Faludy, is a suitable person to continue with. Before his arrest, unable to sleep, he went for a walk at night followed by two observers. He met a friend who was also followed. The six stopped and the friend said to the writer: “Why can you not sleep? What could happen to you? You are a Social Democrat, you will get life. I am a Communist, they will hang me.” As noted, some arrests were expected. Faludy tells that liking to swim, in warm weather he wore a bathing suit under his slacks. Upon reaching a lake, to test the observers, he got out of his car and dived into the water. The detectives made desperate faces and followed in their underwear. I suppose later he got a few extra blows for that trick.

However, most arrests were unpredictable. “Uncle” Tóth, a Meteorologist got “taken away” because he predicted “heavy storm clouds approach from the North-East.” Alas, the same day a Soviet armored division entered the country. This is the stuff out which “espionage” and “anti-Soviet activities” are made! Sometimes, of course there was a better “reason.” Francis Györgyey had a friend who met a Frenchman abroad. Then a French guy came to Gy. who got the address from the mutual friend. Neither spoke languages the other could handle. So they got drunk. With the help of a dictionary the 20 year old discovered that the Frenchman, who arrived by train (!) wanted to know whether Hungary’s tracks have been converted to Russian standards. Rightly, Gy. found this hilarious and told everybody about the lows to which espionage has sunk. The AVH did not laugh and so “General de Gaulle’s Spy” was put away. Hoyos the Doctor went away for spying “for the Western capitalist powers.” After Stalin’s death, the camp was dissolved and the inmates were given quickie retroactive sentences. Hoyos: “Even then they have not told me for whom I had been spying.”

Equally hard-to-believe is Julius Michnay’s case. His father had been an instructor at a military academy in Moscow. M. fought with the Red Army. To escape the Gestapo his mother, a physician, committed suicide. One evening a friend came by with a guy. Could he leave his suitcase until his train leave? Not the man took the train, the AVH took the man and also M. who managed to clear himself. Waiting to be released and for his papers he was made to linger in an ante-room. He passed the time with an important person. Bored, that one told him his version of a then interesting event. Since the AVH kept the tale-teller, M. also had to stay as he knew a “state secret”.

After the Iron Curtain went down, illegal border crossing became “popular.” Dr. Paul Jónás’s sin was just that – with “espionage” added. Actually he was, for the régime, in an international youth organization’s leadership. There he informed about his country’s politics.
“You have told them 100% of the election results?
“Yes, I had told them what the international press knew: the Small Landholders won with 57%.” (The CP’s share: 17%. Uncomfortably identical with what the Arrow Cross got in 1939.)

Camillo Kárpáti studied art and had an interest in the Italian Renaissance. His request for a passport was denied. Innocently he kept talking to people about his problem. So in 1949 he was arrested for “attempting to cross the border illegally.” Peter Zichy was asked in “60” whether, if outside the window it would be Austria, he would jump. Answer: affirmative. “He has acknowledged that, given the chance, he would attempt to escape the country” said the charge that was also his sentence. Faludy was sent by the state to a film festival in (Communist) Czechoslovakia. That became “attempted illegal border crossing.”

Louis Puska, running a village coop store, was arrested for having radicalized a meeting where he had failed to be present. He asked for a trial. “No court will condemn you. We take you away and when it pleases us we let you go.” That was 5 years later.

The decision to intern Györgyey had this justification: he went to an inn with friends where these sung ‘Fascist songs.’ Even though he was under the table it is to be assumed that, had he been awake, he would have sung along.” A dentist got taken because several patients were picked up. This made him the hub of a spy ring and his x-rays were spy messages. Perhaps Alfred Pallavichini had a reason to feel to be at the right place. Prisoners who were once police interrogators told him that the AVH wanted him as an informer. The police reported that his character makes him unrecruitable “We will take care of that” said the AVH and arrested him.

By now the reader has an inkling how and why one family of three got touched by the party-state’s repression. Andreas Hegedüs, a Minister at 28 and member of the CP’s Central Committee confesses: “At the pinnacle of power” he was afraid of arrest and tried to envisage how his show trial could be constructed. George Egri, persecuted before the Communist take-over, thought his guilt consisted of “living the inexcusable sin of independent thinking.” Zoltán Nyeste’s observation supports the guess. “Out of the twelve youths who were in my unit of (anti-German) resistance and in the custody of the Arrow Cross in ‘44, seven were in jail and of these five in Recsk.”

Here an insight into Hungary’s current under par performance suggests itself. The country had been too frequently “decapitated” by her different oppressors (in 1919, 1920, 1944, 1945, 1948, 1956). As a result her political culture suffers from the lack of a component that modern citizenship requires.

Earlier the claim was made that the phenomenon described here metastases into the future. Connecting times and places, Stalinist terror represents an often denied continuum of, and parallel to, National Socialism’s crimes. Indeed, some who are quoted in the book like to compare their lot to what they experienced under the Nazis. Their consensus is also that getting arrested by the AVH had to do with their anti-Nazi activity. Resistors out of principle are dangerous for all tyrannies. (The writer’s stepfather was clearly told this when he naively inquired during the early days of the system why he was not allowed to fly.) Interestingly Dr. Sztáray, was asked in “60:” ”Do you know why you are here? I will tell you. List the names of your associates from resistance in 1943-45. You have conspired with them.” Denial. “This we determine!” Not accidentally, Dr. Ivan Rácz sometimes told his torturers “the Germans were better at this”. He also notes: “They were apparently uninterested regarding the facts.”

Frequently the interrelationship of methods and the “double time” of victims had a parallel in the repression’s personnel. The Communists had hanged the leading Arrow Cross and appreciated the services of the rank-and-file. [Due to this my family could not revenge the death of my grandfather. Even at nine it hurt then – as it does today.]

Detainee George Gábori has a “good one” about this. His charge was conspiracy and hiding messages in chocolate. He refused the conspiracy because he did not want to contribute to his execution. A blonde blue eyed “Svabian-looking” kid beat him. He taunted him with “When I arrived in Dachau at the station eighteen-twenty year old blond Arrow Cross teens like you were beating us.” G. got to Dachau thanks to a Hugo Németh. When in “60” they marched him through a corridor and he had to turn against the wall because people approached. Being “impertinent,” he took a peek. In the uniform of a Lieutenant Colonel he saw Németh. “Listen Németh! Considering that you have been a Gestapo informer you are rightly promoted to a high rank at the AVH.” This caused turmoil and got him a beating. But also getting before Péter.
“I know you. [They used to play ball as kids.] You think that because you were in Dachau, you enjoy immunity? How did you dare to accuse Comrade Németh?”
During his beating next day the “Blonde” told him “Even if you put yourself on the cross, you will not manage to cause my downfall.” (Németh’s is implied)”. Then he got a “semitic looking” interrogator who beat him unconscious. Thereafter he was put in cell 58 which was Szálasi’s (Hungary s “Führer). Let the thoughts generated be concluded with a quote from an unnamed inmate who had already met his counterpart in barrack 23: “You must be an exceptionally decent person if, after Dachau, you land here.”

 
The Charge

The charges brought are positioned on a continuum that is related to the “reasons” for initial detainment. In themselves these lacked a factual basis. The upshot of such cases is that the “interrogation” must be brutal to the same degree that the charges are trumped up. Mistreatment therefore appears to be a consequence of the national policy of intimidation through arrest. Accordingly, “investigation” in this context is a misnomer by virtue of the known groundlessness of the charge to the security organs. Thus the purpose of the “interrogator” was not to beat concealed facts out of suspects but to get an admission of what was clearly a non-fact.

In Z. Nyeste’s assessment, according to the laws of Arrow Cross Hungary he was objectively guilty. When interrogated, the Nazis really wanted to know what he had done against them. Once under Communist management, in “60,” they insisted that he accept blame for what they wanted him to make himself guilty of. Reading the protocols, the impression arises that not admitting guilt when innocent by normal standards, was considered to be evidence of hostility to Socialism. The Party never erred. If the Party said you were guilty and you denied it you pretended that the Party is wrong. This need to abuse is what might have made Dr. Zoltán Benkő to assess “I regarded the torture to equal the Gestapo’s.”

The philosophy of repression is well represented by the statement given by George Steiner who went in 1944 to Buchenwald and then to Bergen-Belsen. He got home in ’48 and became a policeman. Arrest and “60” followed. Who did he see in Germany? “What assignment have the English given you?”
“With the rubber truncheon they convinced me to admit ‘espionage.’ Torture made me say: ‘Tell what I am to say and I will.’”
”Give a name!”
He could not. A Lieutenant Colonel said “Van Lear.” He agreed to sign that.
Then came: Of what did he live in Germany? He denied the charge of pickpocketing. “You will pay for this you dirty fascist because you are an enemy of the people.” Finally a Lieutenant asked him whether he knows why he is there. He did not.
“Because Comrade Lenin has said that it is better if a hundred innocents suffer than to let a guilty one go free.”

Their confessions did not save the victims – as they hoped – from torture. Paul Farkas, age 20 was beaten for nine days. Then he signed. After that they beat him for what he had confessed to. Julius Gortva: “In the end, had they said that I killed Napoleon, I would have confessed to it, too.” At first, John Krizsák, a worker, denied that he was a conspirator. “What, even here you have a big trap?” So he got thrown against a wardrobe. The impact damaged its door. “Look at this dirty Fascist. Even here he damages the people s property.”
He signed hoping to clear himself later in the trial which he never got. (Hopes connected to a court were frequent when the system was still new.)

Some “convicts” tried to score while formally submitting. Györgyei: “Finally I wrote down all sort of things” That included recruiting fighters for Franco (1936-39) when he was eleven. The man who beat him to this confession kept repeating “I am not a sadist. This gives me no pleasure.” Prisoner Klébl: “I was beaten constantly for an admission.” In the end they got it. In several versions.

Accused that he is a Trotzkyst, Titoist clerical Fascist who hates the Hungarian people Faludy denied.
“The question is not whether this is true or not but whether you sign the confession.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then you will be carried out of here in a garbage can.”
So to the surprise of the AVH man he signed right away. Thereafter he was told that he is an American spy. Hoping to get a hearing in court he gave details. On April 1st, 1941 he met his handlers in a drugstore at 72nd & Broadway.
“What is that?”
“An inn.”
“They were the OSS’ Edgar Allan Poe. Description: alcoholic, high front, mustache, pleasing personality.”
“Leave out the pleasing” went the order to the typist.
“Walt Whitman was the other one. He has a white beard.”
“No others?”
Later, while facing the wall he came up with “Zebulon, Edward Bubel. He has two bumps on his front has club feet and limps.”
“Where does he live?”
“Niniveh Str., Babylon.”
Babylon made the AVH suspicious. Faludy had them call Operator to confirm that Babylon is in New York. [It is to be hoped that the KGB and today’s FSB are still looking for these Agents.]

When Faludy got his sentence the number of years were missing. He asked and was told to count the dots after “for…… years of confinement“. There were 25. Paul Lendvai, today a well known publicist in Europe, tells elsewhere that as a twen he got convicted for Trotzkysm without ever having read Trotzky.

Given the unreal nature of the confessions and the mindless distortion of the initial charge, getting an admission proved often to be difficult. At least in the case of those who failed to grasp that nothing they do or say matters. So it is hardly surprising that one victim relates that when he was half dead on the floor a Lieutenant said: “We cannot take this any more. Say it or we just beat you dead. Your friend X has told us everything, so do not drag this out.”
“If X has confessed then why deal with me?”
Surprisingly at that the interrogation ended.
Equally cute is the case of Izidor Melmerstein. Taken before Dreifuss, known for his brutality, he tried this line: “I am an orphan. That is why something makes me look upon you Lieutenant Colonel, Sir, as a father.” From then on Melmerstein had it good.

 
Life and Death in the Lager

At delivery State Security immediately tried to break the detainees. They were told that “We do not have to account (for the death) of anyone. There will be no letters, visitors, information to the family, no packages and no release. Count on this while you expire namelessly.”

In the pursuit of demoralization, the taking into custody was not immediately followed by presenting a charge. Typically, an apprentice tailor who spat on Stalin’s and Rákosi’s picture was made to stand endlessly with his nose against a wall. After much time he was asked whether he is hungry. He was. He got a beating and was taken to another room. There he was presented with these words:
“This man is a menace. He asked for dinner. Jut look at him, he got his portion.”
Beating was often followed by taunts. “De Gaulle s spy,” probably because he seemed important, got before Péter. Has he been mistreated was the question to the bloodied youth. Yes, he said taking a risk and hoping that the boss will correct his subordinates errant behavior. Well, “you must have deserved it.” Arbitrariness can result in justice. Ultimately Péter and his spouse got invited to Rákosi (title “Stalin’s best Hungarian pupil“) for dinner. There they were arrested and kept in the villa’s cave for days while much of the rest of his staff was collected. Then he himself ended in “60.”

Hannah Arendt talks of the “banality of evil.” Recsk validates and generalizes her judgment. The mistreatment was often quite business-like. “I beat his soul,” and “I handle his buttock“. Naturally, besides such craftsmen the genuine sadists were well represented. Mike Mózes tells that once guards forced him and two others to carry faeces in their hands to “burial” in a hand-dug hole. When they tried to clean their hands by rubbing them on a tree they were ordered to clean their paws on their faces. “You are not only s..t as people but you also become s..t because your only way out of here is …and he pointed to the sky.”

Daniel Kiss got it worse. Upon the death by starvation of his neighbor he said “it seems we will not survive this.” Denounced, he got two weeks of jail-in-jail with two hours hog-tied per day. Then a Pfc turned him against a stove and loaded it. It smelled. The guard went out to smoke. Finally an AVH doctor amputated his burned hand, threw the charred organ into a bucket while commenting “You will not play the piano any more.” The man who became gulyás-Communist Kádár’s military attaché in Paris once won a bet for being able to fell an inmate with one blow.

Regardless of torment meted out systematically or on the basis of personal initiative, the worse was not work, cold, humiliation and the beatings. Fighting the AVH meant fighting ones aching body. Some were never fully broken because, after much torture, the body activates a mechanism of protection by reducing its sensitivity. By acclamation it was the famine that stole the show in Recsk. As Louis Puska put it, it is difficult to remain a human being on less than a pound of bread a day. When caloric deprivation reaches that level, one does not mind that the bread is brought in an ox-cart that is otherwise used to transport manure. No wonder that Enemy-of-the-People Steiner admits stealing fodder from horses, and others tell of quickly swiping the left-over feed of the hogs. Dr. Hoyos – he got special treatment for it – submitted to the commander a paper to show that the calories given and the ones needed to do the work in the mine had to lead to death by starvation. (Hoyos, a leading surgeon, ended up in the U.S. in internal medicine. As a surgeon he was finished because, due to a beating, he lost an eye.)

Actually, Recsk might not have been a real death camp. However, in case that the output demanded from the establishment was really important to the AVH’s economic undertaking, then starving the inmates appears as counter productive. It would be a great topic for a dissertation to assess the economic profit of the system of forced-labor camps. Counting the lost potential contribution one could expect to incur from the collective skills and intelligence of the inmates, the results would probably be surprising. However, with this we get backtracked to the issue of “rationality” and must consider that such systems do not use measuring rods scaled by sanity’s rules.

Besides hunger, being cut off the world meant an additional burden. The hunger for information brought it about that, when the guards ordered Kéry to come up with four “significant persons” to empty the cesspool, he got eager volunteers. After the completed job he thanked them for taking the burden weighting on his shoulders. That is when he found out that asking for that job had practical motives. There being no toilet paper for the guards the Party s “Free People” was used for the purpose that its content qualified it for. The pieces were retrieved, washed and then, through interpreting the text, the inmates had access to “outside.”

Aside of not knowing about the world behind the fences, the related lack of perspective tormented Recsk. Arrow Cross’ captives knew that the lost war will soon end. Surviving from one day to another (this is what real surviving is about) meant to gain time while time worked against “them.” In Recsk the consoling assurance that surviving the day is a little victory was missing. No one could guess how long it will be before, if ever, “the Americans come.”

Significantly, a number of those who could be interviewed felt “I have survived my tormentors, I mean not physically but morally.” Whether guards or inmates, the Lager functioned as a catalyst. In Guido Görgey’s assessment, he was “no hero.” There were no heroes. But “one could keep or lose one’s decency.“ Regardless of education and family background, people were decent or rotten. Recsk revealed the “real value” of individuals. Those who were bad grew more evil and the good became more decent. It was, as an old captive put it after some special abuse, “terrible” but it could have been worse. “Worse than this?” exclaimed someone. Glancing at the guard-towers the man said, “Yes, worse is possible. We could be standing up there.” This assessment predates the judgment of Paul Farkas who, after the fact thought “I am only thankful that I was not among the guards but among the prisoners.”

The moral wisdom of surviving inmates demands to be contrasted with the views of their guards. Who were they, where does this element that tyrants in all societies find to serve as their instruments, come from? In the case of the AVH the “Organ” looked for guys with “manure on their boots.” The rank-and-file, even the lower ranking officers, were uneducated and unskilled. Once the Party threw them away like a squeezed lemon peel they wound up in menial jobs. Perhaps Gabriel Bihari should be cited to give substance to their mental set. “Under the given objective conditions the process, as an objective process had been that the world revolution shall triumph because the revolutionary upswing was so great. Then came stagnation.”
What stagnation?
“Well, the enemy, capitalism recovered from its post-war defeats, it could somehow renew itself. We could not develop the economy as fast as capitalism because it had a lot of capital. We could therefore not develop to close the gap and an inordinate number of forced measures had to be made against which the population expressed its disapproval.” (Which is what made the AVH, the “Party’s Fist” indispensable.)
A case told by Dr. A. Sasváry illustrates illiteracy from another angle. A guard asked Faludy whether he is a poet. “OK, you write me one. You will get it if you do not have it in an hour.” Faludy got paper and a pencil and he jotted down the Hungarian version of the Yankee Doodle. He read it to the guard who loved it. Faludy got double rations for dinner.

Why did they join? The Party Secretary told us, relates Francis Kiss that the AVH has been formed and that its task is to maintain the power of the workers and that the Party has to be defended against its enemies. “I felt we had to be there [Recsk] and that what I had done was correct and very important. There were many enemies. It is my opinion the government acted correctly that it took those people who acted unpleasantly out of circulation. Many claimed to be innocent and I hope no one will believe that. I ask you, why did you not land there, why did I not get there, why did others not wind up there?”
“Delighted, I agreed to join” recalls Paul Seres because it was “common knowledge that the AVH was the Party’s fist. I had the feeling that what I do is important. The public thinks that the inmates were beaten. I know of not one single case.”
Then, more realistically: “We just did the job and were told that one can not quit this corps; one can only go to jail from here.”
What did it mean to you, John Verecki, in money to become an AVH? “Well, it was better because when I worked in the cement works I got 2-300 HUF a month and once I joined I received 400. I had clothing, food, raises and did not have to pay for rent. In the old régime I was an orphan. In the AVH I expected a better life.”
Andreas Tóth, who never saw a beating, phrases his motives this way: “It was not political consciousness, I was a peasant kid. I wanted to belong to something.”

The AVH-men – like members of comparable institutions are likely to be – were people without prospects outside of State Security. Still they were bound not only by gratitude to the AVH but also by a sense of pit-bull like obligation for obedience that is coupled to the denial of their actions. This denial has two components. One legalizes whatever was done as necessary, and as common place. The other aspect of denial is to re-write the scenario. Here a composite of the renditions: “They were fed well, got a copious lunch and dinner.“ Our food “was worse than that of the interned.” The meals were based on a weekly menu sent down from “above.” Steve Antal even felt “the Lager was like an enchanted garden.” Fitting paradise, “they brought in grapes, cigarettes, cheese and whatever they asked for by the truckload” recalls John Bálint.

Re-writing the record involves, besides the general (but not universal) denial of starvation, the use of physical punishment.
“We have not hit the prisoners.”
You have famished them.
“We have not. Only in the matter that one has to work, one must work. It does not matter whether he is splitting rocks or cuts wood. It is all the same but he shall move, work. Well, if the tender hands of some, like doctors and professors and other things like that, were a bit ruined.”
Hog-tying? There was no such thing reassures John Varga, in the first interview. Asked about it in the second session, he heard of it. “Naturally.”
Tell about it!
“What for? That was also a punishment. Clear, if talking fails, if the single cell fails, one has to resort to physical punishment. This is done today and tomorrow, too. At that time we only knew this, that we hog-tie the c..ks.ck.r who does not do the way it stands in the big book? I do not deny this. It is a stupid fellow who denies it.”
Steve Fórián: hog-tying? I know nothing about that.

Typically, besides denial the other route of escape is to argue that the abnormal is normal. “No one had rubber truncheons,” claims Bálint. He treated the captives “according to the rules and the instructions. “Well, if you please, that there be no conspiracy, that we watch for that. That there be order. We got instructions. The kind of instructions we got we implemented. I had to carry out because in case not, they called in the investigators right away.”
At that time, so Fórián, “the rule was that wherever the fatherland, the Party puts a person, that is where he has to go.”
Responding to “do you think that that those, who do not desire exactly what the center wishes must be locked up?”
“If his activity is damaging then, in my opinion, he must pushed aside.”
Who could determine this?
“The person, and everywhere there was the Party, is it not that progressive people who agreed that Capitalism should not stay, well these uncovered this element. I do not doubt that there were innocents [among them]. But where are there no such? You can not identify all these.”
Logically the interviewer asked “did you believe that the country’s enemies were in Recsk?”
Joe Ivan: “At that time we heard about the internal and the external enemy, elements that threatened democracy and that this is a patriotic, Party-like act. What can a twenty-year-old know? We could not judge this.”
In general, the guards, years after their active duty felt that where they put you, you must to do what is ordered regardless of what you might think. “Orders are orders, and orders are to be obeyed” could be the summary of the attitude the guards manage to verbalize.

Regardless of ignorance, under-education and the pavlovian instinct to obey whoever might have barked orders, doubts still arose. Some guards went to Recsk because of infractions, such as shooting around wildly when drunk. Accordingly, Victor Létai recalled that being sent to Recsk “we were more unhappy than the inmates” as we “did not even know where Recsk is.” Perhaps this is why, when an old inmate who was hog-tied and then turned like a piglet over the barbecue, made his torturers desist when he, risking his life, said: “Son, what would your mother say if she would see you now?”

Actually, Recsk was not only about coercion against its captives. Fear had to do with the comportments of the people who, according to the will of the Party, made Recsk a hell. Regarding that Imre Várkonyi has a revelation. “We were told that they were against the system and then it incrementally became clear that it ain’t so. But we, at that time, well, you know, everybody was afraid of everybody else because at that time they were looking for the enemy even inside the Party at one time or the other, isn’t it?”
However, the man adds “Retaliatory cells, the deprivation of food was not ordered by us but was suggested by the captives themselves.“ Anyhow, he has “not heard” of suspending hog-tied persons for two hours, only for five minutes. Hardly surprising that László Pap got a nervous collapse from “the things inside the camp” and from living “with one foot in jail.” The prospect of having to trade places with their wards kept guards tense while it degraded them to be terror’s tool.

The smarter of the AVH-men were afraid of their prisoners. “The ones with an assignment were crawling around among them and one could not know who is set on whom, which one of them is watching us.” So “one wuz with one foot always in jail.”
Here an element of disappointment enters the picture. You will have a “glorious future” remembers the promise John Kovács at his induction. “You are chosen people” he was told then. “We believed, that was the problem.“ He saw propaganda films about Soviet partisans and about the Nazis. These made him realize that what he saw was happening in Recsk, too.
“They told us that we were better than Fascism. And I discovered that we were not. They were prisoners 1, we were prisoners 2.”
Insightful is the recollection of George Kövesdy. During the era of de-Stalinization the camp was prepared for dissolution. Ordered to question them, Kövesdi saw no reason to hold the interned Social Democrats. This he reported to “60” The response: he was “betraying the dictatorship of the Proletariat.” So he was reminded that in Recsk “there is a place for you.”

From what the jailers had to say – albeit before Socialism’s overt collapse – an element is missing you find in the public utterances of Nazis. The missing component is an expression of real or perfunctory regret. Attribute this to the fact that the defeat was not military and that, as these testimonials were gathered, living standards in Hungary – due to a large extent to the inhabitants’ failures – fell. However, the unrepentant utterances reveal something that goes beyond the lacking proof of clear failure (military defeat). Arguably there are signs of the atrophy of moral sinews – which might have never been developed by those who therefore became cast as guards and thus not as inmates. The stubborn if inarticulate reassertion of no crime and if yes, no responsibility due to having had orders, is not accidental. In post-Communist Hungary the admittedly guilty and the probably culpable have never been held accountable. Thus abuses on the one hand and victimhood on the other became intermingled –to the peril of the long-range development of that society. No one liked to be in Recsk, all had to put up with something, so all were equally suffering. Through this twisting of the facts guards and inmates achieve equality and share their innocence and responsibility.

Understandably, aside of the reflective reminiscence of the captives, the recollection of guards is devoid of regret and penitence. Judicially these crimes might be forgotten or covered up by inaction. Even so, the category of forgiveness remains, only to be rendered senseless as forgiving makes political and moral sense only if it is embedded in the admission of guilt and the condemnation of sin.