Karoly's Story from Hungary

By Michael Fitzalan

This is the story of Karoly, a man whose family protected Jewish refugees who were trying to escape the advance of Nazi Germany from the west and the advancing Russians Red Army and their Romanian allies to the east. Karoly was used as human-shield by Romanian 'liberators' in Hungary. When, after the war, Hungary was under Russian Communist control, he was sent to prison. Karoly was committed as a political prisoner for being a member of the Independent Small-holders Party, the communist party’s only serious political rival.
Under the communist regime anyone who held authority in the community was a threat and Karoly was arrested under a trumped up charge. He was sent to Márianosztra where he was given the option of starvation or working as a miner in a forced labour camp. Karoly worked in a coalmine until he escaped the cruel communist regime in 1956.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781291798319

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Karoly's Story from Hungary

Karoly’s Story from Hungary

by

Michael Fitzalan

Copyright © 2012 by Michael Fitzalan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews.

Karoly’s Story from Hungary

This is the story of Karoly, a man whose family protected Jewish refugees who were trying to escape the advance of Nazi Germany from the west and the advancing Russians Red Army and their Romanian allies to the east. Karoly was used as human-shield by Romanian 'liberators' in Hungary. When, after the war, Hungary was under Russian Communist control, he was sent to prison. Karoly was committed as a political prisoner for being a member of the Independent Small-holders Party, the communist party’s only serious political rival.

Under the communist regime anyone who held authority in the community was a threat and Karoly was arrested under a trumped up charge. He was sent to Márianosztra where he was given the option of starvation or working as a miner in a forced labour camp. Karoly worked in a coalmine until he escaped the cruel communist regime in 1956.  This is the story of a man who cheated death and suffered un-imaginable privations before escaping to England to start again from nothing, a broken and mentally-enfeebled refugee who rebuilt his life through hard work and determination.

Acknowledgements:

My grateful thanks to all those involved in this project including Nick Dunne and Tom Gately.

Particularly, I wanted to thank Karoly for reliving the horrors of the war and his time as a persecuted farmer and political prisoner during the communist occupation.

Especially, I want to thank my wife, Suzi, and my two sons Alexander and Barnaby.

Hungary suffered; Karoly suffered.

This must never happen again, in the name of communism, or capitalism, or any idealism, or in the name of any religion, to any country or any people.

Chapter One - Overview – Karoly and Budapest

Karoly’s life story began in Hungary in 1928. He was born in January at a farmhouse in the village of Tapiosap, forty kilometres south east of Budapest. His village, Karoly told me, was ninety-eight per cent Catholic, a rural, agrarian based Catholicism, which was very strict. It is now Sülysáp, a village in the County of Pest, 25 miles southeast of Budapest. In 1950 two villages, Tapiosap and Tapiosuly amalgamated, but they separated in 1954. In 1970 they combined again to form Sülysáp. At five, Karoly became an altar boy on Sundays. On 1st September, 1939, he enrolled in the Grammar school at Nagykata where he would spend four years. Nagykáta is a town in Pest County, Hungary, about 60 kilometres (40 miles) from Budapest.

Nagykata was where the Jewish Hungarians were called up to the front. They were given duties behind the lines. He saw this with his own eyes. This town happened to be the place where he, also, saw his first German soldiers, travelling through to Romania in preparation to Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. Operation Barbarossa was named after Frederick Barbarossa, the medieval German ruler, who, as myth would have it, would rescue Germany in her time of need. Barbarossa was the code name for Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union during World War Two. It began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a 2,900 km front. This was the largest invasion so far in the history of warfare. 

In addition to the large number of troops, Barbarossa involved 600,000 motor vehicles and 750,000 horses. This ambitious operation was the manifestation of Hitler's desire to conquer the Russian territories, to destroy communism and make Fascism supreme.

It was also the start of a battle, which would prove pivotal in the war. Planning for Operation Barbarossa started on 18th December 1940; the secret preparations, and the military operation itself, lasted almost a year, from spring to winter 1941.

During the Second World War, Romania, like Hungary, tried to remain neutral, but on 26th June, 1940, Romania received an ultimatum from the Soviets; the army was forced to retreat from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. From 28th June to 4th July, 1940, the Red Army occupied these areas and Hertsa, as well.

The Germans had agreed to cede these territories to the Russians in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. The German military proved unwilling to provide support to their Romanian ally in the event of invasion. No wonder the Romanians felt it acceptable to change sides later in the war. The Fall of France on 22nd June 1940, helped with the timing of the Russian ultimatum.

Germany was distracted by its expansion westward and the Russians were anxious to set up a buffer zone against German expansion eastward. It was either a move to provide a bulwark against any German attempt to expand eastward or it could have been a precursor of Russian designs to expand further into Europe.

It could be argued that the supporters of Communism and those of Fascism were just marshalling their forces before the struggle for world domination. Mid-central European countries were simply in the way.

On 2nd August, 1940, the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was absorbed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The establishment of the Soviet administration was marked by a series of campaigns which included political persecution, spontaneous arrests, sudden deportations to labour camps and random executions. These atrocities and the news of such barbaric treatment would have disseminated west to countries like Hungary.

Karoly would have been aware of the fearsome reputation of the Russians.  The short-lived communist administration in Hungary, itself, had seen brutality and executions. The memories were still fresh.  Already, the Hungarians knew about having communist masters and news from the east about their totalitarian and barbaric treatment of the indigenous population did nothing to reassure them. Pacifying Germany and meeting Hitler’s demands seemed the lesser evil of the two alternatives. 

Hungary was left with the choice, be subjugated to Russia or escape her clutches by aligning itself with the successful and potentially protective Germans, who would not invade Hungary if they were allied to her. The movement towards greater ties with Germany was a result of the fear that there might be a repeat of the communist regime, which came to power in Hungary after the war First World War.

In the inter-war period and, indeed, through most of the Second World War itself, the Hungarians, through their diplomacy, managed to provide shelter for their Jewish population while paying ‘lip-service’ to Hitler and appearing to agree to his demands at every turn. The Hungarians had to join the Axis, due to so many factors, their reward was the return of Northern Transylvania, and Dobruja was awarded to Bulgaria. On 30th August, 1940, Germany forced Romania to cede these territories and the Nazi’s promised to return lands seized as part of the Peace of Trianon.

During the war, Romania was the most important source of oil for Nazi Germany, prompting air-raids once the advancing allied forces had advanced far enough to establish airfields within range. King Caroll II of Romania abdicated in 1940 to be succeeded by The National Legionary State but in fact Ion Antonescu and the Iron Guard shared real power. In 1941 Antonescu, having crushed the Iron Guard, joined the Axis in order to regain territory lost to the Russians.

Antonescu was keen to see the Axis forces drive the Soviets from Romanian territory and the Germans looked as if they would sweep away any resistance in Eastern Europe, just as they had in Western Europe. These countries that had not been invaded directly by Nazi forces were isolated and vulnerable, they therefore made a choice driven not by self-determination but driven by self-preservation.

Karoly states:  In the first instance, the German soldiers, going to join the Romanians on the Eastern Front were not allowed to have any arms; they wore just their belt with an empty bayonet holder.

When war was declared in Europe in 1939, Romania was pro-British and was allied to Poland. However, Romania found itself increasingly isolated. Pro-German and pro-fascist elements began to grow after the successful conquest of the low-countries and France by the German army. All Europe was in awe of the Blitzkrieg. Romania, then, became a key supplier of resources to the Third Reich, especially oil and grain. In a mechanised war such a source of raw material and fuel was vital to the German war effort. Romania joined the German led invasion of the Soviet Union on 22nd June, 1941.

Nearly 800,000 Romanian troops fought on the Eastern front.  Areas that had been annexed by the Soviets were returned to Romania.

This was a significant anti-communist coup. By 1943, the tide began to turn and the Soviets pushed further west, closer to Romania. Foreseeing the fall of Nazi Germany, Romania switched sides, joining the Russians during King Mihal's Coup on 23rd August 1944. This was a significant anti-fascist coup. Romanian troops then fought alongside the Soviet Army until the end of war, reaching as far as Czechoslovakia and Austria. Remember that in July 1941, Romanian and Nazi German troops had recaptured Bessarabia during the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. A military administration was established and the region's Jewish population was either executed on the spot or deported to Transnistria, where they were murdered.

In August 1944, during the Soviet Jassy Kishinev Offensive, the Axis war effort on the Eastern Front collapsed, and Soviet forces entered not only Bessarabia, but also occupied most of Romania. On 12th September, 1944, Romania signed the Moscow Armistice with the Allies. The Armistice, as well as the subsequent peace treaty of 1947, confirmed the Soviet-Romanian border as it was on 1st January, 1941. Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina remained part of the Soviet Union until 1991, when they became part of the newly independent states of Moldova and Ukraine.

Hungary was the first country apart from Germany, Italy, and Japan to adhere to the Tripartite Pact, signing the agreement on 20th November 1940.In the late 1910s and early 1920s, political instability plagued the country until the regency was established by Miklos Horthy. Horthy, who was a Hungarian nobleman and naval officer, became Regent in 1920.

In Hungary, nationalism was strong as there was a desire by Hungarian nationalists to recover the territories lost through Trianon.

Hungary drew closer to Germany and Italy largely because of the shared desire to revise the peace settlements made.

Due to their pro-German stance, the Hungarians received favourable territorial settlements in the form of territory from German annexed Czechoslovakia in 1939 and Northern Transylvania from Romania in the Vienna awards of 1940. During the invasion of Yugoslavia, the Hungarians permitted German troops to transit through their territory and Hungarian forces also took part in the invasion.

Parts of Yugoslavia were annexed to Hungary; in response, the United Kingdom immediately broke off diplomatic relations. It was these troops that Karoly saw at his train station.  Although Hungary did not participate initially in Operation Barbarossa, on 27th June, Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union.

Again this was a defensive move designed to stave off invasion from Russia, which had shown her expansionist dreams by annexing part of Romania. Hungarian troops like their other Axis counterparts were involved in numerous actions against the Soviets. By the end of 1943, however, the Soviets had gained the upper hand while the Germans found themselves in retreat. In 1944, with Soviet troops advancing toward Hungary, Horthy attempted to reach an armistice with the Allies.

The Germans installed Eichmann Eventually Budapest was taken by the Soviets, after fierce fighting. During the war Karoly saw soldiers from Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Italy. He came under fire from several of these, including his own country’s army. He told me they were all different.

Some were a credit to their country and their uniforms; others were a disgrace to both. Karoly moved to his secondary school in the spring of 1944.

He had missed the first term, in September 1943, as he failed the test for speed writing and French, both of which were new to him. The school had eight classes of thirty-one boys. Latin was not compulsory and fourteen of the boys in Karoly’s class were Jewish, there was no segregation in education in Hungary unlike some other countries.

Although in June 1944, Karoly was studying in Budapest, during the summer holidays, at the end of June and through August and September, he worked in the town hall. The USAF dropped bombs during the day and the Russian air force dropped bombs during the night. Karoly was taught how to use a fire hose, he was part of a young fire-fighters group, and he got to hold the nozzle while the others connected the hose and pumped the water for him. The air-raid sirens were part of the sound track of Karoly’s teenage years. In fact during 1944, Budapest was partly destroyed by air raids.

Karoly would sometimes watch the raids from the relative safety of Gellért Hill. The hill was named after Saint Gerard who was thrown to death from the hill. The famous Hotel Gellért and the Baths can still be found in Gellért Square at the foot of the hill, next to the Liberty Bridge. 

Gellért Hill also played a part in the revolution of 1956 when Soviet tanks fired down into the city from the hill. Karoly watched the allies trying to bomb the bridges over the Danube. What is now the Freedom Bridge was destroyed by allied bombing.   The bridge was built between 1894 and 1896. The last river was inserted into the iron structure by the Emperor Franz Josef himself, and the bridge was originally named after him.

From 24th December 1944 to 13th February 1945, Budapest was besieged. During the build up to this offensive, Karoly was kidnapped and press-ganged by the Romanians. He inadvertently became involved in the push forward, by Romanian and Russian troops, moving towards the siege of Budapest. Budapest suffered major damage caused by the attacking Red Army troops and the defending Third Reich forces. All bridges were destroyed by the Germans. More than 38,000 civilians lost their lives during the conflict.

The Siege of Budapest started with encirclement of the city on 29th December 1944 by the Soviet and Romanian forces. The siege ended when the city unconditionally surrendered on 13th February 1945.Karoly told me that the Romanian soldiers, who occupied his part of Hungary, forced him to the Front Line. They took him from his home in October and he spent two months with ‘those so-called Romanian liberators’ as he described them.

Romania suffered additional heavy casualties fighting in Hungary meaning, by the end of the war, the Romanian army had suffered about 300,000 casualties. In November 1944 Karoly could have become one of those casualties as he was forced, by the Romanian ‘liberators’, to carry German ammunition boxes to the Romanian soldiers on the frontline.

The Romanians had kept the guns and ammunition that had been given to them when they had joined the Germans in the invasion of Russia during Operation Barbarossa.

These frontline troops were under fire from small arms and rifles. They used Karoly as a shield against incoming rounds, hoping the Hungarian soldiers would not shoot at a civilian.

I must have escaped death ‘twenty’ times, at least, Karoly said.

He is not one to exaggerate. Karoly is generally one hundred per cent accurate so any mistakes in this book are my responsibility.

Karoly was aware of over twenty bullets whizzing by him, how many went by that he did not hear due to shouting or other battle noises or through fear and adrenaline, no one knows. After two months, Karoly got a two-day pass for 24th December and 25th December.  Fortunately, almost immediately, on Christmas Day, the Romanian soldiers stationed in his part of Hungary advanced, forgetting about Karoly. 

Karoly managed to stay fifteen kilometres behind the front-line with his family. The Romanian army moved on to the siege of Budapest, Karoly, was safe for the time being, his sister had escape rape and his mother had been spared due to her cooking skills.

Karoly told me more about what happened after the war as well. After the Second World War, with the Soviet forces still stationed in the country, it was easy for the communists to seize power. The army was exercising control over the populace. As a result, the communists and their allied parties claimed 80% of the vote. Of course this was achieved through a combination of vote manipulation, elimination, and by forcing mergers of competing parties. Quickly the Communists established themselves as the dominant party.

In 1945 the wild communist murders started. As the years went by, slowly and surely, local communists gradually took control, aided by those Hungarian communists, who had been in charge in 1919, as they returned to Hungary from their exile in Russia. As they got control, so they started to erode the rural Catholic way of life. They set themselves up as a government and went about the destruction of the village’s way of life.

The communists had the support of the Red Army with all the assistance of a million Russian soldiers. Their first step was to nationalise all the religious schools, religious buildings and, then, they started collective farms.

Soviet style farming was the least of the village’s worries as the communists terrorised everyone and behaved barbarically to the local population. People were scared to celebrate mass. Those who went to church lost their jobs with no explanation.

"Cardinal Mindszenty, the Prince Primate of Hungary, was saved by Franco, of all people, in 1948. Franco had sentenced the defeated communists, in Spain, to prison.

When the Cardinal was arrested, he executed five or six prisoners, and threatened to execute fifteen more if the Cardinal was expelled. The communists backed down!"

József Mindszenty was the head of the Catholic Church, Archbishop of Esztergom. 

Mindszenty was as a steadfast supporter of Church freedom and opponent of communism and he spoke up against the brutal persecution taking place. As a result, he was tortured and given a life sentence in a trial, which took place in1949.

This 'show trial' generated worldwide condemnation, including a United Nations resolution.

The Cardinal was granted political asylum once he was freed in the revolution of 1956, living in the U.S. embassy for 15 years. He was finally allowed to leave the country in 1971. Cardinal Mindszenty died in Vienna, during 1975.

He had been saved by a Fascist and persecuted by the communist regime. He epitomised Hungary’s struggle to be Hungarian, not fascistic and not communist. The communists needed to dismantle the authority of the church and destroy any political threat from other political parties.

As a result, Karoly became a man pursued because he was a religious farmer and a member of the youth wing of the Smallholders’ Party.

The Independent Smallholders, Agrarian Workers and Civic Party, or Független Kisgazda, Földmunkás és Polgári Párt, was reformed in recent years but won no seats.  Founded in 1908, the original party won an overwhelming majority in the first elections after WWII resulting in its leader, Zoltan Tildy, becoming prime minister. The Smallholders-dominated parliament established a republic in 1946 with Tildy as president. He was succeeded as prime minister by Ferenc Nagy. 

However, due to the occupation of the country by the Red Army, the Hungarian Communist Party was able to use a ‘salami tactic’ to break up opponent parties. Widespread election fraud in 1947 led to a government. In 1947 the Communist Party carried out a coup d’état against the rule of the Smallholders’ Party. Though not all democratic institutions were abolished, the Communist Party held power.

The successful and prominent Smallholders’ politicians were either arrested or forced to leave the country. There was basically a communist purge of the opposition parties. Lajos Dinnyés of the Smallholders’ party, remained Prime Minister after the 1947 elections, but his government was controlled by the communists.

Two years later the party was absorbed into a People’s Independent Front, led by the communist Hungarian Working People's Party, establishing a communist people's republic after successful elections. The Smallholders’ Party was dissolved. Scarcely, out of uniform, in 1951, having completed his National Service, at the end of May, Karoly was arrested. 

One night in June, he was taken from his home and taken to prison on a trumped up charge of conspiracy to overthrow the communist government. This happened only once he had been de-mobbed from the army after completing his National Service at the end of May of that year. He was arrested in June, not even a month after his discharge from the army.

He was sentenced to twelve years in prison and arrived at a converted nunnery at Márianosztra on 15th August. Márianosztra is a village in Pest County.

The Monastery of Márianosztra was originally built as a convent for nuns in 1453 where males were banned and was turned into a prison for men in 1980. In the post-war period it was used as a makeshift prison by the communist administration.

It was difficult to house the 636,000 people who were, at different periods over the time, incarcerated during the communist regime’s existence. It was difficult to provide shelter for these waves of prisoners in the existing accommodation so more and more buildings were requisitioned to provide prisons.

To give you an image of life there, in Márianosztra, prisoners had only 250g of bread and one gram of oil per day. Sometimes they had sour cabbage too.  Twice a week they had a small amount of horse meat.

This was not war-time rations; this was six years after the war, not in enemy country but in the place of their birth. In July 1952, the Ministry of Justice wrote a letter offering: civilian food, pay, more visits from outside, freedom in the grounds of the camp and the possibility of early controlled temporary release. In return for all this, the prisoners would have to volunteer to work in a coal mine.

Karoly accepted this offer in order to gain some form of freedom from starvation, to escape the fate of his fellow prisoners who were dying at an alarming rate and to earn some money for his family. From that time, Karoly was trying to assist his old widowed mother with his earnings from the coalmine. Then, in 1956, on 23rd October, the revolution against the communists came.

The revolt against what Karoly called ‘tyrannical, terrorist communists’ had begun. It had the wholehearted support of political prisoners and Karoly’s miners went on a hunger strike.

Out of six hundred and nineteen prisoners, six hundred and four were political. The other fifteen were common criminals who, in the opinion of the other prisoners, deserved to be held in prison because they had committed a crime. On 31st October 1956, the prisoners were freed with the help of some soldiers and young freedom fighters.

Karoly rang his mother at eleven that night, she was terrorised. The communists had thrown her out of her own home and she had been living in a wash-house. He took her home and got solid food for her.

Karoly decided that he would go back to the mine for a short time until things sorted themselves out. However, before that he had to go to the police to obtain the compulsory Personal Identity Document, it was, after all, still a police state.

The policeman heard his story and said he should go back to prison to serve the rest of his sentence, another six, and half years. He went home and weighed up his chances. He would have to leave, he had committed to the revolution by his hunger strike, but the authorities still wanted him to serve over six years for no crime.

Karoly said most people were taught the the three R’s. In communist Hungary only two options were open to political prisoners, The two R’s, run or rope.

To have some faint knowledge of communism in the fifties in Hungary, there were thirty seven forced labour camps with between 800 and 1,500 prisoners in each. There were between 50,000 to 60,000 Hungarians behind barbed wire well after the war and despite it being peace-time and living in a country agriculturally self-sufficient, people had to queue for food every morning.

It was called a ‘People’s Democracy’ yet the inmates of the prisons were ninety-five per cent Catholic. The authorities executed Catholics.

If you should go to Hungary, do not miss the cemetery in XVII district where the names of those slaughtered are buried and where they have their names recorded on a marble plaque.

A group of history teachers have tried to remove those plaques bearing victim’s names but Karoly feels that the memorials to those murdered should stay.

1956 was the year that Karoly left Hungary. He had walked three days to get to Austria. He volunteered as a miner for whichever country would take him. The British miners’ representative came first.

Karoly wanted to work in a coal mine, since it was the most valuable skill he possessed, farmers were not highly sought after. He had gained valuable experience as a miner, at least. He arrived in England on 3rd January 1957 with three others, penniless, with no extra clothing, just the clothes that the Red Cross had given him in Austria.

Arriving in the country with no English, he was a true refugee and he was mentally broken.

His first mass was in Skegness. In those days the mass was in Latin so he felt at home in some way but there were still tears for those he had left behind and for what we had been through. He was pleased about one thing, however, there was no AVO. The AVO or ÁVH was the Hungarian arm of the Russian KGB, a vicious secret police force.

The AVO or ÁVH formed the Hungarian secret police from 1945 until 1956. It was conceived as an external appendage of the KGB, but attained its own, special, home-grown, reputation for brutality during a series