“The Road Up” magazine pre-release. April 4, 1999.
Joseph Karlik
(Editted by M. A. Golub. Author's orphography and punctuation kept. Russian translation pending.)
A story of the World War II seen through the eyes of a Hungarian teenager.
It was 1944. I was 14 years old, I lived and went to school in Budapest, Hungary.
My country was fighting on the side of Germany, not because—and I am sure most Hungarians would agree with me—not because we wanted to fight for German Nazism, but because we didn't want the Stalinist system to over-run our country. (I talk about ‘my country’ but today I am no patriot. I am convinced that too much nationalism—patriotism—this archaic off-shoot of ancient tribalism, is one of the biggest problems that burdens mankind.
A problem that we have to overcome if we ever hope to achieve a significant improvement in the way we exist on this good old planet Earth. I am all for everybody preserving their various cultural heritages—after all, that is what gives the world that “rich tapestry” of various peoples—but those heritages must exclude the old style competitiveness based on race, nationality, religion etc. etc. We just have to learn to live in harmony.
The signs are good, one can see more and more evidence of ‘moves’ in that direction—though it saddens me that the main motivating force behind such moves still seems to be the fear of nuclear weapons instead of the straight-out rejection of war as being an acceptable solution to any problem. But I am digressing… Back to my little story…
It was Christmas Eve when the rumble of heavy artillery fire has reached our very suburb. The rumble was getting louder and louder over the preceding days, as the front line got closer and closer to our home… now we could even see in the darkness the flashes of the artillery pieces in the little suburban valley our windows overlooked… (We were never ‘rich’. My father was a school teacher, but my mother had a way with finances, so that we lived in a nice suburb of Budapest, on a hillside, over looking the above mentioned valley with its nice trees and houses. There was also a large area occupied by a Military Academy—that's were most of the artillery flashes occurred. They must have put up some sort of a resistance… but it didn't last very long…
By the time Christmas Day dawned things were reasonably quite. Cautiously opening the front door and peering out into the street we caught our first glimpses of Russian soldiers. In fact it was only minutes later that one of them was banging on the door, pushing his way in as soon as we opened it…submachine-gun at the ready… searching the house for any possible resistance, I guess… That was my first meeting with the Red Army. The sight of that soldier with his fur hat, padded uniform and his machine gun will always remain a firm fixture in my memory… (The gun, I much later found out, was the Soviet PPSh 1941 model, in a few weeks time it was known all over Hungary by the nickname “davaj guitar” (pronounced “dove-eye guitAroo”, “A” stressed, means “give a guitar”—M.A.G.). The explanation of this term will have to wait a little.
Our quite large, decorated Christmas tree was standing in the corner—and as the soldier was doing his search we took one of the foil-wrapped chocolate decorations of the tree and offered it to him. His face softened into a smile, he shouldered his submachine-gun and left. Before the day was out, there were about two hundred soldiers, just like the first one, stationed in our house. We had two large living-rooms,—the floors were covered from wall-to-wall with blankets and sleeping soldiers. We had a flight of stairs leading up to a ‘manzard’ room under the roof—those stairs were also ‘covered’ with soldiers… they were perching in pairs on the stairs… that's how they got their nights rest. On several occasions in the next few days this mass-of-humanity broke into those slow, soulful and haunting Russian folk-songs and the whole house reverberated with their singing… like scenes out of a Tolstoy or a Dostojevski novel… scenes that are indelibly etched into my memory…
December 1944.
The Red Army was fighting its way west, pushing the German and Hungarian Armies into retreat. The fighting front has arrived at my hometown, Budapest. Before I continue with the events of those months, I would like to mention just what effect the war had on our everyday lives up to that point. Other than the rationing of food, the shortage of petrol, the appearance of wood-burning gas-generators on the back of whatever small number of motorcars there were in existence in those days, the continuos black-outs were the most noticeable signs that there was a war on. All the windows in the houses had either wooden shutters or black paper pasted allover them. The headlights on cars and trucks all had metal covers with just a downward pointing slit on them—I still don't know how they could see were they were going as there were, of course, no street lights at all. From about 1943 onwards the Air Raids became just about a daily event. Very few from the East, from the Soviets, but many, many massive ones, from the South. Americans, from the by then occupied Italian bases, sometimes in small numbers, other times in huge wave after wave of carpet-bombing that often seemed to last for hours. The main indicators of what was going to happen were the “Air Raid” announcements over the Radio Stations. The regular broadcast was stifled into radio-silence at the first sign of an attack, the silent hum of the non-broadcasting radio broken only periodically by the blurted out warning of “Air Raid” to province after province of the Country as the attackers made their way towards their usual target, the capital city, Budapest. It could happen any time, during the day or the night, sometimes day and night. After a while we learned how to tell the size of the raid by the length of the pauses between warnings from one province to the next one.
Long pauses meant slow progress of huge fleets of aircraft with a full load of bombs.
The rule was of course, as soon as the sirens started the shrill wail of the alarm, everybody had to take cover in the designated Shelters. A few of us boys in the neighborhood—remember myself and my friends were all twelve to thirteen years old—tried, and sometimes succeeded, to time our visits to each other in such a way that when an air raid approached we were out in the open, walking towards the top of the hill on which we lived. We reached the huge, covered tourist Look-Out on top by the time the sirens wailed the actual alarm and we had a grandstand view of the proceedings—the destruction of our beautiful home town. A sight never to be cherished—and never to be forgotten. The seemingly hundreds of silvery 'dots' glinting in the sunshine—American “Liberator” bombers they were, we later found out—the white puffs of smoke from the thousands of exploding anti-aircraft shells, drifting into each other, eventually forming a hazy cloud under the sea of glinting dots—seemingly ineffective, but at least keeping the bastards high in the sky…
One occasion we did witness a hit. One white puff of smoke smashed into one of the glinting, silvery dots—a small black plume of smoke was added to the blue sky-white haze-dots of silver scene. It seemed to add sudden meaning to the constant rumble of shells exploding in the air, bombs exploding in peoples homes—and at long last, at least one black plume tracing a cork-screw pattern towards the ground… a few moments later two small white dots emerged from the corkscrew—two of the crew parachuted… We, boys in the Look-Out, noted where the plane crashed. It was another one of the forested hills surrounding our town. We judged it to be about five or six kilometers away from were we were. We started of immediately. By some fluke of a minor miracle, about an hour later we were right on the spot before anyone else ever got there.
It was on the following day when we tried to re-visit the site, that we found it surrounded by army and police, we couldn't get near it. The police-guard was mumbling something about ‘unexploded bombs’ and ‘fuel tanks that could explode any minute'. Little did they know that the day before we, four of us boys, were jumping all over the wreckage, exploring it thoroughly. I remember ‘souveneering’ a little metal box, about 12×8×3centimeter with two, about 12cm spring loaded arms sticking out of it. I didn't know what it was, but I remember thinking: it might have something to do with bomb-release. (I took it home at the time, but it seemed to have disappeared when the earlier mentioned, stair-perching mass of Soviet soldiers occupied our home,—together with a lot of other things, but more about that later…).
Back to our first spotting the American “Liberator” bomber wreckage. Beside the little metal souvenir box, there was one other item we were seriously considering to ‘take home’. It was one of the landing wheels that broke free from the body of the plane, with couple of struts still attached to it. It was all rubber, fully inflated and leaning against one of the many trees of the forested crash-site. One of the most acute shortages of our wartime existence was leather for repairing soles of shoes. For a long time by then, old car tyres were cut up and used as a substitute in shoe repairs. As this wheel towered by about a meter over our thirteen-yers-old heads, we were ecstatic with the thought: just imagine how many pairs of shoes could be repaired with that quantity of rubber?….
We couldn't budge that wheel. Even if we could move it some, we would have never got it out of the forest with all the trees and bushes in the way… But we were still determined to try. The following day we went back to the site with coils of rope and levering bars, but as I have already mentioned, by then the site was surrounded by soldiers and police and we could not get near “our” wheel.
As boys we thought it was the smart thing to do to go out into the open when it looked like an Air-raid coming up—just to see what's happening. On one occasion this attitude gave me a real lesson in what it is like to be genuinely in “fear for your life”. I happened to be walking home, taking a shortcut across a huge piece of vacant land which had a lot of pine trees on it, but nothing in the way of shelter. Another air-raid must have been in progress, this time unknown to me. I heard the ‘hummmm’ of airplane motors, but I was never prepared for what happened next. The anti-aircraft guns opened fire and they must have been aiming right above where I was… once the shells started to explode high in the air, the fragments started to rain back towards earth, each making that horrible zzzeeee-wheeee-zheeee whistling sound…I knew what the damned pieces looked like, you could see plenty of them on the ground from previous occasions. Pieces of steel, mostly about 50-60 millimeters long, about 10mm thick, width about the same… and the edges of this shrapnel were jagged like hell… And when the air is filled with that horrible whistling sounds, with thousands of them raining towards you, you sure learn the meaning of the word “fear”. The irony of it all being, that this horrible danger came from our own “defences”. Anyway, I have never before or since pressed myself so hard against the trunk of a tree, trying to become one with the somewhat protective wood.
A few months later, on that same piece of sparsely wooded vacant block of land close to my home, I have experienced another shock far worst than physical fear for personal safety.
This was about a month after the Red Army laid siege to Budapest. German army units were fighting within the encircled, what used to be the medieval fortification of the former Royal Palace. As far as I knew the siege was still on, one could hear the constant rumble of the artillery fire. It was winter, there was still snow around. I was taking the usual short-cut home when I saw three Red Army soldiers, machine-guns at the ready, herding five soldiers in German uniforms, obviously Prisoners-of-War, having made a break somehow from the encircled fort. The five Germans where walking in front, disarmed, with both hands up on their heads, in the pose of total surrender.
I was about twenty meters from the group when the Reds, without any apparent reason or whatever, suddenly opened fire with their machine-guns and mowed down the Germans. Two-hundred odd rounds of ammunition left the five bodies in a horrible mess. I could see bits of brains in the blood-soaked caps lying next to the grotesquely twisted bodies… The Reds just walked on, it was up to us civilians to bury bodies later.
I was standing in the snow, looking at the slight vapor mist rising from those warm pools of blood collected on and around the twisted bodies that lay in the snow. My fourteen-year-old mind was stunned, incapable of forming an immediate opinion. But an impression formed in that fourteen-year-old mind that has never left me. An impression that, after more than fifty years, is still with me. For it took years for the vision of that blood-warm rising mist to crystallize in my mind into a prism of sharpness that focuses its pin-point light on one unescapable fact: There is something wrong with human mentality that creates circumstances such as this. Circumstances that sweep people into situations where individually they can not be blamed for what they are doing, because our so-called civilization dictates the actions that must be taken. Circumstances that create an atmosphere of kill or be killed, dulls all senses away from realizing that respect for life is the first huge stepping-stone that can raise humanity towards what must be the ultimate goal of all human beings: survival of our species on this Planet, and ultimately, the attainment of such moral and ethical standards that are worthy of dissemination in the wider Universe.
But back to Christmas 1944, the time when that first Red soldier walked into our home. Across the street from my family's home, lived a family who managed to organize a refuge for children “Protected By The Swedish Red Cross”. A huge, properly painted sign to this effect was fastened to the gate leading to the front garden, another huge sign on the entry-door to the house. Most of the children from the neighborhood moved into this refuge. I, being fourteen, also qualified. There were about thirty children, the rooms was pretty cramped, we all slept on makeshift mattresses laid edge to edge. When you had to go for a wee-wee during the night, you had to clamber over all the other Kids to get to the toilets. As some of the kids where girls getting close to my age, I found this part of our existence rather enjoyable.
And I must say the Red Army respected our “refuge” status to an amazing degree. Especially the front-line troops. The ones who did the fighting. Sure they came to visit—first probably to check that no military funny-business is going on, but later they brought us food, the same stuff they ate. I will never forget that thick vegetable soup, more like stew, with bits of meat floating in it, that was distributed from the kitchen where ever they cooked it, to the troops in a huge steel pot-on-wheels drawn by a horse. The pot looked about one cubic-meter capacity and the soup was ladled out of that into the soldiers field-tins, or in our case, into the cooking-pots of our refuge.
I particularly remember the visit of one group of officers. One of them, a captain I think he was, hugged me, the fourteen-year-old, so tightly and for so long—I remember thinking: this guy must have a son back home… probably my age and thousands of kilometers away… It was a very emotional moment, I can still feel the coarseness of the material, a Red Army officer's overcoat against my face in that tight hug…
The “fighting troops” soon moved on. Other Red Army units, “occupation” troops moved in and things gradually got worst. They still respected the children's refuge, the Red Cross sign. We still got occasional helpings of the thick soup from the horse drawn one-meter pot-on-wheels. But the frequency of screams in the night—or during the day for that matter—increased. Woman being raped… Calling: “Patroll, Patroll” hoping the Military Police Patroll will turn up… The MP's actually made a show of turning up, but usually they fired a few shots into the air as they got nearer to where the screams came from, thus giving a chance for the culprits to clear out…
I remember a woman on a makeshift stretcher, made out of a wardrobe door, seemingly lifeless, apparently in a sort of post-hysterics faint… her elderly husband holding her hand and telling us between sobs how they—what seemed like about a hundred soldiers—raped his wife… one after the other…
There were two words of Russian I think every citizen of Hungary got to know: “Davaj chasi…” (pronounced as “dove-eye chassee”—M.A.G.) (The spelling is colloquial. I know it as: “Quick, your watch…”)
On one occasion the Father of the family in whose house our refuge was, was requested by a pair of Officers to go to a house and do something about whatever the problem was. I do not know what was said, but my fourteen years were apparently the nearest to another adult, so he took me with him. The house we went to was obviously a scene of some desperate struggle, every bit of furniture turned over or smashed, curtains, cushions torn… finally in two separate rooms we found two separate young women, both about mid-twenty, shot dead, semi-nude in torn clothing… lying on blood-soaked sheets… staring at the ceiling with open, forever glazed eyes… obviously the victims of some males who couldn't get their way with them… or punished them for something after they got their way….
All we could do was to mark the place for another grave-digging party… Grave digging was a full-time job in the next few weeks. As the winter snow thawed, it became imperative to bury the many dead bodies lying everywhere on the side of the roads. Some where civilians caught unintentionally in some crossfire, others were shot with a ‘reason’. I remember one body with a sign on it, in Hungarian: “This is the fate of anyone who lifts a hand against the Red Army”. Later there were the bodies of German soldiers trying to fight their way out of their more or less self-created trap. These soldiers lay with trousers opened up, genital janked out for all the world to see… Some macabre ritual to prove ultimate victory over another man?…
I am sure the German Army was guilty of many equal or worst atrocities in many places. And I must reiterate and emphasize: I believe we can not blame the Armies or the individual soldiers for what happens in war. It is the very concept of war that we, as members of the human race, must reject. We must find ways to alter our very thinking processes, to eliminate from our vocabulary not only words like WAR, but words like GREED and HATE, the causes of war. And eliminate not only those words from our vocabulary, but we also have to eliminate the concepts they stand for from our way of thinking. This is not an easy task. It is a very difficult task to undo thousands of years evolution of the Human Mind in this unacceptable direction, but if we as individuals all make an effort to reverse the unacceptable trend, we will succeed eventually.
After all, there is also that glorious evolution of the human mind that enables us to see these problems, to recognize the danger of continuing on that “wrong” tangent.
I believe there is HOPE for us.
I believe HOPE is the most beautiful word in ANY language.
The end.