Iron Curtain (23 page)

The explicit goal of the Soviet special camps in eastern Germany was not labor or murder but isolation: the special camps were meant to cut dubious people off from the rest of society, at least until the new Soviet occupiers had got their bearings. They were preventative rather than punitive, designed primarily to quarantine people who might oppose the system, not to incarcerate people who had already done so. In the Soviet Gulag some contact with the outside world was possible, and inmates could even sometimes receive visitors. By contrast, during the first three years of the existence of the postwar German camps, prisoners could not send or receive letters, and they had no news from the outside world whatsoever. In many cases, their families did not know what had happened to them or where they were. They had simply disappeared.

Over time, conditions did improve, in part thanks to pressure from outside. The sudden disappearance of so many young people made family members frantic, and they bombarded officials with requests for information. German authorities were usually of no help. In 1947, a local official advised family members in Thuringia that they “might be able to learn more from the Russian prosecutor in Weimar.”
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Soviet officials in turn passed such requests up the chain of command and, in the general chaos, people got lost. One German student disappeared in 1945 and was finally “found” by his parents only in 1952.
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That was four years after the Soviet military administration in Germany had agreed to allow prisoners to notify their family members of their locations.
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In that same year, the NKVD had also increased the food allowances for the camps, in order to reduce the high death rate and to mollify the East German leaders who were petitioning the Soviet authorities for change.
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The arrests, along with the prolonged detention of Wehrmacht soldiers in the Soviet Union (some would remain there until the 1950s), became a major source of friction between the public and the new authorities. But they also helped create a new set of standards for public behavior. Most of the newly liberated Germans were not communists and did not know what to expect from the Soviet occupation forces. The arrest and incarceration of thousands of young people on the slightest suspicion of any form of “anti-Soviet” politics immediately set the tone for others. It was a first lesson, for many, on
the need to censor oneself in public. If a teenager like
Gisela Gneist could be arrested for talking about democracy, then the penalty for more serious political involvement would obviously be much higher.

Former prisoners and their families were even more afraid. After their release, they rarely spoke about what had happened to them. Lehmann, who had been in the Ketschendorf camp in Germany as well as the Soviet Gulag, didn’t tell his wife about either until after 1989.
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The use of selective violence and the creation of camps for potential enemies of the regime were also part of a broader Soviet policy. The Red Army and the NKVD knew that in societies as uncertain and unstable as those of postwar Eastern Europe, mass arrests could backfire. But arrests carefully targeted at outspoken people could have a wider echo: if you arrest one such person, ten more will be frightened.

The Russians who arrived in Budapest in January 1945 knew little about the nation whose capital they had just conquered. Most assumed they had arrived in a country peopled entirely by Nazi collaborators—Hungary had been a German ally during the invasion of the USSR—and they were sometimes incredulous to find themselves treated as
liberators. As in Germany, they were under orders to arrest all of the fascists they could identify. But whereas in Germany they had looked for Werewolves and in Poland they tracked down the Home Army, in Hungary they seemed unsure of how, exactly, a fascist might be identified.

As a result, the first arrests in Hungary were often arbitrary. Men were stopped on the street, told they would be taken away to do “a little work”—
malenkaya rabota
in Russian, a phrase that became Hungarianized as
málenkij robot—
and marched off in convoys. They would then disappear deep into the Soviet Union and not return for many years. At the very beginning, it seemed almost anyone would suffice. An eyewitness from a town in eastern Hungary remembered that within days of entering his town, soldiers began collecting people: “Not only men but also children, sixteen- to seventeen-year-old kids and even a thirteen-year-old. No matter how we cried and begged, they did not react, just held their guns and told everyone to get out of the houses with sometimes nothing on, no clothes, no food, just the way they were there … We did not know where they were taken, they were just saying
málenkij robot
,
málenkij robot
.”
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Some were considered suspicious because they appeared to be wealthy or because they owned books.
George Bien, then aged sixteen, was arrested along with his father because he owned a shortwave radio. He was interrogated as a spy, forced to confess, and made to sign a thirty-page Russian document, of which he did not understand a single word. Bien eventually wound up in the camps of
Kolyma, returning home only in 1955.
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Soviet troops also seemed to be under orders to look for Germans, who they had been informed would be quite numerous. In practice, this meant that people with German-sounding names (very common in the former Hapsburg realms) were immediately treated as war criminals. József Révai, who was to become one of the most important Hungarian communists, complained to Rákosi in early January that Russian soldiers seemed to have “fixed quotas” they had to fulfill, and that they took as Germans “people who did not speak a word of German—people who were proven antifascists, had been interned.”
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The result of these policies was that somewhere between 140,000 and 200,000 Hungarians were arrested and deported to the USSR after 1945. Most of them wound up in the camps of the Gulag.
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Many remained
in Hungary as well. Internment—imprisonment without trial—had become common in Hungary in the late 1930s, but now it was expanded. “People’s courts” were created to try, sentence, and in some cases execute Nazi collaborators. A few of these trials were made into major public events, in the hope that they would educate Hungarians about the crimes of the past. Even at the time many observed that ordinary Hungarians mostly dismissed them as “victors’ justice.” A few years later, some of the verdicts would be overturned, on the grounds that it was time to drop the “retaliatory character of the punishments.”
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Nor were they perceived as fair. Although decisions about internment and trials were nominally under Hungarian control, it was widely assumed that the NKVD influenced the courts.
A. M. Belyanov, the Soviet official delegated to oversee security matters in Hungary, at one point berated a Hungarian politician about the slow pace of trials: “He urged that the people’s tribunals work faster, he criticized them for negotiating and talking too much. He wanted them to announce the verdict right after the prosecution speech. I told him that we had studied the Soviet justice system and there, in political cases, witnesses are heard publicly at the court. He smiled unwillingly and showed me his big yellow teeth, which were like those of a tiger …”
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The Red Army also held its own trials near Vienna, in an elegant villa in
the resort town of
Baden. There was no pretense about Hungarian sovereignty there:
Soviet military tribunals simply convicted Hungarians of political crimes under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code, just as in Germany.
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The number of the accused was very high, and the nature of the charges very broad. A series of secret decrees had instructed the new Hungarian police forces to arrest, among others, former members of extreme right movements, including the fascist
Arrow Cross movement, which had ruled Hungary during the final days of the war, from October 1944 until March 1945; military officers who had served under Admiral Horthy, Hungary’s interwar authoritarian leader, from 1920 until the Arrow Cross takeover; and also pub owners, tobacconists, barbers, and all of those who—in another hopelessly broad formulation—“
due to their regular contacts with the public were the primary disseminators of fascist propaganda
” (my italics). In practice, anyone who had ever worked for or praised any of the prewar governments, party leaders, or politicians was at risk. The NKVD, along with the new security police, also acquired lists of young people who had been members of the
levente
, Admiral Horthy’s paramilitary youth organization, and began tracking them down, just as they had tracked down Hitler Youth and alleged Werewolves in Germany. In total, Hungarian and Soviet security police interned some 40,000 Hungarians between 1945 and 1949. Around Budapest alone, the new regime built sixteen internment camps with a capacity to contain up to 23,000 prisoners.
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Not all of those arrested had collaborated with the Nazis. On the contrary, from the moment of the Red Army’s entry into Hungary, the new Hungarian secret police—backed, of course, by the Hungarian communist party and its Soviet mentors—began to seek out and identify a different sort of “fascist” as well. Although the Hungarian wartime underground was never as large or as well organized as its Polish equivalent, there had been cells of anti-German opposition even at the highest levels of society. Immediately after the war’s end (much earlier than Hungarian chronology usually has it) the NKVD and the Hungarian secret police made these antifascists into a target. They were too independent, they believed in national sovereignty, and they knew how to create clandestine organizations. Many supported the Smallholders’ Party, which played a large role in the provisional government and did actually win elections in 1945.

In a truly democratic postwar Eastern Europe, they would, like the Polish Home Army, have become the political elite. But even before the Hungarian
government was fully under communist control, former members of the anti-German resistance knew they were under surveillance. István Szent-Miklósy, a member of one such secret grouping, later wrote that he and his friends “felt somehow hunted but could not give any tangible reason” immediately after the war’s end. Unlike their Polish counterparts, these were not armed partisans: Szent-Miklósy’s group was, he wrote, “without formal structure, without lists of names, without pledges, emblems or identity cards, without clearly delineated rules, without even an encompassing philosophy.”
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Many had been part of earlier groups such as the
Hungarian Community, an antifascist (and also anti-Semitic) secret society, or the wartime Hungarian Independence Movement, which was also more of an anti-German discussion circle than a full-fledged resistance organization. Some of the group were among the founding members of the postwar Smallholders’ Party, and as such were trying to cooperate with a regime they thought might become a democracy. Eventually they were hardly more than a group of friends who were vaguely anti-Soviet and who met in one another’s apartments to exchange concerns.

In the end, they became objects of special interest not because of anything they’d done but because the secret police got hold of a written summary of their wartime resistance activities. Then they were watched even more carefully, as Szent-Miklósy described:

Szent-Miklósy was arrested in December 1946. He was taken to the secret police headquarters on Andrássy Street, where he was tortured. He was made to stand with his forehead angled against the wall and his arms outstretched for hours, and forced to shout, “I am the murderer of my wife and my mother,” both of whom, he had been told, were also under arrest.
He was put on trial, along with a large group of coconspirators. All were accused of agitating to overthrow “the democratic state” and jailed for ten years. During the trial Szent-Miklósy “confessed,” at great length, to crimes he had never committed. His arrest was a kind of preemptive strike, typical of that time: he and his circle hadn’t actually done anything of any significance—but the authorities feared they might.

A similarly preemptive strike against the independent-minded clergy followed soon after. The chief victim of that round was a charismatic and energetic Franciscan monk, Father Szaléz Kiss. Father Kiss ran a large and successful Christian youth group called Kedim, in and around the town of
Gyöngyös, just fifty miles east of Budapest. Over the course of 1945, the new Hungarian secret police began to take a special interest in Gyöngyös because the communists had done particularly badly there in the elections of that year, and because the peasant-based Smallholders’ Party had done particularly well.

Their Soviet mentors became even more interested when, beginning in September 1945, unknown gunmen murdered several Red Army soldiers stationed in the region. Under pressure to do something, the new Hungarian secret police launched one of their first big investigations. They arrested and detained some sixty people, including high-school-aged members of Kedim, and interrogated them all at great length. Their goal was to establish an elaborate spiderweb of connections: between Kedim and the Smallholders’ Party, between the Smallholders’ Party and the “Anglo-Saxon powers,” between the
U.S. embassy and Father Kiss, and between Father Kiss and the young men who allegedly murdered the Russian soldiers. Put together, these links were said to expose a “fascist terror conspiracy group” that was, at least in the imagination of the secret policemen, attempting to bring back the old regime.