Iron Curtain (51 page)

“REACTIONARY CLERICS” WERE obvious targets in the paranoid atmosphere of High Stalinism. But there were many other potential enemies. Following a series of strikes and economic disasters, the Polish secret police decided that it needed “a thorough study of the workforce on the shop floor and at all levels of the administration … intelligence concerning the precise political influences to be found among the workforce, in the past and at present.” They rummaged through their files and identified
twenty-five categories of “enemies.” These included anyone who had been in the Home Army, anyone who had been at all active in the prewar social democratic movement or any other political party, and anyone who had served in the Polish armed forces abroad. Many who had been released from prison in 1947 or had accepted amnesty after the war immediately fell under new suspicion too. Eventually, this list grew to forty-three categories. By 1954, according to Andrzej Paczkowski, the “register of criminal and suspicious elements” contained 6 million names, or one in three adults. In 1948 there were 26,400 political prisoners, by mid-1950 there were 35,200, and by 1954 there were 84,200 political prisoners in the country, incarcerated all over Poland.
³

Similar processes unfolded across the bloc. In Hungary, the secret police kept its focus on “potential” enemies. In East
Germany the Stasi sought to identify real and imagined Western spies. In Czechoslovakia police sought out anyone who had opposed the communist coup d’état of 1948, or anyone who might be presumed to oppose it. The Romanians launched a special operation in May 1950, targeting any remaining government ministers from the period 1919–45, including some very elderly men, as well as Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic priests.
⁴

In this second wave of investigations and arrests, peasants and rural landowners were frequently victims too. In the autumn of 1952, the secret police arrested tens of thousands of Polish peasants who had failed to comply with requirements for compulsory delivery of grain.
⁵
Between 1948 and 1953, some 400,000 Hungarian peasants were arrested for failing to deliver their production quotas, and an extraordinary 850,000 were fined.
⁶
In 1949, nearly 3,000 rural Romanian landowners were evicted from their properties within the space of a few minutes to make way for collectivization.
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But mass, Soviet-style arrests created a Soviet-style problem: Where should all of these unreliable enemies be kept? In Poland, authorities simply allowed prisons to become overcrowded and let conditions deteriorate. Wacław
Beynar, a former Home Army partisan, was arrested in 1948 and found himself in an airless cell in the Rakowiecka prison in Warsaw. So humid was the cell that prisoners, among them many veterans of the Warsaw Uprising, removed their shirts and waved them in the air in order to create the illusion of a breeze. There was no toilet in the cell, and prisoners were taken out to use one only twice a day, a system that quickly became a form of torture for those who got diarrhea from the prison food. During interrogations, Beynar
was beaten “primitively,” hit in the face, kicked in the side, and given a death sentence, which he heard “with neutrality: I just couldn’t believe it, that I’m a criminal.”

Eventually Beynar was reprieved, given a long prison sentence, and sent to Wronki, a much larger prison near
Poznań that held some 4,000 mostly political “criminals.” Upon arrival, “we all cried like children,” he remembered, though the prisoner who suffered most was one who had been in the camp at Dachau. To him it felt simply like déjà vu.
⁸
Another fellow prisoner was
Stanisław Szostak, arrested along with General Wilk outside Vilnius in 1944, then rearrested in
Szczecin in 1948 and immediately thrown into a cell with Nazi collaborators. Wronki, he recalled, was “full of lice, lacked air, was hot in the summer and cold in the winter.” Both he and Beynar would be freed only in 1956.
⁹
Lublin Castle, a forbidding medieval structure that had been used as an emergency prison and execution site for Home Army soldiers in 1944 and 1945, also remained open until 1954. Its gloom, dirt, and silence were thought to increase prisoners’ terror.
¹⁰

Not everyone went to a domestic prison. Tens of thousands of Poles were sent straight into the
Soviet Gulag, as were many Germans. Many of the latter had been picked up directly by the NKVD—sometimes off the streets of West Berlin—and put directly on trial in the USSR. Several hundred cases of Germans arrested in Germany after the war, tried in Moscow, and put to death there have since been documented.
¹¹
The Hungarians also adopted another Soviet penal practice and began sending ex-aristocrats, prewar military officers, former landowners, and “politically untrustworthy people” living near Hungary’s Austrian or Yugoslav borders not to prison but into exile in small villages in eastern Hungary. This policy of relocation had two additional advantages: it freed up large apartments in major cities for the new legions of party bureaucrats who needed suitable accommodations, and it provided rural communities with a new pool of unskilled labor, though not necessarily a productive one.
¹²
A similar policy in Romania led to the removal of some 44,000 people living near the Romanian–Yugoslav border. Entire families were loaded onto trains, taken to a sparsely populated region, the Ba˘ra˘gan steppe, and left in fields to fend for themselves.
¹³

Still others were sent to
concentration camps. By 1949 the NKVD’s Gulag camps in Germany (described in
Chapter 5
) had been disbanded on the grounds that they were attracting too much Western attention and creating bad publicity for the Soviet occupation regime. But at about the same
time, other Eastern European governments founded brand-new camp systems. Although not part of the Soviet Gulag, they were modeled on it. As in the USSR, prisoners were meant to work in exchange for food and were meant to be “useful” to the economy.

Between 1949 and 1953 the Czechoslovak regime maintained a group of eighteen such camps near Jáchymov, in northwest Bohemia, where prisoners worked in uranium mines, extracting raw materials for the new Soviet nuclear weapons program. The prisoners were given no special clothing or protection against radiation, and death rates were high.
¹⁴
The Romanian regime also created a network of camps, the best known of which were built along the Danube–Black Sea canal, a Soviet-backed construction project with dubious economic returns. At its height, the canal “employed” some 40,000 prisoners, about a quarter of the 180,000 Romanian camp inmates.
¹⁵
The
Bulgarian regime also built several notably sadistic labor camps (and maintained them well into the 1960s and 1970s, long after the majority of Soviet camps had been disbanded).
¹⁶
Despite its “anti-Stalinist”
political orientation, Tito’s Yugoslavia built labor camps too, including one on an Adriatic island, where water was scarce and the main torment was thirst.
¹⁷

Even on this list of grim institutions,
Recsk, Hungary’s most notorious labor camp, deserves a special place. Internment—imprisonment without trial—had been a feature of the Hungarian system from the very beginning, and internment camps had been constructed all around Budapest and other major cities.
¹⁸
But by 1950–51, the regime considered these temporary arrangements neither harsh enough nor secure enough to deal with especially dangerous political criminals. In search of a better solution, the Hungarian leadership turned for advice to
Rudolf Garasin.

After his wartime exploits as a marginally successful partisan (described in
Chapter 4
), Garasin had returned to the Soviet Union. There, according to his official biography, he served as the deputy director of a state printing company until 1951, when he suddenly returned to Hungary and took a series of high-ranking government jobs, first in the Justice Ministry and then in the Interior Ministry.
¹⁹
In an internal party questionnaire, he later described himself with a little bit more detail as having been “commander of a unit of
Siberian military construction in the forests around Novosibirsk” during the early 1940s—an era when “construction in the forests around Novosibirsk” was almost exclusively carried out by the Soviet Gulag.
²⁰
In Hungarian government archives, his name also appears in correspondence
with Mátyás Rákosi, with whom he discussed “the situation in labor camps” on several occasions. In June 1953, for example, he sent Rákosi a report containing statistics and information on people who had been interned as well as the numbers of people employed by the camp directorate.
²¹

Though it was never publicly stated, leading party members, government officials, and prisoners all in fact regarded Garasin as the man who had “imported” the techniques of the Soviet Gulag to Hungary.
²²
His reappearance in Budapest in 1951 coincided with the creation of a new Directorate for Public Works—the Hungarian acronym is KÖMI—in December. This new department was supposed to support “on the one hand the interests of the people’s economy, and on the other hand the interests of law enforcement.”
²³
In other words, just like the Soviet Gulag, KÖMI aimed to create profitable companies that would make use of prisoner labor in factories, quarries, and construction projects. The department was first part of the Justice Ministry, as was Garasin. In 1952, both Garasin and the department were shifted to the Interior Ministry. By January 1953, KÖMI “employed” some 27,000 prisoners.

Recsk was only one of the camps in Garasin’s empire, a vast department that also included notoriously disorganized transit and internment camps at Kistarcsa, Kazinbarcika, and Tiszalök. But Recsk held the most prominent and distinguished prisoners, and Recsk’s existence was shrouded in the deepest secrecy. It was not given an official number, as were other camps, and prisoners there were forbidden any contact with the outside world. Few documents are available on the camp’s early days—possibly because the decision to build it was made by János Kádár, Hungary’s later leader.
²⁴

Recsk also became, in Hungarian national memory, a symbol not only of secrecy but of the absurd twists fate could hand out to people in the era of High Stalinism. Recsk only existed for a short time—it opened in 1950 and was dissolved in October 1953—but in that period people became prisoners there for political reasons, economic reasons, or for nothing in particular. Many of the prisoners were Smallholders or social democrats, especially social democrats who had opposed the merger of their party with the communist party. Others were former aristocrats, or people with foreign contacts—even very slight foreign contacts. One prisoner, Aladár Györgyey, was a student of art history who briefly befriended a French student visitor.
²⁵
Another man was sent there after his car crashed into Rákosi’s car. He had been late to a wedding and was in a hurry.
²⁶
György Faludy, the Hungarian poet, was sent
to Recsk after he returned to the country from exile in the United States. He became active in the Social Democratic Party, went to work for its newspaper, there made the acquaintance of several people swept up in the show trials of the time—and was sentenced as an American spy.
²⁷

As in previous waves of arrests, a large number of Recsk inmates were also former members of the wartime antifascist resistance. One of them—the member of a group that in 1944 broke away from the Hungarian regime in order to fight the Germans—was beaten up during interrogation by a guard who shouted “someone who was able to organize a plot in 1944 can easily be an enemy of the people after 1945.”
²⁸
The regime wanted them out of the way even before they had begun to think about starting to fight again.

By comparison to the vast Soviet camps in whose shadow it was built, Recsk was very small. At its height, Recsk held only 1,700 prisoners, and many of the buildings used on or near the site—those where the staff lived, for example—were just large farmhouses left over from before the war. The camp itself was in a cleared piece of forest; the quarry was a short walk away; the guards lived in a small manor house nearby. On the day I visited, in 2009, not much remained of the barracks. One or two have been rebuilt to house a museum on the site, but the rest are gone, their locations indicated by a sign or a mark on the map. Local archaeologists have marked out the other important sites—the location of the punishment cell, the foundations of the other barracks, the entrance to the camp—but the overwhelming impression is one of mud, the same mud Faludy described as so thick the men lost their boots in it.

Like the Soviet camps after which it was modeled, Recsk was built from scratch by prisoners, who then cut timber and worked in a quarry to “earn” their food, which they ate standing up outside, in sunshine, snow, or rain, as Faludy also remembered:

As in the Gulag, there was a hierarchy in Recsk—former social democrats were treated better than former members of center-right parties, for example, and some prisoners were allowed to collaborate and become foremen. The prisoners called them
nachalniks
, the Russian word for “boss.” Also as in the Gulag there were elaborate systems of control and punishment. The prisoners were regularly made to stand and be counted, no matter the weather. This took a long time because the guards’ knowledge of numbers was so weak. Those who disobeyed any of the rules could be put in a punishment barrack and deprived of food or could be sent to spend the night lying on a plank in a “wet” cell, where water seeped in from the sides, sometimes knee-deep. To observe all of these Soviet innovations, and presumably to offer suggestions for improvement, Soviet advisers paid periodic visits to the camp, as did Rákosi. As in the USSR a Potemkin village was created in anticipation of their arrival: prisoners were cleaned, workplaces were tidied up, flowers were even planted around the camp perimeter.