Magyar News, 2001. szeptember-2002. augusztus (12. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
2002-01-01 / 5. szám
I was watching a documentary on the television about the desperate life of the Afghan people, specially the women. It was very upsetting, and emotionally disturbing. That was the time I received this article from Erika Papp. I held on to it till the documentary ended and still under the emotional experience I started to read it. I decided that this might be the best time for our readers to read it and think about the world we live in. Editor Together with tens of thousands of other Hungarians, Magdolna Rohr got to the Soviet Union, to forced labor camps, at age seventeen. Instead of Hungarian schools, she graduated from the "University of the Gulag." There was a time, when 12 million people were held prisoner in some 40,000 camps at the same time, from the Kola Peninsula to the Caucasus. Due to the cruelty, freezing temperatures and hunger, many millions of them never saw their homes again. The majority of those who returned, as did Magdolna Rohr and her husband, Károly Pintér who had been dragged away as a home guard (levente), could never get back on their feet again. They carried a stigma, they were under surveillance for decades. Mrs. Károly Pintér, née Magdolna Rohr, retired as the head of a hotel accounting supervisory group. Today, she is one of the mainstays of the Gulag Foundation, and the spokesperson for the human rights of over 400 former Hungarian Gulag inmates. She was not yet 17 , when she was arrested by two members of the Soviet military guard, on September 23rd, 1945 January. "They appeared at our apartment at Horthy Miklós Avenue #1, presently Bartók Béla Avenue. Of course I didn't know why, at the time. My parents weren't home, only my grandmother; I saw them again only eight years later. The military guards collected my jewelry, I never got it back. Previous to this, my girlfriend Borbála Marczin and I had made the acquaintance of two young men, István Herczeg and Kornél Tiefenbeck. However, István Herczeg wanted to defect in the summer of 1945, but was caught. Only later did it come to light that the names of three of us were in his address book. For the Soviet military guard, this constituted a "gang of four conspirators", and from this they created the charge of spying, treason and organizing against the Soviets." I presume you were not involved in politics at the time. "Not at all, and I never had a weapon in my hands, although according to one of the charges, I had offered armed resistance to the Soviets. When I worked in the Reparations Office in 1990,1 asked one of the security guards for his pistol , so at least I might be able to say: once in my life I had a weapon in my hands." Robbed of Youth: Teenage Girl in the Gulag I István Stefka’s interview in the Magyar Nemzet. Translated by Erika Papp Faber What career were you preparing for? "I attended a business school, but because of the war, I had completed only one year. I don't rightly know what I would have become. At any rate, instead of the business course, I graduated from the Soviet 'university' of the Gulag." Did they interrogate you? "They always interrogated at night. Moreover, they (fragged me hither and yon. First I was kept in a barracks at Üllői Avenue, then they took me to Szombathely, to the so-called “Owl's Fortress.”(Bagolyvár) Several days later, I was interrogated in Eisenstadt, Austria. The interpreter didn't speak Hungarian very well, but just enough to order me to sign the pages written in Cyrillic letters." And you signed everything. "I signed it, because I didn't know any Russian. The slogan was, if I sign everything, and the interrogation is over, they'll let me go home." Did they beat you? "Only at first. When they took me in, an officer beat my head with his pistol. According to the interpreter, he said: 'Talk, because I can shoot you dead too, and nobody will ever know what happened to you.'" Did you, a teenager, understand what was going on around you? Were you very much afraid? "I had already had a horrible experience. The advancing Russian soldiers had raped me during the siege of Budapest. I was terrified of them. Maybe that also contributed to my signing everything." But they didn't let you go home. "No. From Austria, they brought my arrested friends and me back to Balatonfiired, where, on January 31st, 1946, the military tribunal of the 7th Soviet Army sentenced us to ten years, to be spent in a correctional and reformatory concentration camp. As there was no interpreter, we figured this out when they showed the ten years by hand. To this day, we don't know exactly what the military judge had read against us. Then they took us down to the cellar, where we were very cold, and my girlfriend and I sadly realized that this was no joke." Then what happened? "They took us to Sopronkőhida, where 15 of us were in one cell. It was stuffy. Very soon, in February, in frightful cold, they loaded several thousands of us into freight cars, and took us to the Soviet Union." Was the trip long? "We traveled three and a half weeks to Lemberg." How did you keep yourselves clean? "Nohow. They divided the freight car into three sections. In the width of the door, they set up barbed wire on both sides, the guard was in the middle. We had to take care of our necessities in full view of the guard and the others, through a hole cut in the floor of the freight car. We couldn't wash ourselves, our entire body was covered with lice. .They humiliated us wherever they could. When we arrived in Lemberg, they took us into a bath. We had to strip to the skin, where men shaved our body hair, and women shaved the men's. Meanwhile, the comments of the Soviet soldiers accompanied this operation, and they roared with laughter at our expense. Two weeks later, they took us to the first lager, at Donbass, which is in the Ukraine, in the Don coal basin." What did you eat? "The Russians did almost whatever they wanted to with me, the 'snivelling brat of a girl.' They gave us our food -potatoes, cabbage -in a large washbasin, and the adults divided it among themselves, I often saw only the leftover liquid. They stole my clothes, my shoes, I had to go out to work in the fields barefoot. I had to remove the weeds from among the potato plants. I cried a lot. My feet became ulcerated. Finally, they felt sorry for me, and I got my clothes and shoes back. It was a terrible world, it rained a lot, we sank knee-deep into the black soil." How long were you there? "For several weeks, then they loaded us into freight cars, and took us to Siberia. We didn't know exactly where we were headed. Once again, the guard sat in the middle of the freight car, the prisoners crowded together on both sides, holes looked down on the rails, the trip seemed endless. It must have been a month and a half, we covered 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles). The further into Siberia we went, the colder it got. I was very close to the “cesshole”, the cold wind came up through it, once again we were covered with lice. I became very sick. I don't even know how I got off the freight car. In Taj set, Siberia, I awoke to someone tapping my cheek, and to being bald. They suspected typhus, but actually I got malaria. A Georgian doctor, who had served his sentence, treated me with quinine." So this was already the Gulag? "Yes. 'Gulag' is a compound word - standing for Supreme State Authority of Page 4 István Stefka’s interview in the Magyar Nemzet. Translated by Erika Papp Faber
