The Hungarian Student, 1958 (3. évfolyam, 1-2. szám)
1958-10-01 / 1. szám
To whom should I write first? To my mother or to my wife? I am watching with satisfaction how the broken stones keep piling up in front of me. If this keeps up, I will have the twenty-one cubic feet by noon. The same amount I used to break in a whole day. Twenty-one cubic feet, that is the minimum. The idea of the minimum brings me back to my senses. My hammer strikes with a duller thud upon the stones, my swings decrease in number. It is true, twenty-one cubic feet are the minimum. Under that minimum, there are the half-rations, and above, death. And something else: man must have a limit too. Yesterday, when we learned that Benke had become a seventy-cubic-feet man, we had a bitter taste in our mouths and we looked at him with disgust. We even argued among us that if Benke managed to break the seventy, then sooner or later the same output would be asked of us too, of me, of Loránd Keresztessy and the others. Wouldn't the others despise me just as much? And they would be entitled to. Do I think I am alone here and not with twelve hundred others? Noon is still far away and I have my twentyone cubic feet almost finished. That’s too much. What can I do with it? I have to work, because if I stop Kreybig would single me out immediately and yell. And if he yells then the AVH guards will slap and kick me. It takes a long time for me to figure out that the only thing for me to do is to grab my pitchfork and shovel a part of my broken stones over to Loránd Keresztessy’s pile when neither the guards nor Kreybig are watching. Keresztessy looks at me uncomprehendingly and then, as if enlightened, whispers to me that tomorrow he will pay me back in kind. After a while I begin to break the stones again with the usual rhythm. I am going to produce the minimum: the twenty-one cubic feet. And I comfort myself with the thought that the story about the seventy cubic feet is just a tale anyway, a trick to deceive us, and that none of us will be permitted to write a letter, ever. * * * This issue introduces the new publication of the Union of Free Hungarian Students, in cooperation with its local groups throughout the free world. The North American edition is distributed in Canada and the United States.
