The Hungarian Student, 1958 (2. évfolyam, 1-7. szám)
1958 / 5. szám
The Hungarian Student 11 What Price Freedom? By JOSEPH J. NOLD T he FIRST SNOW of winter was falling as we drove into Vienna. The city was already congested with Hungarian refugees. Fifty thousand had come across in the past two weeks, since the Russian tanks had rolled into Budapest. Four days later the number was 80,000 and it continued to grow. A Danish student doing volunteer work in the “Suchdienst,” the office that helped locate relatives told us, “Last night we admitted 1,500 to Traiskirchen alone.” Traiskirchen was the biggest camp near Vienna. Under Imperial Austria it had been a military college; under the Soviet occupation after the war it had become an army camp. When they left, they took with them everything that could be lifted, pulled, or pried loose, furnitures, sinks, toilets, doors, windows and even the frames. “Refugees began coming across on the morning of November fourth,” the head of the American Quaker Relief Team told us. “Next day 1,000 were moved into Traiskirchen. When I came out on Wednesday there were 5,000 sleeping on straw on the floor, not a door or window in the place, food had to be brought from kitchens in Vienna, there were only six toilets in the whole camp.” Two weeks later when I arrived the Austrian Government with U.N. Refugee Relief Funds had already done much to improve conditions. Methods of Escape “How did you escape?” Hans, an American student, our interpreter, who had himself fled from Hungray in 1948, told us. Two of his cousins and several classmates whom he had not seen in eight years had come across the border in the past week. “Getting out of Budapest is the hardest part,” he said. “The Russians have the city surrouned, the outskirts strictly patrolled. Most people say they have to go to the country to get food. Once outside they just take a train to a town near the frontier, get out and walk the last 15 kilometres through the fields. Peasants guide them through, some for nothing, others demand a price, rings, watches, an exchange of a good suit of clothes for old. At the frontier there was seldom trouble. Most of the guards are Hungarian, they just turn their backs. Only the last couple days have the Russians stationed troops along the border. Now things appear to be tightening up. Some have had to swim the canal along one part of the border, and by the time they are found by the Austrian police their clothes are frozen solid. They have to cut them out of their clothes. Some are found too late.” The Austrian border police put them in buses, sent them off to emergency camps where they were given soup and chocolate, a medical examination, and then sent on to one of the more permanent camps such as Traiskirchen. Camp Life Camp life is not a noble life. In the early weeks, flustered by the spirit of defiance and adventure, the Hungarians impatiently waited to move on to other countries. All the countries of the free Western world opened their arms to them. Switzerland, France, Britain, Sweden took the sick and the aged; tiny Holland opened its doors widely and generously, most went to America. In all about 50,000 were settled in other lands, but quotas were soon filled, by the end of November, the stream had slowed to a trickle. Christmas in Traiskirchen was a bleak event. Midnight mass, on Christmas eve, was held in the largest room in the camp. For the Hungarians, it was the first midnight mass they had been permitted to attend in ten years, since the new regime had been brought to them in 1947. A Christmas tree stood behind the altar, on either side the Austrian and the Hungarian flags draped in black, were hung. The men sung the hymns, well known Hungarian Christmas songs, loud, defiantly, with their throat, guts, and heart, tears streaming from their eyes. It would be the last time they would sing together as Hungarians. Next year at Christmas they would be Americans, Australians or Canadians. A cold wind swept across the icy roads as they trudged back to their rooms that night; life, pity, love seemed frozen with the mud as they went to bed Christmas morning. The Frontier I spent New Year’s Eve on the frontier near Andau, a village 50 miles south of Vienna. It was a bitter night; cold, and sleeting. As the rain landed it froze turning the road into ice. “No worse than the mud,” the young English woman who was driving the Landrover told me. Two weeks ago she had packed up her literature books at the University of London and come with a friend to Vienna. Cheerlessly, we drove east over the frozen, marsh land, the last mile we crept through the night slowly, without lights, then stopped. “The frontier’s just ahead,” she said, “a hundred feet this side of the canal.” We climbed a slight rise, the black water glittered below us. “You’re now in Hungary.” “Alex is down there.” He was a young American student at the Sorbonne. We huddled together out of the wind. “When I first came down here six weeks ago,” he told me, “they used to swim the canal. Had to, because all the bridges were blown up. But it’s too cold now; some have tried, but unless we find them mighty soon they die of exposure. So I got a hold of a rubber dingy and brought it down. There is a line tied to it on the other side. The guides know where it is. Listen,” he interrupted. The stillness of the night was broken by the crunching of feet breaking through the snow crust. Low voices, a hurried flash of light. A reply from Alex. The sound of the dingy pulled through the water. Pause, movement from the cluster of black on the Hungarian side. We pulled the dingy back to the Austrian side. Mostly young men, but women with their children and the aged kept coming across throughout the night, frightened, happy, dazed, some threw their arms around us, others only stood simpering, tears we couldn’t see on their cheeks. Their first steps into freedom. They drank coffee and hot soup with shaking hands, given to them by a Scotsman from a mobile canteen on a two ton lorry. He had driven down from Edinburgh, and just parked it there 100 feet from the Hungarian frontier. They stopped coming only at dawn. “Grim life, this,” John, a young British Merchant Naval Officer told me over a warm fire and breakfast. Two months ago he had paid off his ship, bought a Landrover, drove down to Austria, and had been ferrying refugees from the frontier to Andau ever since. Supplies and Schools “It isn’t enough to feed, and clothe these people,” Nirye, one of the Swedish Red Cross personnel at Traiskirchen told us over supper. I jumped at the opportunity to quit my job handing out men’s underwear and socks, to go into the school teaching business. With no books, no dictionaries, only four bare walls, paper and pencil, two masters who had come down from Gordonstoun School in Scotland, and a handful of volunteers from the clothes store, classes were begun in German and English, teaching by the direct method. Later we began an infant school for the 200 children we had in the camp, erected football goal posts on a field (in a recent letter I was told that Traiskirchen has one of the best teams in the country), marked out volleyball and basketball courts in a gigantic half ruined hall, formely a drill armor. In mid-January I was reminded, by letter, of my committment to teach at the Doon School in Dehra Dun, India. To leave Traiskirchen was not easy. But leave I must. The Hungarian Revolution had taught me the strife, hatred and misery of war, as well as the courage of a people figthting for freedom. The author of this article, Joseph J. Nold, is a Canadian school teacher who was on his way to India to teach in the Doon School when the Hungarian Revolution broke out. Instead of traveling to Italy first, as he had planned, Mr. Nold went to Austria where he teas in charge of supplies in Traiskirchen Camp. This article originally appeared in The Doon School Weekly (Dehra Dun, India, May 11, 1957).
