Hell Gets Worse: From Jail Cell to KGB Dungeon...

Immediately after being "released" from jail, my father found himself in even greater peril. He was taken by an armed guard along with a Benedictine professor, a Jesuit professor and another student to a car that was waiting outside of the Communist Headquarters. They were instructed to enter the car by another armed Communist agent who made a great display of loading his pistol in front of them. They entered the car as ordered and were sped away to a destination unknown.

After approximately half an hour, my father and the other prisoners arrived at their destination. They were met by a Soviet KGB guard at a gate that led to a three story villa. My father knew at that moment that they had been handed over to the Budapest post of the KGB and felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him. He was led with the others to a room in the villa where they were searched and had their belts and shoelaces taken away. One by one, they were led out of that room to cells in a dungeon underneath the villa. My father was the last to be taken to his cell. My father's cell was #7...he remembers it vividly to this day. The guard opened the iron door and my father was made to enter. After his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light he saw that there were five other prisoners in the cell with him, one of which was Andras Kallay who was a distant relative of his. They stood frozen staring at each other in disbelief.

Andras then rushed over to my father and asked why he, too, had been brought to the dungeon and my father responded that it was due to his affiliation with the Boy Scouts. Because of the fabricated allegations against the Scouts, all of the young members were being imprisoned and tortured. Andras understood that to be true, as the other boys in the cell were also Boy Scouts. He then took my father under his wing and explained to him what he should expect over the course of the next few days. As Andras had been in the dungeon longer he was able to warn my father that every night the KGB agents would come in and start interrogations usually around 11pm. Those interrogations would last until 2 or 3 in the morning. He told my father to be brave and careful during his times being interrogated and to remember it was better to be brave and endure the torture than to be sent to Siberia for the next ten years.

My father greatly appreciated the advice and tried his best to mentally prepare for what was to come. He also struggled to understand why his relative was also incarcerated. He had been a war hero and on October 15, 1944 opened fire at the Royal Palace against the intruding Germans. He was later captured by the Germans and was a prisoner at Dachau...the Soviets should have considered his heroism against the Germans, yet here he was in an underground cell. Andras explained that when the Americans liberated Dachau in 1945, he too was let free and he and his father went to Capri where they were able to regain their health. When Andras returned to Hungary to reunite with his fiancee, the Soviets arrested him with the false allegations that he was returning to Hungary as a spy. It was clear that no one was safe from the Soviets. Anyone, at any time could be considered a spy or as working against the government and could be abducted and tortured.

My father spent three months in the KGB dungeon....the months of June, July and August of 1946. He remembers those months as being the most painful of his life. When he describes the cell to me, I cannot imagine how such a kind and gentle man could have ever been placed in conditions like that. Five men had to share a small, concrete cell with only a sink and a bucket. They had to sleep on the slab floors without any blankets or pillows. Every fourth night at 11pm my father was taken upstairs to be interrogated by Major Igor Simolov. He recalls being yelled at by the Major in Russian and whose interpreter spoke poor Hungarian. Between my father's hearing impairment and the broken Hungarian he was being communicated with, my father had an extremely difficult time understanding what the questions and allegations being thrown at him were. The office was thick with cigarette smoke which made him nauseous and he was terrified of responding in a way that would further incriminate him in their eyes. Twice he was made to sit on a stool with a Jupiter lamp aimed at his face with an agent standing behind him who would intermittently hit my father on the head, slap, punch and kick him. One evening, my father found himself so tired that he fell asleep on the cell floor and as he could not hear the agent calling his name to go upstairs for his interrogation, he was kicked by one of the guards in the face with a steel toed boot causing damage to his jaw. To this day my father will often cry out in his sleep from nightmares induced by memories of those months spent in the KGB dungeon. It breaks my heart that he ever had to endure such a nightmare....and to think that it would be just the tip of the iceberg....

The Persecution of a Boy Scout...

With the passing of each day, the Communists in Hungary were growing stronger and soon had their hands in everything. They controlled the police, the Ministry of the Interior, and the courts. Everyone had to have background checks and a clearance via the Communist committee. Fortunately, as my grandfather had acted against the Nazis, he was given clearance, yet sadly, it would soon become clear that this "clearance" would not truly be enough.

The Communist Political Police and the KGB started a wild witch hunt, and while they did capture and prosecute many war criminals and sadistic extremists, they also victimized many innocent Hungarians. They removed the people's ability to go to Church and religious schools. The youth were not allowed to socialize in groups such as the Boy Scouts, and anyone belonging to the noble classes were closely monitored. My father remembers this time as being an era of fear, hatred and revenge.

Despite the Communist ban on groups like the Boy Scouts, my father continued meeting with his friends and their troop during school hours. They needed something to stay sane during this time of turmoil, and going on hikes in the mountains, doing homework together, and hanging out making jokes and conversing was one of the only things my father and his friends had left of their youth. Although they were offered to join the Communist Youth Movement, my father and his cronies refused. They contacted the Boy Scouts World Headquarters in London to let them know that the Scouts had been banned in Hungary, yet sadly there was nothing that the London office could do.

It wasn't long before my father started hearing from his friends that several of the boys they knew, as well as some of their professors were being arrested for their involvement with the Boy Scouts. It was assumed by the Communists that since the Scouts were in connection with London, and therefore with the US by proxy, that the Scouts were acting as spies of some sort and the boys were being prosecuted and persecuted as such.

On June 7th, 1946, at about 4:00 in the afternoon, two plainclothes Communist agents came to my father's apartment, arrested and took him to their headquarters. He was interrogated until 10:00p.m. and was then roughly placed into a jail cell where he saw several of his friends who had been arrested earlier. His mother and sister were scared and outraged. They immediately went to seek help from Vice Admiral William Dietrich of the U.S. Navy who was shocked to hear that teenagers were being arrested. He immediately commissioned two 2 Jeeps with six American G.I.'s to go to the Communist Party Headquarters and get my father out. It was to no avail. When they arrived at headquarters the Communist agents denied that they were arresting and incarcerating teens and were turned away. My father spent ten days in the cell not knowing how or when he would ever get out.

On the tenth day, my father would be allowed out of his cell....but where he would be sent after that would turn out to be far more torturous than he could've imagined...