Life Starts to Go Back to Normal....Or Does It?

After enduring weeks on end of torture, and interrogations my father and his fellow prisoners were called for a final meeting with their jailers. Names of other Boy Scouts were being called out and assigned to internment camps in Siberia. As each young man's name was called and led away, my father's blood ran cold wondering if he, too, would be sent away. Miraculously my father, his cousin Andras, and two other prisoners did not have their names called. They stood in utter shock and silence looking at each other. For about 20 minutes no one said a word or moved a muscle. Then, without further explanation, they were returned to their cells where they would spend six days in complete ignorance of what their fate was to be.

On the morning of the sixth day, my father was escorted upstairs to an office. A KGB agent asked him for his name, date of birth, birthplace, and other personal questions, then he was taken back to the dungeon. Later that evening he was called back upstairs and ordered into a prison bus which transported him back to the Hungarian Communist Political Police Headquarters. He stayed in a cell at the headquarters for another week and was finally released, without a dime, with a bruised body, swollen cheek and bloody nose, and made to walk 9km (just under 6 miles) to his home.

After walking for two hours, my father made it home and knocked at the window. He was pale and skinny and feared that his family would not recognize him. When his sister, Eva, looked out the window she screamed with relief and joy at seeing her brother and called out to their mother as she ran to open the door and let him in. My grandmother was ill at the time, but as soon as she heard that her son was home safe, she flew out of bed to see him. The neighbors made a delicious dinner and my father ate voraciously. Afterwards he was able to take a warm shower. His first time being able to use a proper bathroom and bathe in three months. He then got to sleep in his own, clean bed which felt like heaven after sleeping on a concrete slab for so long.

My father was allowed to rest for two days after returning home as it was September and school was about to resume. He would be entering the 7th grade which he remembers as being difficult and laden with many assignments. When summer rolled back around, he has fond memories of going on vacation with his classmates to Lake Balaton for three weeks where they swam, hiked, and rode bicycles. After the school trip was over, my father prepared to attend his sister's wedding. He remembers the church being crowded with all of the elite of prewar society in attendance. After summer ended, my father went back to hit the books and entered the 8th grade which he diligently studied his way through and was able to pass through with flying colors. Life was starting to feel as though it was going back to normal....but was it?

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....