Ludevít Végh

“We lived in midst of anti-Semitism. I said that anti-Semitism was a phenomenon accompanying a petty bourgeois society, with anti-Semitism being something as necessary sanitation. This does not pertain only to anti-Semitism, but to anti-Romani tendencies and to anything else. It simply formed a part of life, and that’s how I perceived it. I say it was normal, I regarded it as part of my life. I knew that my father was helpless against it, I knew it was no use complaining to him about boys who were bullying me and spitting on me, I knew that after the occupation of Hungary my professor of Hungarian language treats me differently than he would a Slovak student. I thought of anti-Semitism as something normal. At that time, nobody was speaking about anti-Semitism being inhuman, contradictory to human rights, etc. These questions, and questions regarding the army and such, were simply nonexistent. There were no questions about it. I found my way of defending myself against anti-Semitism when I discovered that mathematics could be my weapon. It became my personal weapon. Not only a way of defence, but it really worked. In my class, in the sixth grade of the secondary school, there was a boy sitting on front of me, his name was Balzar. And we were good friends. From time to time he needed a hand in mathematics, we talked to each other, quite simply we were two boys who were friends, one helping the other. Then the war broke out, people were fleeing, living in illegality, and one day I met this Balzar somewhere in Slovakia, and he was wearing an SS military uniform. At that moment I thought: Should I hide myself? Or should I go to him? Should I say hello? He recognized me, spoke to me the same way he used to and so I also behaved in the same way. He told me: ´Don’t keep looking at me this way just because of that SS uniform. We had an illegal group in Košice, while it was still the Czechoslovak republic. Many Germans lived there. When the war broke out, we got an order to join the Hitlerjugend, and so I got an SS uniform, but you don’t need to give a damn about it.”

“The Hungarians were notorious for shots in the back of the neck. In Budapest there were many corpses floating in the river. They did not want to carry people to be shot too far away, and therefore they brought them to the Danube river, shot them in the back of their necks and they fell in the water. And when Budapest became completely liberated, there was no shooting going on anymore, but from the Nyilas houses – these were the houses where the headquarters of the Arrow Cross Party was – they pulled out hundreds of corpses from their basements, you would not believe that. They laid them on the street. There were piles of corpses, seven, eight, nine metres high. Something had to be done with them. Dead horses also had to be cleared away. It was necessary, for there was a threat of an epidemic in entire Budapest. I was sick just to look at it. But it had to be done. Truly, the Hungarian Nyilas party members were in a sense worse than German Nazis – at least that’s what was rumoured. Just imagine this, when I was in that internment camp, a Hungarian sergeant got drunk, and started shouting: ´Do you know what I will do with you…´ We did not listen to him, he was drunk and lucky that he was able to sit or lie down. ´I will make a pocket for you.´ We did not know what a pocket was. A pocket means that they made an incision in your skin, put their hand there and on top of that poured salt in there. I have to say the Hungarians who were so cruel were truly very cruel people. I remember, in the camp, when we did some work and we were guarded by German Germans, we had to watch out. But when Austrian Germans guarded us, they just told us: ´You can speak when we are here, just be careful when this and this guard comes…”

“I lie down, sleep for a while and suddenly I hear shots being fired and I say: ´Dammit, the Germans have broken through the front.´ I quickly put on my clothes, I had a Belgian browning on me, and I go out and see that it’s the Russians who are shooting. But shooting in the air. That’s a custom, that when a war comes to an end, all cartridges are fired. I did not know about that, I learnt it and so I did the same. That was the end of the war. Then there was only one problem left – how to get home. With Honza, my uncle, we wanted to convince the command to lend us a car so that we could somehow drive to Prague.”

“At one moment I lost my nerves. I knew that the street up there was being checked by the fascists, they walked from one house to another, and wherever they found a man between eighteen and forty-five, they dragged him out of the house and shot him. Because they knew he was a civilian in disguise, a former soldier, who was in hiding. I was ready for that, but at that moment, I chickened out and I thought: I got to ask the guys for help. I walked towards them and gave a signal. This signal was three knocks. It was as if somehow they knew I was in shit, and as if they also sensed that they must not answer. When I repeated the signal three times and there was no reply, I understood it was me who made the mistake, and not them. And so I returned and thought: come what may. What I did not know, however, and what I learnt only after – that the house belonged to a high-ranking official of Hungarian fascists, and when the guards came to that house, he exclaimed: ´Do you know who I am?´ - ´Who? ´- ´I am official this and this. And I guarantee you there is nobody in this house. I would have known about that. Good-bye.´ And he gave them a fascist greeting. This was the only house which was left out from the search. In other houses, what they did was that the owner of the house had to go with them, and if they found somebody inside, they shot not only him, but the owner as well.”