Peter Balo, “The Gulag: Through the eyes of a survivor”, (Remembrance in time, Transilvania
University Press of Brasov 2012), pp. 11-14.
The below article has been made upon an
interview with a Hungarian survivor of the GULAG – Mrs. Pintér. She spent eight
and a half years in captivity, in several Soviet force-labour camps. My aim is
to commemorate her and those millions of nameless people, becoming the victims
of the communism. Mrs. Pintér was born as Magdolna Rohr, on the 24th of
December, 1928. Her father worked as a clerk at a law firm, while her mother
was a housewife, bringing up the children. She went to Bátaszék to primary
school and then she maturated in Budapest. She was educated in a religious way,
attended church school. She stayed in Budapest during the WWII, being an
eye-witness of bombing the capital, the lack of food – all these things left a
serious mark in her soul. Her personal tragedy started on the 23rd of September
of 1945, when two Soviet soldiers appeared in their flat with a civil translator
and they asked her to go with them. She was promised that they only wanted to
talk to her. Getting in the street they pushed her in a car. Afterwards she was
taken to a later demolished building to the Üllıi Str. (Budapest), and her
interrogation has started. The interrogators asked her about her friends and
the actions they had done together, but due to the lack of any such actions,
the young girl couldn’t reply any of the questions. Then the Soviet officer
took his pistol and threatened Magdolna with killing her on the spot. After the
inefficient interrogation she was accommodated in an unheated room of the
building, furnished only with a bed. The next day her interrogation continued,
and then she could have some information to find out, why she has been captured
by the Soviet authorities. It became clear, that a friend of hers wanted to
leave Hungary, but he was caught at the Austrian-Hungarian border, and in his
notebook they found the name of two English pilots, and also the name of
Magdolna Rohr. That could be the base of the charges.
Being aware of her
innocence Magdolna kept on denying the charges. One day a reinforced guard took
her and the other prisoners, kept in the building to Szombathely, where they
were accommodated under inhuman circumstances, in a coal-cellar. The next
station was Eisenstadt that is situated in Austria. Among the poor supply with
meal the night-interrogations have started. In the evenings a Russian woman was
put in her cell, who constantly asked questions, but as she was innocent, she
couldn’t answer any ofthem. This problem was “solved” by the Soviet officers by
creating Russian-language confessions including false information. She couldn’t
even read those confessions, but as she and the others were promised to go home
if they sign those documents, all of them signed the false confessions.
Soon she was
delivered again, again not home to Budapest, but to Balatonfüred. There, after
a trial without any legal background she was sentenced to ten years
imprisonment. After the sentence had been pronounced, Magdolna was taken to the
prison of Sopronkıhida, to an unheated cell for two, where there were fifteen
prisoners closed at the same time. The only fortune of hers – among the many
afflictions – was that she and a woman from Ukraine was appointed to wash the
officers’ clothes for a better supplement. She shared the extra food with the
other prisoners, which meant an advantage for her later fate.
Following
Sopronkıhida she was taken to Lemberg (today Lvov – in Ukraine). The journey by
train, full of suffer, longed for three weeks, under inhuman conditions. There
was only a hole cut in the floor of the overcrowded compartment. The prisoners
could relieve themselves only through those holes; their sustenance was
miserable and they were constantly suffering of thirst. It meant a serious
mental shock for her that after arriving at the Lemberg camp, and having an
obligatory bath, men shaved women’s hairs among the rude and vulgar comments of
the guard. She spent only several days in Lemberg, and then she was taken to
the Donbass camp – situated in the coalfield of Donbass (Ukraine), where she
worked in the agriculture – on a potato-field. As it was usual at the similar
places, the life was directed by criminals, so the violation and brutality,
many times leading to murders, was an everyday phenomenon. However, there were
some prisoners, whom she had formerly known from the Sopronkıhida prison, where
she had shared her extra food with them.
These prisoners
protected the new-coming, weak young girl being unversed about the local
circumstances: she could be the first, to get food, and one time they even got
back her stolen clothes. Soon she was entrained again, and after a journey,
longing for several weeks she was taken to Irkutsk and then to Taiset (Russia
today). During the journey she became seriously ill – became malarial, and she
arrived in Siberia half-dead. Thanks to the treatment by a well-intentioned
doctor originated from Georgia, who could get medicine for her, she got better.
For her luck she was assigned to the camp kitchen as the assistant of another
Hungarian prisoner. Thanks to the relatively hearty meal she strengthened and
when she fully recovered, she became a seamstress in another camp.
But not that camp
was the last station – she was delivered to several further camps, where the
weak girl had to fulfil the hardest physical works: she participated in
woodcutting, structural erection, and worked at the building of the
Trans-Siberian railway – putting down the rails – under awful
weather-conditions, and getting food with poor calorie. Officially, if the
temperature was lower than -42 ºC, the prisoners were not taken to work, but in
the reality they had to work even at -50 ºC, she had to work 12 hours aday,
putting 6,5 m long logs on trucks. They had to build barracks for themselves,
and they could have a bath only every three-four weeks. There was no medical
service or even the basic medicine, so the diseases and epidemics were
frequent. If somebody couldn’t work for his state of health, or refused working
– for example for a religious reason – could be killed or trussed to a tree.
There were many mosquitoes in Siberia in the summer, which could cause serious
injuries in such cases.
The prisoners were
guarded according to strict regulations: if any of them fell out of the march
column, was shot down. Due to the above reasons the mortality was extremely
high. The nationality of the prisoners was different; Magdolna told that at the
camps she met Latvians, Lithuanians, Polish, German, Russian, Ukranians and
even Coreans. It helped her survival that she learned Russian language, could
adapt to the local circumstances, and she learned how to save her strength.
Several times they could have the same logs measured by the supervisors twice,
so one day they had to work very hard, but the next day they only imitated the
wood-cutting, so they could get the ration after the execution the norm at
100%.
The turn in her
fortune came in 1953, after Stalin’s death, when their guard informed the
Hungarian and German prisoners that they could go home. After the plenty of
suffer and false promises they didn’t believe the soldiers, but one day they
were entrained again, and after a journey longing for several weeks they
arrived in Lemberg (Lviv). There they spent six months, as Mátyás Rákosi, the
communist dictator of Hungary considered them to be persona non grata. In the end
he was forced to let them in the country on Soviet pressure. Later on the
leaders of the communist party still took them unwanted in Hungary. When after
the inhuman suffers the train, delivering the survivors from the GULAG passed
the Soviet-Hungarian border (on the 3rd of December, 1953), the members of the
State Security Authority (SSA) – the political police of the ’50-s – invaded
the train, and the prisoners were seized. They were accommodated in Sóstó-fürdı
near Nyíregyháza, in a camp, guarded by the SSA. They couldn’t even get in
contact with their relatives. Several weeks later they received 10 HUF to buy
train tickets, and finally could go home.
The delight to see
her parents and friends, after so many years, was unutterable. Later the
pleasure was shadowed by the fact that in the Socialist system of Hungary she
was a secondary citizen. She was not allowed to talk about her “experience” in
the Soviet Union, and hardly could get a passport. Up to her rehabilitation in
1976 her certificate of moral included the record of her being a criminal.
Despite she was officially dispensed from any crimes – she never committed -,
the services of state security detected her until 1989. Furthermore, she has
been still suffering from the health-effects of her captivity: cardiac failure
because of the hard physical work, joint gout due to the cold weather in
Siberia, not to mention the mental consequences, which are not possible to
forget.
After coming home
she got married with Károly Pintér, whom she had met in Tajset in 1946 for the
first time. Later they were taken to different camps, so lost each other for
years. They met each other again on the way back in Lemberg in 1953. Due to the
monstrosities the GULAG prisoners went through, and the further afflictions of
them after getting home, it was quite prevalent that they got married with
other former GULAG prisoners – only those, surviving the camps could understand
each other. Magdolna Rohr and her husband became the members of the GULAG
Foundation. She has been trying to protect the interests of the formers
prisoners of the GULAG and works for the public commemoration of the victims.
