FLIGHT FROM FEAR
Gedye, G. E. R.
Flight from Fear By G. E. R. GEDYE Vienna THIS IS the story of flight told me by Istvan Dobi, a Hungarian about 45, who arrived in Vienna last week. It is not an unusual story —just the simple...
...My heart—it is another cliche, but again the literal truth—my heart stood still...
...The worst was that we did not know whether they would come from before or behind us or from a flank...
...Everyone began to get out...
...The first thing for a townsman like myself was to learn how to move in the dark...
...And it is seldom that a Budapest lawyer cries...
...I spent the next day and night in their house, unable to move until she had washed, dried, and repaired my ruined clothes...
...At the same moment my smuggler guide appeared before me, smiling...
...In the kitchen the farmer gave me the password and I gave him the countersign...
...It lasted half an hour...
...However, no one asked for papers...
...escape—at a high price...
...Because,' he said, 'it is a sealed train from the [Austrian] Burgen-land to Vienna, which cuts here across a little neck of Hungarian territory...
...One hour later the door was unlocked by a boy of 15, who again gave the password and led me across the field to a small farm...
...The couple had lived for years by smuggling, and they began to demand fantastic sums for getting me to Vienna...
...It was too late to hesitate now...
...IV "The train stopped at a biggish station, and I looked out to find something to occupy my thoughts...
...That is the Austrian village of Morbisch.' "After reconnoitering the ground, Arpad led us to the house where we were expected...
...But at last I was in Austria, a free, though occupied, country, and had only the Russians to fear...
...His address is Maros Utca 55...
...I noticed three strands drop, cut by bullets, but we were untouched...
...Arpad whispered back: 'I don't know...
...come on,' he said...
...In fact, I am not prepared to guarantee that Istvan Dobi is a Hungarian—or even that he is Istvan Dobi...
...This creature is not my Istvan Dobi...
...Istvan Dobi is, of course, the name of the puppet premier of the Conservative Hungarian Small Farmer's Party, who still complacently gives the cover of his name to the Red Terror of the Communists in Hungary, as so many individuals from reactionary parties in Russia's satellite states have done, while democratic socialists went to prison and the gallows...
...We crawled as rapidly as we could towards one of the posts to which the wire was fixed...
...When he found and brought her to the house next night, a prolonged wrangle over money began...
...Arpad and Josip lifted the lowest horizontal wire and motioned to me to go ahead...
...Very soon the two boys shook my hand and left...
...But Istvan—so far—has been lucky...
...But to my mind, its very simplicity carries conviction...
...This is Vienna Meidling station, in the British sector.' "I sprang to my feet and burst into tears...
...As soon as possible, we turned out of the main street into a side road which led towards the frontier...
...A friend of his, Mrs...
...I cannot guarantee that every name here can be found in the Hungarian directories, or that every place mentioned will be found on the maps where the narrative might lead you to expect it...
...Gero went into the village...
...I was coated in drying mud, my clothes hung in strips from me, my face was torn in a dozen places, all bleeding profusely...
...It was a fine night, but drifting clouds generally obscured the face of the moon...
...My Istvan is a Budapest lawyer...
...One day a friend told me that his greengrocer, Ferenc Farkas, would arrange my G. E. R. GEDYE, one of the best-informed correspondents in Central Europe, has interviewed scores of men and women who have escaped from behind the Iron Curtain...
...He is still at large today...
...III "Next night, Arpad, Josip, and I set out on our great adventure...
...He has friends and relatives at home, and there are thousands longing for the chance to use his escape route...
...Suddenly he stopped and faced us...
...Gero got Josip to accept 2,000...
...The boy of 18 called ]osip, and a cousin of his, a couple of years older, called Arpad, later guided me to Austria...
...There is a strained, other-world look in Istvan's eyes today—indistinguishable from what under Hitler used to be called the Deutsche Blick —the sudden twist of the neck to right or left over the shoulder as the narrative breaks off or the voice drops to a whisper for fear of some eavesdropping spy...
...At last I found it...
...there was not one of its 30 minutes in which I did not call upon God to punish them for their avaricious cruelty...
...I remember that we all slept in a kitchen, in one corner of which a Hungarian steppe bitch (used for guarding sheep) was giving birth to a total of seven puppies, one every hbur or- so, throughout the night...
...finally he turned into a woods where we followed him along almost invisible paths through the undergrowth...
...Clearly Farkas in Budapest was a swindler...
...but I sat on, again paralyzed with fear, in a sort of stupor...
...Soon we reached open fields...
...Then my disbelieving eyes assured me that the uniforms they wore were British...
...Nothing more happened, and at last we got up and struggled blindly ahead through ploughed fields, and corn, here and there pitching forwards into muddy irrigation channels...
...Clearly the train did not go beyond this village of Meidling, and Vienna might yet be hundreds of kilometres away...
...You can imagine my thoughts during this last perilous stage of my journey...
...As we emerged from the other side, another rocket burst in the sky, apparently ahead of us...
...Frankly I have lost my bearings.' "We lay flattened in the muddy soil, expecting every minute to hear the whine of bullets...
...Two hours later a girl of 18 came to my hiding place, gave me the agreed password, and guided me to a barn, locking me in...
...All that time I was incapable of movement or speech...
...He looks not unlike a lawyer of 45 in any big city of Western Europe, keen-faced, noncommittal features, grey eyes which seem to be everlastingly summing up something—or somebody...
...Arpad came in soon after my arrival and said we must wait two days, as there was an alert on for the frontier guards...
...Arpad went on a dozen paces ahead of us...
...My knees knocking together, I made my way along the train to discover the name of the station...
...Ladies and Gentlemen of The Progressive—Istvan Dobi: "Before I attempted to escape from the Red Terror, I spent three months cautiously reconnoitering prospects...
...She had with her only 4,500 Forints...
...In the cracked parlor mirror I could hardly recognize myself...
...I was not allowed to know their names, but their families lived at Sopron, in that Hungarian peninsula which is almost surrounded by Austrian territory...
...Come on...
...It was the frontier...
...He demanded 4,000 Forints but finally accepted 3,500...
...Still, I could not speak a word during the remaining hours of the journey...
...I did not then know that throughout the Russian zone, the Austrian gendarmerie are forced to hunt down, arrest, and hand over fugitives to the Russians, who send them back across the Curtain to be shot...
...Are we in Austria?' I asked in a whisper...
...I had nothing like that amount, and finally she agreed to send me by train for 1,000, and to change 500 Forint into Austrian schillings for me at one-third of the official rate...
...I had provided for this by starting an action against a Sopron businessman and had with me an order of the courts to appear before the judge there...
...How glibly writers say: 'He was paralyzed with fright.' Now I know that it can be literally true...
...It's all over...
...When I offered her the 400 Forint which Mrs...
...Istvan talks with nervous long-windedness and often repeats himself...
...He said that he made very little on the deal, over 70% of the money going to bribe professional smugglers and the Communist frontier guards...
...When I met Farkas, he said that before he could move I must assign my little house to him and pay him 10,000 Forints in cash...
...Arpad was clearly the chief smuggler...
...Suddenly I saw two soldiers outside the window...
...In the midst of the clearing ahead we could see an eight foot high belt of barbed wire, fastened to tall posts at intervals of ten feet...
...V "Hours later, the train stopped in a station labelled 'Meidling...
...One thing, however, distinguishes him from his average colleague in the free world...
...But it is the cheapest route from Schallendorf to the capital.' "So, to enable them to make a few extra schillings, the Austrian smuggler couple had callously sent me, unwarned, to undergo this agonizing experience...
...At last I summoned up the courage to ask an Austrian peasant beside me why no one could leave the train...
...They must in so doing have set off an alarm, for the next moment a rocket shot up, bursting overhead and descending slowly like a parachute of magnesium wire...
...This is our 17th escape trip,' they told me, 'and we want to make it a score...
...The name meant nothing to me...
...Gero said had been agreed upon, to include the bribing of a lorry driver to smuggle me through, she burst out laughing and said that would cost at least 5,000 Forint...
...Then he gave the signal for us to drop to our knees...
...At first I thought I had been deliberately betrayed, and hastily cast about me to find a means of killing myself to avoid Red torture...
...I hope so...
...I heard half a dozen desultory rifle shots behind us, shouts of: 'Halt, or you are dead men,' then a couple of bursts from a Sten gun, raking the wire...
...Gero, on the morning of Sunday, May 27...
...I must not leave the house or let myself be seen at the window...
...Three nights a week around midnight I took a streetcar to the outskirts of Budapest and there tramped through fields and woods until dawn began to break...
...It is not an unusual story —just the simple narrative typical of the one-in-three fugitives who get through the Iron Curtain to Vienna...
...I told Josip that Mrs...
...Then, never again —not for all the millions of Forints Stalin has stolen from Hungary.' "The man and his wife where I was quartered warned me that I was still in great danger, as Morbisch was in the Russian Zone of Austria...
...So I have had to abridge his narrative...
...It was Sopron, whence I had started to leave Hungary...
...We left next day at midday by motor bus for Schallendorf, accompanied by her eldest son, and there we boarded the train for Vienna...
...I cannot guarantee tomorrow...
...this was accepted on her promise to send the additional 1,000 Forints from Budapest...
...I found it, all right...
...I went to the rear of the train, he to the front, saying he would come for me again just before we entered Vienna...
...Actually it must have been some ten minutes...
...And even in the cafe in the American Zone of Vienna where he told me his story in the course of five Iongish sessions, there can still be spies who report back to the Russian Kommandatura to arrange a kidnapping...
...II "I complied with all his conditions and left Budapest by train, accompanied by Mrs...
...The whole family—father, aged 45, Croatian mother, a boy of 9, another of 18, and a small girl—all seemed to know what was afoot...
...Formerly on the foreign staff of the New York Times and the London Herald, Gedye is free-lancing from Vienna for the London Observer, Tribune, and The Progressive...
...Arpad stood motionless, listening, for what seemed to me like four hours...
...Then I heard a guard shouting (but, thank God, in German): 'No one may get out here.' The doors were all locked, and Hungarian police, soldiers, and easily recognizable secret agents patrolled up and down the train, obviously to see that no one got in or out...
...What I do guarantee is that he has just escaped from somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, and that every detail of his story (with the above reservations) is literally as he told it to me...
...She left to catch the night train, and I never saw her again...
...When the train began to move again, I fainted for a moment, but pulled myself together as the Austrian gave me a nip from a flask of some burning schnapps...
...His books on European Politics include "The Revolver Republic," "Heirs to the Hapsburgs," and "Fallen Bastion," published in the United States as "Betrayal in Central Europe...
...Once through the wire we joined hands in the inky darkness and reached a small copse of larches...
...Next day, to my consternation, Josip asked me what I was going to pay for the trip, saying nobody had yet given the family a penny...
...The slogans were in Hungarian...
...Gero had all my money and would pay...
...Papers are frequently examined on the train...
...In addition to the parallel strings of wire, diagonal wires ran through them from post to post...
...Slowly I felt that I was developing cat's eyes...
...Margit Gero, knew two women working in the former Manfred Weiss works at Csepel...
...we crawled ahead frantically through the wire...
...At Esterhaza we got out of the last carriage, and I hid in a copse, while Mrs...
...My smuggler guide had vanished...
...We were drenched through and through, mud-caked, and with our teeth chattering when Arpad stopped and, pointing to a dim light ahead, said: 'It's all right...
...All over the walls were gigantic portraits of Stalin, Lenin, Voroshiloff—and of Mattyas Rakosi, the dreaded head of the Hungarian Communist Party...
Vol. 15 • August 1951 • No. 8
