World War II Behind Closed Doors (51 page)

Hungary had not been the most reliable ally of the Nazis. Initially the Hungarian government, under Admiral Horthy, had been reluctant to join forces with Germany. Not only was there a traditional Hungarian fear of German power, but the country's geographical position also made it vulnerable to conquest from the East. But after the Germans had conquered France in the early summer of 1940 the Hungarians reassessed their military and political priorities. Just as this one event changed Stalin's attitude to the Nazis, so it altered the Hungarians' position about the war. Now, they thought, they had a chance to ally themselves with the winning side and gain valuable new territory in Romania as a result. And so it proved when, in October 1940, the Hungarians joined the Axis and received Northern Transylvania from Romania as a consequence.

But by 1944 it was clear that the Hungarians had backed the wrong side. And after Hungarian forces had been crushed on the Eastern Front fighting alongside the Germans, Horthy had tried to manoeuvre a way out of the war. In March, however, once Hitler had learnt of Horthy's plans, he ordered German troops to occupy the country, and the Nazis proceeded to deport hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz – helped, it must be said, by compliant members of the Hungarian gendarmerie. In October 1944 Horthy – kept on by the Nazis as head of state after their occupation – tried once again to broker a peace deal with the West, and once again the Nazis moved to prevent him. This time Szálasi Ferenc, the leader of the Hungarian fascist party, the Arrow Cross, replaced Horthy, and the Nazis strengthened their grip on the country.

That same month Stalin ordered an immediate attack on Budapest. In a heated phone call with the commander of the 2nd
Ukrainian Front, Rodion Malinovsky, Stalin insisted that the Hungarian capital must be taken ‘in the next few days’. When Malinovsky replied that he needed five days for the task, Stalin said: ‘There is no point in being so stubborn. You obviously don't understand the political necessity of an immediate strike against Budapest’.
⁵⁹
The ‘political necessity’ was probably the forthcoming meeting of the ‘Big Three’ at which the post-war future of much of Europe would be discussed. But the Soviets did not take Budapest ‘in the next few days’ and, given the fierceness of German and Hungarian resistance, it was ludicrous of Stalin ever to expect them to. Indeed, it was not until Christmas that the Soviets managed to launch what they hoped would be the final assault on the city.

‘On the outskirts of Budapest on certain lines there was very strong resistance’, says Boris Likhachev,
⁶⁰
a Soviet tank commander who took part in the attack. ‘And there were very powerful counter-attacks’. As head of the reconnaissance department of his tank corps, Likhachev was in the heat of the action. And he still vividly remembers the intensity of the battle for Budapest: ‘The sound of the artillery fire! When a shell explodes you smell burning, and it irritates your eyes. And it affects your breathing. What is even worse is when a bomb explodes – your breathing system is affected. It's smothering you. There is no fresh air to breathe and all this smoke fills your lungs…. Several times I experienced this. To be inside the tank with the hatches closed – even though tanks have a ventilation system, it doesn't help. It's poor and ineffective. And a person cannot be inside a tank for long when there are explosions around…. With the tanks, especially tanks with heavy armour, on the one hand you feel safe, on the other hand you suffocate’.

Budapest is divided by the Danube. On one side is Pest, and the Red Army made good progress through its relatively flat terrain and wide streets. On the other side of the river is Buda. Here the hills made the attackers' task much harder, but on Christmas Eve the Soviets managed to capture the high ground overlooking Buda, and by Boxing Day the city was encircled. Just as he had with Stalingrad, Hitler ordered a fight to the last.
Budapest was declared a
‘Feste Plätze’
– a fortified place that must not be surrendered. A total of seventy thousand soldiers – roughly equal numbers of Germans and Hungarians – prepared to defend the capital.

With the Red Army close, the citizens of Budapest were in a state of fear. Barna Andrasofszky,
⁶¹
who was a medical student at the time but had just been conscripted into a Hungarian military unit, remembers that ‘there were very many bad signs, because we did hear what was happening with the Russians coming into the country’. Refugees who had fled from the northern area of Hungary already occupied by the Soviets ‘were telling terrible things. Watches were taken away from everybody, and women – they did not care whether they were young or old – they [the Soviets] were taking them and they were raping them. So this was the news that was spreading around’.

On 17 January 1945, German and Hungarian troops withdrew from Pest into Buda, and the Germans blew up the five bridges across the Danube that linked the two halves of the city. Within Buda, particularly around the central fortress which was defended by SS troops, the fighting was intense. Eventually, worn out by the sheer force of the Red Army attack, the Germans attempted to break out – and all but a few thousand were killed or captured. On 13 February the city finally surrendered.

The soldiers of the Red Army, who had been told by Stalin to capture the Hungarian capital in ‘a few days’, had taken more than a hundred days to force a surrender. And in the immediate aftermath of their victory, some of the Soviets took their revenge.

Ivan Polcz was one of the first to witness what happened. He was thirteen on 11 February, just two days before the surrender, and was the only child of a respectable middle-class Hungarian family. During the siege he and his parents had hidden in the cellar of a relative's house in the suburbs. They had all heard rumours of how the Soviets ‘did not respect women at all’, but ‘many people did not believe’ that the Red Army soldiers would commit rape.

Two nights before Ivan's birthday, everyone in the cellar had heard heavy bombing. ‘And then’, he says, ‘all of a sudden two
Russian soldiers wearing white stormed into the cellar holding machine guns’. The Red Army soldiers shouted that they were looking for Germans. Finding none, they ran back out into the street. Horrified, Ivan watched as half an hour later German soldiers came into the cellar. But, not finding their enemy, they rushed away again.

Then, on the night of his birthday, ‘an incredible number of Russian soldiers stormed into the cellar with guns. If it hadn't been so frightening we would have been laughing our heads off because they were dressed with other people's clothes. Men were even wearing women's boots…. They asked us if we had jewellery, but apart from taking our watches and some of the clothes which they liked they didn't do anything’. Subsequent groups of Red Army soldiers came first to plant cables to establish a telephone line and then to bring food: ‘And so we were quite OK with them. And we thought to ourselves that the idea that they were aggressive with women, this is probably an invention of the Nazis to threaten us’.

But a few days later the atmosphere changed. At about ten o'clock at night two Red Army soldiers came into the cellar where, by now, about twenty-five people were sheltering – a mixture of elderly couples, younger couples and children. Ivan ‘cannot remember’ the faces of the Soviets, ‘but they didn't look too nice’.

One of the young Hungarian husbands acted as interpreter and asked the soldiers what they wanted. When they told him, he ‘started to tremble’. They had said that ‘they needed a woman’. ‘Of course, the interpreter got frightened because he was a young man with a wife who was there on one of those beds…so he said that here there are [only] mothers and elderly people, and they should leave us alone. But they did not want to go away. And then all the women who were there, they covered themselves with a blanket and they [the Soviets] started to take the blanket from them. I was terribly afraid because my mother was there and for her age – forty-eight – she was a good-looking woman. Next to her was her younger sister, and next to them was a councillor from the embassy with his wife and his sixteen-year-old daughter’.

When the soldiers reached the far end of the cellar they found a blonde young woman of seventeen, the maid of the couple who owned the villa. This was the woman they chose. They grabbed her and she started crying and pleading, shouting to the rest of the people in the cellar: ‘Please help me! Help me!’

‘Everybody was frozen – a stone’, says Ivan. ‘This was a terrible moment. I will never forget about it. Everybody knew by then that the women were in real danger…. And then something happened which was at first sight quite strange’. The owner of the house, a retired military officer, started to talk to the maid. ‘He said: “Please make this sacrifice for the sake of the country. And with this you will be able to save the other women here who will never forget this”’.

‘At the time’, says Ivan, ‘I thought this a very mean statement – that he told her to “make this sacrifice on the altar of the Hungarian nation,” but in a way she [the maid] did save my mother and all the other young women there. Then there was quite a lot of crying and the Russian grabbed her and took her upstairs…and after fifteen minutes this girl staggered back down the stairs. She was absolutely collapsing, and she said that she had been the victim of a very fierce atrocity and rape, and this animal even beat her up because she had been crying. And of course everybody else was crying…when they [the others in the cellar] saw this poor girl they didn't even dare to look at her…. It was a terrible case’, recalls Ivan. ‘Even today I can still remember it quite vividly and I get goosebumps, even though I am seventy-five years of age’.

In the aftermath of the Red Army's victory in Budapest rape was almost ubiquitous. ‘The worst suffering of the Hungarian population is due to the rape of women’, records a contemporary report from the Swiss embassy in Budapest. ‘Rapes – affecting all age groups from ten to seventy – are so common that very few women in Hungary have been spared…. The misery is made worse by the sad fact that many Russian soldiers are diseased and there are absolutely no medicines in Hungary’.
⁶²

Fifteen-year-old Agnes Karlik
⁶³
was one of the young Hungarian women who suffered personally at the hands of the Soviet forces.
Just like Ivan and his family, Agnes had been hiding in a cellar with her family during the siege. And, just like Ivan, she found the first Red Army soldiers she met ‘not unpleasant. They were just making sure that there were no enemies in the building. They didn't stay long. They tried, actually, to be friendly’.

But the atmosphere soon changed: ‘All of a sudden these rough type of soldiers entered the building and they were really unpleasant. They snatched watches and looted and pushed people around…. We tried to pacify them, but it was a very frightening time for all of us. The children were crying. And they started to pull women out with the excuse to come and help peel potatoes. And my sister and myself were dragged away’. Agnes' grandmother insisted on going with them: ‘She tried to find out what they wanted and what they were doing. But they just pushed her around and we clung to her. And then they took us outside. There was snow everywhere and it was pretty cold’.

The soldiers dragged them into a tent nearby. ‘They were screaming, and for myself I felt absolutely so frightened that I was just rigid. So they pushed us into this tent type of arrangement and they raped us [her and her sister]. We were just young. Very young. And we didn't know what they were doing because at that time children were brought up differently. Not so aware…. I was sixteen, almost sixteen. In November I was going to be sixteen. And my sister was fourteen. My grandmother tried to help us and they beat her up…. But she wouldn't leave us. And when it was all over she took us back. I still get nightmares about it’.

That night Agnes curled up and tried to fall asleep in a secluded section of the cellar where the clothes were kept: And I was woken up by another couple of hoodlums coming into that section. I don't know how they found me there. They must have been trying to loot. And there I was in the middle of it. And they raped me again. And again I just let myself go absolutely limp'.

Both of these Soviet men raped Agnes. And for her this terrible experience was even ‘worse’ than the rape she had endured earlier in the day. Without her grandmother present she felt ‘such a lonely feeling of helplessness’. After the assaults were over she
‘crawled out’ and told her mother what had happened. ‘I got hysterical actually when I got to my mother. And I remember I was in such a state that eventually they had to shake me to get me out of it’.

The effect on Agnes of these rapes was, understandably, profound: ‘For a long time I felt really resentful against men, being able to do such a thing without any sort of good reason…. It makes you feel really resentful against mankind, more or less’. In hospital, immediately after the second attack, Agnes was given an internal examination to check that she was not seriously injured. This was not an uncommon occurrence, as a result of the severity of the attacks that many women endured.

Medical student Barna Andrasofszky
⁶⁴
witnessed just such a case in a village outside Budapest in the spring of 1945. He was called into a house by an elderly woman and was told that there was a sick young girl inside. When he went in he saw that the living room was in ‘disarray’ and a young woman of about twenty-five was lying on a bed, covered in a blanket: ‘I went up to her and took the blanket – it was covered in blood. And she was crying and she kept saying that she was going to die, and that she didn't want to live any more’. Barna was told that the young woman had been raped by ‘maybe ten or fifteen’ men. She was bleeding profusely from internal injuries sustained in the attack. Barna could not stem the flow of blood, and the woman was taken away to hospital. ‘It was very difficult to come to terms that this was happening in the twentieth century’, he says. ‘It was very difficult to see as a reality what the Nazi propaganda was spreading. But here we could see that in reality. And also we heard about many other terrible situations like this’.