Track closure

The date was 31 August 1968.

The summer is over. The last Saturday in August. Tomorrow is September 1st, school starts on
Monday.

We travel with my grandfather by train from Agárd to Budapest. The rest of the family has been
home for a few days. I begged to stay downstairs with Grandpa. We're full of luggage, taking home
the summer stuff, the fruit we picked, pears, apples, and some end-of-summer flowers, August lilies.
Grandpa still has to come back in September for the nuts, hazelnuts and winter pears.

We'll travel in a jerky waxtrain because it's cheaper by a few forints. The train stops everywhere. The
Déli Railway Station is the final stop, but we get off at Kelenföld, because it is cheaper that way, and
from there we take two trams, with a transfer to the Üllői út Clinics.

But there is still a lot of time before then.

A couple of cars away are some summer friends from the beach, I'd love to join them, but I'm sorry
to leave my grandfather alone, and I'm ashamed that I'm not in my brand new jeans, but in baggy
teddy trousers.

It's sweltering hot. Every now and then I roll down the window, but someone always tells me to pull
it up because there's a draught. But I really enjoy the fresh air in the late summer, mingled with the
smell of the lake and the smoke from the steamer. The coupe is full of simple, mostly elderly garden
owner people tired from work, with buckets and bags. The smell of sweat mingles with the heady
scent of flowers.

My last glimpses of the lake, the deserted beaches, the scene of summer. On the other side of the
lake, the hills are already yellowing, the monument of Pákozd battle on the top of Mount Mészeg is
sadly silent. No more small boats are puffing towards the fishing tavern on Mosquito Island, no
sailboats are sailing across the water, only one or two fishing boats can be seen.

I love this landscape. I've spent every summer here since I was born. This is summer paradise. And
the oasis is in the Clinic Garden from autumn to summer.

At one station or another, you can hear the clang of the descending barriers, and everywhere there
are one or two waiting pedestrians, sometimes a motorcyclist, hardly a car.

On the Balaton highway there are a conspicuous number of military vehicles, eleven days since we
entered Czechoslovakia with the Soviet troops.

We don't talk much. My grandfather is a quiet man, and we don't have much in common.

Suddenly he breaks the silence.

- It's war again. This is the sixth one in my life.

- What do you mean, the sixth?

- At fourteen, the Great War, at seventeen, the Reds and the Whites in Russia, at nineteen, the
Communists in Hungary, at thirty-nine, the second World War, then fifty-six revolution, and now this.

- Grandpa, where did you fight in the First World War?

- Well, if you're really interested, I'll tell you.

He lights a cheap cigarette, his hands trembling as he struggles to fit the tiny flame to the end of the
cigarette on the rattling train.

- I have to start far away. You know that I was born in Érszalacs, in the county of Bihar, now part of
Romania. We were very poor. My parents were peasants, farmers. We had a small plot of land, we
grew a little corn and vegetables, one cow and mostly poultry. The house was a pise building, and we
often heated in our oven with corn husks, and baked bread and cooked the soup and porridge on it.

We also had a small vineyard on the hill above the village, with a cellar attached to it, and in the
barrels we had some good wine. This was the ruin of my father, who drank too much one winter
night, fell asleep in front of the cellar and froze to death in the morning. He was 42, I was 12.

I was left half-orphaned. We children had to help our mother around the house and on the farm.

Our mother was tired from all the childbirth and work.

I got up at dawn, I cut the wood, I had to light the oven and I baked the bread.

There were six of us: my elder brothers John and Alexander, me, Joseph, my two younger others
Andrew and Charles and my sister Róza. Charles died in infancy.

Szalacs was a large village with more than 5,000 Hungarian inhabitants, three quarters of whom were
Reformed, the rest Catholic. On Sundays, after the church service and the tavern, the Reformed and
Catholic lads used to fight. Just for fun.

I went to six elementary schools, I was a good student. I had to work. When I was 19, in 1907, I went
to work as a gardener in the public hospital in Nagyvárad.

I was paid 20 crowns a month, which was not a lot of money, but I sent most of it home to my
mother. For fun, I drank a glass of beer on Sundays and smoked a cigarette. Only on sundays.

Two years later I was hired as a gardener by Rezső Ghiczy, a vineyard owner. Here I was already
earning 60 crowns a month. After a year, however, I left because my companions suspected me of
stealing. My master had me condemned. I did not stay, I was very hurt.

Anyway, my mother's brother, Károly Tolvaj, a merchant, invited me to Budapest to work for him in
his general store in the Károlyi Palace on the corner of Sándor Főherceg utca and Szentkirályi utca.

I packed my things into a wooden box, boarded a train and travelled up to Budapest to try my luck.

Uncle Károly was waiting for me at the Keleti Railway Station, but he didn't buy a tram ticket, so we
walked at least five kilometres to his shop near the National Museum. Then my hand fell off my
heavy box.
I once caught a footman stealing. We had a fight. When Uncle Charles found out we'd had a fight, he
scolded me. I quit that very day.

I applied for a job as a gardener at the nearby clinic on Üllői street. Later I became a male nurse. The
year was 1911, when I was drafted.

In September 1914, as the war broke out, I was called up to the 3rd Infantry Regiment in Debrecen.

I went home to Szalacs to say goodbye to my mother and brothers and sister.

There I found out that my brother András had been called up.

I comforted our poor, crying mother: Don't cry, mother, we'll go and shoot him and come home.

We had no idea at the time that my brother András would never come home, and I would not come
home for almost six years, but by then Szalacs would not be in Hungary, but in Romania.

The next day I travelled with my brother and the village men by train to Debrecen through
Érmihályfalva.

I became in the army a medic, because i worked in a hospital.

With two of my fellow soldiers - my compatriots - I had a photograph taken in my soldier suit at a
photographer's, I still keep it.

After a month of training, in October we were taken to the Russian front.

We were loaded into cattle wagons and travelled through Nyíregyháza, Kisvárda and Záhony to
Ungvár.

From there, we marched on in columns on foot, because the Russians had broken through the front
in September, occupied the whole of Galicia and invaded Hungary.

We had to push the Russians out of Transcarpathia through the Uzhok Pass into Galicia.

We were out of the front line in a few days. Here the hills were already high, dotted with valleys and
small, wooden-hut Ruthenian villages.

By November the cold had arrived. The fortunes of war were in flux. Usually we attacked and pushed
forward, but sometimes a Russian counterattack was successful.

On one occasion, when the soup was almost ready in the goulash pot, we were suddenly attacked by
Russians. We had to flee quickly, but we spilled the hot pot of soup on the ground so that the
Russians would not eat it.

After a week we took back our positions and were so hungry that we scraped pieces of meat and
potatoes from under the snow that had just fallen and ate them.

By early December we had retaken the Uzsoki Pass and pushed into Galicia.

I was captured on 19 December. Our unit was unexpectedly surrounded by a Russian patrol and we
were all captured.
 *

In the meantime, we left Lake Velence. In Kápolnásnyék, Vörösmarty's birthplace appeared for a
moment. At Pettend, the tracks were surrounded by the plains of the Mezőföld, sometimes in a deep
ditch, sometimes on top of an embankment, depending on whether they were cutting through a hill
or a stream valley. Far to the north of the Váli brook, the bluish hump of the Vértes could be seen. At
Martonvásár there was a track closure, so we had a longer forced rest ahead of us.

I had long forgotten my friends and my baggy teddy trousers, and listened in awe to my grandfather's
life story.

He smoked again. He usually smoked less, but now he was stirred by the memories.

- At first I was very frightened, but when I saw that I wasn't being killed, just taken prisoner, I calmed
down. After all, the threat of death had passed over my head. The war could not last more than a
month or two, I could endure it, and at the end I could go home, and everything would go on as it
had begun.

We were taken to Stryj, Ukraina, where thousands of my comrades were awaiting the outcome of
their fate. Here we were again loaded into cattle wagons, and the long journey, our ordeal, began.

First we were taken to Lemberg, to the large assembly camp which had been converted from a
barracks. Here we spent Christmas 1914. A few days later we were wagoned in again, and from then
on I spent more than a month in cattle wagons. Once a day I was given half a loaf of stale bread, a jug
of water and a tub. All this in December and January, during the Russian winter, without heating.

Our journey took us through Kiev, Kursk, Oryol and Tula to Moscow. Of course, we had no idea
where we were going, only those who knew some Cyrillic could spell out the names of the stations. In
Moscow we were split up, some to the north, some to Siberia and some to Turkestan. Here we were
a mixture of Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Czechs, Croats, Poles, Galician Ukrainians, Slovenes,
Romanians from Transylvania and Bukovina. The worst thing was that I didn't know a word of Russian
and I couldn't understand what they wanted from me. There was rarely an interpreter. The New
Year's Eve of 1915 was in Moscow.

In January we were again wagoned in. We reached Turkestan through Ryazan, Kuybishev and
Orenburg. Sometimes, when the train was stationary for a long time, we were allowed to get out for
a while to exercise our tired limbs. Sometimes the train would stand at a station for days. We arrived
in early February in Kokand, Uzbekistan, near the Chinese border, at the foot of the Pamir
Mountains, in the Fergana Basin, via Aralsk, Kizil Orda and Tashkent.

Kokand was a real Asian Muslim Turkish city, with mosques and minarets. I had never seen anything
like it. From there we were driven on foot to the garrison in Skobelev, the prisoners of war camp.

In the meantime we had many dead and sick, the wounds of the wounded had become infected,
many had frozen their feet, dysentery and typhus were taking their toll. We were starving and cold.
Most of the healthy prisoners from the camp were distributed to work on farms in the area. After a
few weeks, I was taken, along with two of my companions, to the farm of a young war widow.

The woman treated us well. We had to work a lot, but we were given decent lodging and food.

As soon as we arrived, she gave us a loaf of bread. We fell on it like wolves and ate it like wolves.
Finally, not the hard, nasty black bread, but soft and white like the bread at home. The woman just
looked at us, her tears quietly flowing.

And so two years of monotony passed. Summers were very hot and winters were bitterly cold. We
were in the valley of the Sir-Darya River, where irrigation farming was practised everywhere. Wheat,
orchards, melons, vegetables.

We had no news from home, and we had no news of ourselves. We didn't even know how the war
was going or why it wasn't over, even though the leaves had fallen three times since we had left. In
the meantime, I was slowly learning Russian.

In February 1917, the revolution broke out in St Petersburg. The news came that Russia was quitting
the war. We began to feel hopeful. But the months went by without results. At the end of October,
news of the Red Revolution arrived. We didn't know what would happen. Civil war broke out. At first
the Reds were in power in Tashkent, but then the Whites drove them out.

In 1919, the Bolsheviks re-entered Turkestan, and the fighting reached Skobelev. I too was
conscripted as a Red soldier and became a medic again. Now I had to take care of patients in a
military typhus hospital. I also caught typhus and fell into bed with a high fever. For weeks I was not
sure I would recover, but then I did survive.

At the beginning of the summer of 1920, nearly six years after I was taken prisoner, I received the
news that I could go home.

I started packing my bags at once. My mistress was crying, she wanted to keep me, but I could not be
stopped. I missed my family, my country, my village, the chimes and the Hungarian countryside. Here
the muezzins sang "Tashkent, Tashkent, Samarkand! It was not my world, I was a stranger there.

They wagoned me again and took me back to Moscow, through civil war-torn Russia. From Moscow, I
was taken via Tver to St. Petersburg and from there to Finland. In Helsinki we were put on a ship and
landed in Stettin, Germany.

I finally arrived home by train, through Berlin and Prague, on 14 August 1920, to the landing camp at
Csót, where I was quarantined for two weeks under observation. At the end I received three days'
pay, - 12 crowns, - and 100 crowns demobilization fee. The camp officer asked me where I wanted to
go. I told him: home. He looks at my papers, sees I'm from Szalacs and asks: "Where are you going? I
didn't understand. He says, "It's because Szalacs is no longer the Homeland, it had to be handed over
to the Romanians.

I travelled up to Pest and applied for a job at the Üllői út Clinic.

It was very difficult for me to visit my mum and dad in Szalacs. I had to escape to and from the
border. There I learned that my brother András had died in the war.
Every Sunday I took the tram to Újpest. My brother Sándor moved there, started a family and worked
as a tram conductor. We went to the Reformed services together, and afterwards I had lunch at their
house.

They introduced me through an acquaintance to your grandmother - a good Reformed girl, they said
- but that's another story.

In the meantime, the track closure over and our train was on its way. By the time the narrative was
over, we had already passed the pig-fattening farm and the castle of Nagytétény, and were in
Budafok, in front of the old wine cellars on the banks of the Danube.

After that my grandfather said nothing more, I was silent too.

He didn't even light another cigarette.

We got off at Kelenföld with our luggage and buckets, bought two transfer tickets and with trams 49
and 63 back home.

Budapest, 26.04.2014.

András Mezey