My Happy Days In Hell Read online

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  My Happy Days in Hell

  György Faludy was born in Budapest in 1910 and died there in 2006. he was educated at the universities of Vienna, Berlin and Graz and left Hungary in 1938 to live in Paris. He served with the US Army during the Second World War and returned to Hungary in 1946. As dramatized in his famous book My Happy Days in Hell, he was sent to a labour camp on trumped-up charges for three years. After the failure of the 1956 revolution Faludy left Hungary, living first in London and then in Toronto, before returning to Hungary for the final eighteen years of his immensely long life. He was a poet, editor and translator.

  GYÖRGY FALUDY

  My Happy Days in Hell

  Translated by Kathleen Szasz

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  To Suzanne

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published by André Deutsch 1962

  Published in Penguin Classics 2010

  Copyright © György Faludy, 1962

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-195960-3

  Contents

  PART ONE

  France

  PART TWO

  Africa

  PART THREE

  The USA and the People’s Democracy

  PART FOUR

  Arrest

  PART FIVE

  The Forced-Labour Camp

  PART ONE

  France

  In November, 1938, in Budapest, I was invited to a party at which the guest of honour was a British MP. There was also a fat, very conservative and melancholy baron at the party, as well as a few skinny, radical and cheerful colleagues of mine from the left-wing periodical financed by the above-mentioned right-wing baron. The principal subject of conversation was Munich and its consequences. We argued, shouted, gesticulated and finally came to the conclusion that Hitler could do in Europe exactly as he pleased. Everyone was excited, only the features of the British Member of Parliament preserved their somewhat waxy, statue-like calm as he explained quietly why Chamberlain’s policy was correct. When we reached this point, our hostess, a serene and terribly rich lady, no longer young, who made no secret of it that she spent a month or two every year in a lunatic asylum, declared that the topic and mood of our conversation reminded her strongly of the first pages of War and Peace.

  Our polite British guest hastily changed the subject and began to question us concerning our plans for the future. Béla Horvath, a young Catholic poet who, regardless of the time of the year and the occasion was wearing a bright, checked jacket, black trousers and a Michaelmas daisy in his buttonhole, declared that he would fight against Hitler even if he had to give his life for Christianity, for social justice and for Hungary’s independence. He spoke cheerfully, without tragic pose, and in a low voice so as not to disturb the intimate atmosphere of the silk-lined, box-like little salon. He quoted a great deal from the Fathers of the Church, but even more from Chesterton. At the end of his address he joined his hands as if in prayer, raised large, round eyes to the ceiling and thanked the Holy Virgin and his pet saint, St Catherine of Siena, for blessing him with such virility: a virility proved whenever his sense of duty made him speak at mass meetings, whenever his rebelliousness brought him into court, and whenever his pleasure led him into the bed of a peasant girl.

  Horvath’s impassioned speech seemed to have further saddened the honourable Member, who said in his reply that he had not come to Budapest to interfere with our affairs, yet now begged us to allow him to express his modest and honest opinion. We were all young, some of us – I for instance – almost children. He did not wholeheartedly share our radical views, at least not here (by which he probably meant that only Westerners were worthy of freedom; for us even Horthy’s semi-fascist squirearchy was far too good), but he was afraid that should the Germans march into Hungary we would no longer be in a position to express our beliefs. Our periodicals would be confiscated, our books seized and we would be arrested and hanged in secret. The best advice he could give us, he said, was to leave Hungary. It was not impossible that there would soon be a war in spite of Chamberlain’s efforts. After the war, however, we could return and serve the ideals for which, today, we would sacrifice ourselves in vain.

  We paid no heed to his words because we were too intent upon venting our anger against Chamberlain on the poor man. Two months later all the guests at the party, with the exception of the Catholic poet, had left Hungary. The good baron didn’t stop until he reached India. Some had gone to America, others to England.

  It was not the honourable Member who made up my mind for me. All he did was to sever the last tie still holding me back – my fear that I would be called a coward for running away. Yet I had good reasons to leave. I knew that if I remained I would have to fight in the Hungarian Army as an ally of the Germans. I knew that if Hitler won the war Hungary would disappear from the map and a few decades hence only the Hungarian serfs of the German landowners would still speak Hungarian when, after a long day’s work, they stretched out their aching bones in the darkness of the stable. Only if Hitler lost the war was there a chance of survival for my country, but even that was not certain. It seemed clear to me that in case of war my place was on the side of the so-called enemy.

  I, too, had participated in the tragi-comic dress-rehearsal. I, too, had been called up when the Hungarian Army was mobilized in the days before Munich. We had marched through the streets of Budapest to the railway station, accompanied by a military band. At the back exit of the station, however, we were loaded on lorries and driven back to the barracks. In the afternoon we repeated the performance and in the evening we marched through town for the third time. When, at last, we climbed into the train, we had to take off our new uniforms issued by the government and change into old, ragged ones. At the same time we had to hand in our new repeating rifles in exchange for old carbines into which shells had to be fed one by one.

  A few hours later I – then commander of one of the signal platoons of the 11th Infantry Regiment – lay with my men on the southern shore of the River Ipoly, two hundred yards from the Czechs. To the left I could hear one of the battalions of the regiment wandering purposeless in the under-brush, until they gradually dispersed to lie down in the shelter of holl
ows or among the maize. They had no guns and most of their officers had remained behind in the villages because they were afraid of an attack. On our right the fields were deserted. The poplars on the shore, high above the Czechs’ concrete shelters, stood in the moonlight like old actors wrapped in dressing gowns, peering barefoot in the door of the larder to see whether there was any wine left. The thick, russet foliage of the autumnal bushes never stirred, as if it were painted; the stage was set for the great moment of ultimate destruction. While the clatter of the Czech tanks echoed across the water I thought that if they attacked now the Hungarian Army would be routed in two hours and the Czechs would march into Budapest by dawn.

  When, the next day, we received neither supplies nor reinforcement, neither ammunition nor orders, I contacted the Czechs by radio. The troops facing us came from Pozsony and spoke Hungarian. They invited me to dinner that evening, and I went. When I was filling my rucksack with tins for our soldiers before I left the Czechs, the staff sergeant asked me with friendly directness how long it would be before we attacked. We shouldn’t pay attention to their concrete shelters nor to their hand grenades, he said, they all had their white handkerchiefs and towels ready. It was high time someone liquidated that rotten Czechoslovak democracy.

  Next day I was summoned to battalion headquarters in the village. A young, tall and nervous colonel hauled me over the coals and declared that he would have me court-martialled for treason. The next minute, however, after he had sent his adjutant from the room, he recited one of my anti-Nazi poems and congratulated me warmly. He begged me to forgive him for arresting me and particularly for not being able to provide a jail befitting my rank, but he couldn’t help it. Thereupon he accompanied me to a pigsty which had been thoroughly cleaned out and furnished with a large, wine-coloured couch and a huge, poison-green, betasselled armchair. He made up for this lack of comfort by sending me wine, cigarettes and books.

  The colonel profited by the chaos following upon Munich to send me back to my detachment which had, in the meantime, plundered all the orchards of the region and fed itself by throwing hand grenades into a nearby fishpond. Shortly after that we marched into Southern Slovakia, re-annexed to Hungary by the Vienna Resolution. In the territories inhabited by the Slovaks we were watched with fear and mute bitterness, in the Hungarian-inhabited regions we were received with cheers and flowers. We put up in a Hungarian village where, on the second day, my windows were broken by stones during the night and two of my men were knifed in a pub. This occurred after the peasants had found out that henceforth they would receive half as much for their wheat but would have to pay nearly twice as much for industrial products as they had done under the Czechoslovak Republic. A few days later a special company, the so-called ragged-guardists, arrived in the neighbourhood. These differed from partisans only in that they carried on their activities not behind the enemy’s back but behind that of their own armies. One of their characteristic feats of heroism was to emasculate a Jewish jeweller in front of his wife and children and place the few gold watches he had in his store in a Budapest pawn-shop – presumably for patriotic purposes. As the Ministry of Defence had ordered the regular army not to interfere with the affairs of the special companies, my battalion commander was helpless. Soon we were ordered back to Budapest and only the special company and the gendarmes remained behind to complete the work of liberation. It was then that I decided never to participate again in the military operations of the Hungarian Army, however patriotic I might feel.

  The second reason for my emigration was even more pressing. I had written a few satirical poems about the Hungarian fascist leaders. One of them, a deputy by the name of Andras Csilléry, had a heart attack when his malicious secretary showed him my poem after dinner; a poem the social-democratic party disseminated in the form of a leaflet. I had always considered this the greatest achievement of my life. However, until March, 1938, none of my victims had conceived the idea of starting legal proceedings against me. The day following Hitler’s entry into Vienna a great many leading officials, judges, prosecutors and intellectuals queued up before the arrow-cross party headquarters at 60 Andrassy Street, to be received into the party. They stood there for hours, many of them red with shame, for few of them truly sympathized with the Nazis. Still, they waited patiently and found comfort in the thought that there was nothing else for them to do since the West would leave Hungary in the lurch as it had done Austria. The atmosphere of the entire country changed from one minute to the next. A series of actions for slander was brought against me and the Public Prosecutor started proceedings because of my anti-Nazi poems. In one case I was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and it seemed probable that the Supreme Court would increase the sentence. In December, 1938, one of the department heads of the Ministry of Justice – Béla Csank – whom I had never met, summoned me to his office and urged me to leave the country as soon as possible because my arrest was impending. I received the same message from the head of the Budapest Police and from Istvan Antal, Minister of Justice. I was deeply moved by their solicitude, mainly because I had considered both my determined enemies. Istvan Antal asked me to let him have a dedicated copy of my poems before I left.

  The third reason for my emigration was the mad urge to run away not from the army, not from prison, but from my beautiful wife whom I had married barely a year before.

  I had met her three years earlier in the dusty reception room of the liberal newspaper for which I worked. I was sitting there correcting the proofs of some poems of mine when a tall, lovely girl walked in with a provocative, insolent and silly arrogance that immediately repelled me. Outside, heavy snowflakes were falling from a yellow-grey sky; not the first snow of the year.

  She excused herself for the intrusion and explained that she had come to copy out a poem from one of the paper’s back numbers.

  ‘Take off your coat,’ I said and watched her peeling off her fur coat. From the way she did it it was evident that she was used to men helping her off with it.

  ‘The Faludy poems,’ I said, ‘are always cut out from the office copies and taken home. You won’t find a single one …’

  At first she refused to believe that I was the author of the poem in question. She had imagined me much older, much more dignified. However, she was glad to have been wrong and began to praise my work to high heaven. I cut her short by declaring that I was busy at the moment but would give her a ring very soon and bring her the poem in person. A week later I called on her and asked her to meet me at the indoor swimming pool so as to make my intentions quite clear. She came but I was again disappointed by the way she moved. She walked towards me in her two-piece white swim-suit exactly like a small-town prima donna who knows – and knows nothing else – that she is the belle of the town and that all men, from the grocer to the mayor, are crazy about her. Yet her beauty soon made me forget her movements and the excessive make-up on her face. She had a low, rounded forehead, large brown eyes, a short, straight nose, long, exciting lips and a lovely figure. We sat under the sun lamps and I entertained her with a number of amusing stories. She bent forward to listen and involuntarily showed me her small, boyish, pink-tipped breasts. Never before had I seen breasts so beautiful, neither in the Paris music-halls nor in museums: not even on Titian’s Venus or the headless Aphrodite of Cyrene. My voice betrayed my excitement and, becoming aware of the reason, she straightened up.

  ‘Back!’ I snapped at her, ‘back as you were before!’

  Obediently she bent her shoulders, then burst into tears. Suddenly I was sorry for her and assured her that I was not the kind of man her mother had undoubtedly warned her against, who seduced girls and then threw them out. She was surprised that I knew her mother’s way of thinking so well, but my reassurance comforted her. Ten days later we were sitting in a pastry-shop when I thoughtlessly declared that I would gladly marry her. She blushed with pleasure but made no reply. Later we walked to the ruins of an ancient Roman amphitheatre on the outskirts of town and sa
t down on thick snow. We kissed until we sank deep into the snow and found ourselves on a wet marble bench, at the bottom of a funnel-shaped well. This is where I woke up. My love for Valy had lasted from the swimming pool to the amphitheatre.

  On the way home, I suddenly remembered what I had said to her at the pastry-shop and a wild panic took hold of me. I would gladly have walked the ten miles to her home on my bare feet in the snow to entreat her to forget and forgive, like Henry IV under the walls of Canossa. But it was very late and I knew that her father – a venerable cabinet-maker – retired early. I tossed and turned all night, helpless and desperate, exactly as I was to toss one and a half years later when I was to meet Valy on the following morning at the Register office. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was insane to keep our date because our marriage was doomed in advance; yet I also knew that I would go because I had promised it to her that afternoon at the pastry-shop and because once or twice she had reminded me of that promise.

  Valy was a faithful, honest, loving and selfless wife; she was an excellent housekeeper and she adored me. Or rather, not me, but a gigantic bronze bust of the Platonic idea of the poet as seen by a blue-stocking. When I worked she retired to the kitchen so as not to disturb me by moving about in her room next to mine, and sat motionless on a kitchen stool until daybreak. When we went out together she praised me so loudly and so long that I fled into the darkest corner to hide my shame. She imagined herself my Muse and believed that should she leave me I would perish on the roadside. Thus it was in my own interest that she protected me and bossed me. As time passed she froze out all my friends and acquaintances. Once, when someone gave me a pot of tulips and she noticed that I looked at the flowers three times in succession, she threw the pot out of the window. She was jealous, hysterical and touchy and because she believed that all poets were solemn and pompous she tried to cure me of my easy-going indolence and irreverence. She loved quarrels, the noisier the better. Whenever we quarrelled she enumerated all the crimes I had committed against her, from the oldest to the most recent, sobbing and screaming until all our neighbours woke. If I fell asleep during these scenes, she shook me awake and reproached me for being a wash-out, good for nothing, not even for a quarrel, and if I still slept on she resumed the quarrel in the morning.