GEORGE HODOS
595
more pronounced in the secret branch trials, our Swiss group had not one
gentile member.
But the picture was very similar on the other side of the fence ; the
overwhelming majority of the AVH officers were Jewish, from Gabor Peter
on the top down to the little interrogators; only the manual jobs, physical
torture as well as the routine jail duties, were performed by gentiles, mostly
of peasant origin.
In spite of this even distribution, the anti-Semitic undercurrent of the
purge was already clearly distinguishable, it would culminate four to five
years later, after the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia, in the arrest of commu–
nists with a Zionist past and the preparations for a "Jewish doctors' plot,"
thwarted only in the last minute by the death of Stalin.
*
*
*
It is simpler to relate the events of the four and one-half years following
the trial.
It
was not a villa to which we were transported from the Trial Hall,
but the prison of Vic, near the border with Czechoslovakia. Later we were
taken to the former Assembly Prison in Budapest . Both prisons were run by
the AVH and reserved for political prisoners.
We were beaten when we spoke with a cell neighbor, when a pencil
stub or a piece of paper was found on us, when we did not produce our work
norms in the button factory .
They kept us for weeks in isolation cells, forced us to exercise in the
prison corridor until we collapsed , and when we were fettered on hands and
feet the guards would put out their cigarettes in our ears . The worst part was
the complete isolation from the outside ; we were not permitted to write or
to receive letters, to say nothing of visitors . My wife had no word from
me,
no indication of whether I was alive or dead, for four years. I had become a
speck of dust, squashed by the Party.
We survived these years in large measure because we were together.
It
did not take long before we realized that none of us had committed even
the slightest offense against the Party or the state.
It
was a small step to the
realization that the criminals were not those in the prisons but those in the
Kremlin and in the offices of the AVH. The AVH interrogators had not lied
to us , with such knowledge as we possessed, the length of our sentences was
a mere formality ; we could not hope to leave this nether world alive.
Our rescue came from a totally unexpected direction . Stalin, who had
made us disappear, enabled us to return by his own death. Khrushchev
needed a counter Rajk trial for his own purposes in the struggle against Beria
and so he "unmasked" Beria and his accomplices as "agents of the imperial–
istic intelligence services."
For Stalin, Hungary had been , in 1949, the scene of the first big scale
