Between Berlin and Moscow – The difficult fate of a member of the Levente organisation in southern Slovakia. Written summary of audio-video interview.

When the front approached Deáki (Diakovce, Sala district), Arnold Merva’s home village, at the end of 1944, the forced conscription of the young men in the German Reich began: “Some chief officer figured out that the Hungarian youth had to be saved from the invading Russian army. That we would be the founders and executors of the future. From Deáki, there were three expeditions of conscripts to Germany, but how many in total, I have no idea. I spoke to some guys who were also on the island of Peenemünde, from where the V2 rockets were launched to London. And it was a terribly dangerous place because the British were fully aware of everything. They never knew at what moment the bombing was going to come and bring the whole thing down. There were people, for example, who had anti-aircraft training on flak, these little four-barrel anti-aircraft guns. And those guys had so much fun when they could turn the cannon around and shoot at the fighter. That’s how kids are.”

Arnold Merva went to Germany with the second group from Deáki, but on the train there were also Leventes from the surrounding villages: “We went to bed, on the evening of 5 January 1945, they were beating the drums at midnight. Tomorrow morning at six o’clock, all the Leventes from fifteen years old up to soldier age who are at home must appear at the village hall with three days’ rations and fresh underwear, and they will leave for Germany. Of course, as always then, it was added that they were ‘under the burden of execution‘. Of course, there was a lot of crying in the street, there were several of us so young.” The route took them along the Váh, through the Jablunka Pass, to Dresden, where the transport turned south and via Ústí nad Labem reached Cheb, where it split. The student body continued north to Berlin. Due to congestion and damage to the railway network, the journey took more than two weeks.

The destination was Schönwald, a military airfield west of Berlin: “We were working on the airfield, where they were already digging fortifications. Messerschmitts and then Focke-Wolfs landed there, but there were also bigger planes. We dug sloping hatches, but they were so wide that even their wings could fit. So while we were working we still didn’t really understand our situation. Because Germany was already, you could say, on its knees, completely overwhelmed.”

In the last days of the war, life in the besieged city took on absurd contours: “Everything was in ruins and there were hardly any civilians in that part of the city – those who had not fled were all living in the cellars. On the top floor, anyone could run riot, it was uninhabited. And again, the German organisation was something to be admired – bombing one day, the next morning the street was cleared. A heap of rubble left and right, but the roads were clear, traffic was maintained until the last days. And even then, crazy things happened. There was a recurring figure. An SS officer. German cap on one side, pulled down, looking tough, knight’s cross around his neck, his right eye blindfolded, his left hand was just a hook. His right side was crossed with a machine gun, and he was just walking around, he hadn’t put a helmet on his head, because it did protect his head somewhat. He wasn’t protecting himself from anything, anything could come at him. The man had the impression that it was looking for death, it was looking for where something could hit it. Once there was a big shoot-out, and he got himself under fire and went across the Heerstrasse. There was gunfire all around him, everything, and he calmly crossed over to the other side, where we saw him go through the trees. And the bullet missed him, even though he was shot there. He may have had no one left. He may have been living alone of his family, and he was going through all sorts of things, because the way he lost his arm and his eye, it was no child’s play. They wanted to be everything and they became nothing.”

Arnold Merva recalls his first direct encounter with a Red Army soldier as follows: “Suddenly, someone from the bushes called out: ‘Stoi! Ruki verch!‘ At first we only saw a machine gun barrel, then a soldier stepped out because he saw us stop and put our hands up. It was a young guy, a brown, very handsome kid, about our age or even younger, of course he must have been an old front fighter, who knows how long he had been a soldier. He came up to us: ’No, uri máte?’ Uhr is in German, he meant watch. We showed him, no Uhr, no watch. He took it from those who had it, because there were about six or seven of us in that group. I had a three-coloured flashlight hanging on my belt, red, green and I don’t know what colour you could change, maybe white. I really liked it, I didn’t have anything like that at home. He took it, put it on, liked it, put it in his pocket, and that was it.”

The first of the ten prison camps in which Mr Merva was held was in a huge cement factory in Rüdersdorf, east of Berlin. It was here that the soldiers began to become prisoners. “Then it was announced that all hair had to be removed, everyone had to shave their heads. With what? And then there were those lifeless razors, Holy Mary! By the time they’d shaved my hair off, half the skin was still there. Then the doctor’s visit, that was a miracle. We went in, and the doctor, I can still recall her standing in front of me, was dressed like hell: she had white sandals on her feet, black silk stockings, this big blue skirt that Russian women used to wear, and green gymnast’s pants, the kind of shirt you have to wear with three buttons on top. And she had red hair and a cigarette in her pipe, she smoked it, God forbid! Well, the impression I got when I saw her was, is this the doctor? Well, doctor! Anyone who had a bit of teeth left in his mouth was class one, anyone who was already bone and skin was class two or three, and anyone who had to be carried in, was dystrophy, and that was that.”

At the end of June, a transport was set up to take the prisoners to Poznań. “As in a fully equipped camp, there were two toilets there. And as in the toilets in general, there were graffiti everywhere, I read a Slovak inscription there, it was ‘Podľa čistoty záchoda poznáš kultúru národa’ – the cleanliness of the toilet shows the culture of the nation. And how true this was was horribly confirmed later, when we were in primitive environments so far below civilisation. What purity means, and the preservation of purity – as long as one can strive for purity, there is hope of return, there is hope of survival. When you have given up, sooner or later you will be destroyed, then only luck can save you, because then you cannot recover from your own humanity. These were terrible situations. And then I often remembered this sentence. There was no culture there.”

At the end of July, some of the prisoners were loaded into wagons and began the more than two-week journey to the Soviet Union and the subsequent quarantine – and the prisoners had to stay in the wagon: “To be in a wagon for more than a month is an amazing thing. We were squeezed into a wagon, forty or fifty of us, without bunks, so we were just on the ground, lying on the floorboards. And what’s more, during the quarantine we were given better food – they didn’t know about fat – they gave us oily food. The only thing they forgot was that if they gave you food, you had to go to the toilet there. Then they made a spout like this. I was lucky enough to be at least at the back of the wagon. But for those who were lying right next to it, when they gave me this fatty food and I got diarrhoea – not epidemic, but natural – how it was there is unimaginable. And then at the very end of August, when it was time to get out of the wagon, those who jumped out – ‘who am I!‘ – hiccupped like colts, no strength left in our legs.”

In early September 1945, the worst months of Mr Merva’s life began. The location: Grazdansk (civilian) camp No. 12, Baranavichy, Belarus, Soviet Federative Republic of Belarus. “That was it. Footwear was not distributed, but a pile of everything was thrown off a car. But that was nowhere near what we had. I had two left-footed gym slippers. I put one on my right foot, and the other one was at least five sizes bigger – I put it on my left foot and we went into the winter with it. It came off in two weeks, but because we were working with wood at the time, we made our own wooden soles, thick ones so they wouldn’t wear out quickly, and we put some kind of harness, some kind of rope, on them and walked with them. The wounds made by that harness didn’t heal for years, because wood doesn’t bend, and the step was obviously always on the harness, so it was terrible. And we were like that until the beginning of November. It was only at the beginning of November, when we had got over the big autumn rains, that we were given clothing, the kind of clothing that the Swedish and all the armies had thrown off.”

Although prisoners had been used for casual labour in earlier concentration camps, it was only in the Soviet Union that regular work began. In an environment where everything is owned by the state, corruption and theft sooner or later develop: “The wood that could be felled was taken and carried to the railway, not to the station. When no trains came, they pushed the train out and then had to quickly load some wagons with the wood. And when we had loaded almost the whole train in ten days, it turned out that we didn’t have a permit, we were stealing the wood! Then they pulled us into the station and we had to throw down all the wood, it was terrible!”

The hunger, which the prisoners inherited from Germany, became more and more severe thanks to hard work. As time went on, food became more and more the focus of the prisoners’ attention. “In the middle of the room, in the middle of the entrance, there was a man from the middle of the hall. He stole somebody’s bread. The kid had already fallen down, and they just kept kicking him and hitting him. The next day the kid died because his kidneys supposedly ruptured. So that’s what I saw, for a piece of bread! We ate what we were given and it was too little. There, bread was really the only thing that might have kept us going, and if anyone sinned against it, there was no Uncle Peter.”

The other reality the prisoners had to deal with was the lack of hygiene: “From the beginning of November until February 20, because they took over the camp on the 17th, we didn’t have a bath. This also means that we didn’t have clean underwear during these almost four months, because the system there was that they gave us underwear in the bathroom. Not clean, but you could change there. The only source of water was in the yard of a dilapidated school next door, and from there water was brought to the kitchen, as much as was needed for cooking. There was no washing or bathing, except for when you rubbed your face with the snow. And in the meantime, there were all kinds of diseases. You can imagine the state of things.”

A combination of bad factors – exhausting work, inadequate nutrition, disastrous hygiene – led to the weakening of the human body and increased susceptibility to various diseases: “Then we were hit by epidemic diarrhoea. And there was no remedy. We had a doctor, in the eyes of the Russians a doctor was a great authority, it didn’t matter what his ethnicity was, as long as he was a doctor. He had a surgery, a small room, this narrow room, with a medical soldier. And he was supposed to be a barber, but it didn’t matter, they were the medical staff who had to look after us. But they were absolutely helpless. Without medicine, the best the doctor could say was ‘pray that you stay alive‘, but even that was useless. It was horrible. When the epidemic of diarrhoea began in mid-October, and lasted for a month, the people really fell like flies in autumn.”

The extent to which the fate of the prisoner of war is linked to the character of the prison guard who holds the power has been proven many times. In the second half of February, a new officer with the rank of lieutenant took over Camp 12 from the old, ruthless camp commander. After his arrival, living conditions improved considerably. “Because the previous administration had stolen everything from us, we had received supplies in vain – what they could, they stole and sold. So they took over about five hundred and twenty people on 5 September, on 17 February they were able to hand over one hundred and seventy, one hundred and seventy-five people. The rest were taken away, either as patients or simply buried in the snow behind the camp. Those who survived could count themselves lucky. If I hadn’t been young or somehow tougher than average, I wouldn’t have survived either, because I could have died of any of my diseases.”

At the new camp in Kavpenica, construction began on the long-distance road linking Moscow to Berlin. Again, because of the lack of equipment, the task of moving the huge quantities of earth was left to the masses of prisoners. “That was the big nonsense. The Russians didn’t like us because of that, they even said ‘you’ll go home, but you’ll raise the norm here, and then it will stay here for us, and we’ll have to do it all the time’. They were right, they were 100% right. But we just had to be encouraged, ‘you’ll make half a cubic metre more and then you’ll have ten decilitres more bread’. When we started in Kalpenyica, the norm was 1.2 cubic metres for two people with the noodles, and in two months we had two and a half cubes.”

Mr Merva discovered that the prisoners were not the only ones who had a hard time in the camps: “One of the guards was called Aristol, and we used to talk to him. It wasn’t that I was on good terms with him, it was just a way of chatting a little, to understand each other’s relationships and situations. ‘When did you leave home?‘ – he asks me. ‘Oh, it’s been two years.‘ – ‘What?, It’s been four years since I left.‘ – ‘You haven’t been home?‘ – ‘No, no‘, he says. The war had been over for more than a year. He says: – ‘I get ten days. I won’t even make it home in ten days, not even to come back‘ – because he was from somewhere in Eastern Siberia. – ‘If I don’t come back, I’m a deserter‘ – and there’s no Uncle Peter there, he can go to the gulag. That was life at that time, so those on the other side, those who were guarding us, were just as much prisoners because they were just as helpless as we were.”

The prisoners were given the opportunity to write home in the autumn of 1945, but there was no reply. Mr Merva received his first letter in November 1946, in which his mother wrote briefly that she was alive and well. “Ferenc also receives the letter, goes over and receives it, his hand was almost trembling. He unfurls it there beside his friend Géza, fades away, collapses. It said: ‘Dear Ferenc, I received your letter, but it went to the wrong place, I’m sorry, I don’t live there anymore’ – he was living somewhere in the Alföld, on some farm in the Kishunság region -, ‘because they brought us the news of your death, and I met one of the soldiers who fled, and now I live here. If you want to come and see me when you get home”. They were like that. Perhaps that was the first time I thought, the first time I felt, that it was not for us that the hardest thing was. We young people somehow managed it, because most of us, people my age, were independent. We had family, but it was our parents, not our own family. But there were people who left three or four children at home, even their wives, and now for years they didn’t know if they are alive, dead, what about them, is it worth living at all? Even before that, he had left them behind at the age of thirty or thirty-five, and for three or four years he knew nothing about them. What were those people going through?”

A few days before returning home, the prisoners were asked to provide an address where they intended to go after their return from the Soviet Union. Mr Merva changed his mind at the last minute: instead of his birthplace, Deáki, he gave the address of his relatives in Budapest. When they were waiting for the train, a military jeep arrived at the station: “Suddenly a military jeep came. ‘I’m going to read out names‘, he said. He started, read out about twenty names, including Horváth Andris, a Peredite. I had already guessed what was going to happen, because we knew roughly who belonged where, who was from the Highlands and who was not. Well, he read out the ones from the Highlands, the ones from Czechoslovakia. Now either we don’t go home or they don’t. But everything pointed to us going home. Then later we were in contact with Andris Horváth, who told us that they had also come home about three weeks later, and got home in May. In Malacka, or wherever there was a camp like that, where they took these people who had been to the Soviet Union.”

With short stops at the transit camps in Maramaros and Debrecen, Arnold Merva reached Budapest on 3 May 1948. A few weeks later he returned to his home village. After three and a half years he was reunited with his family.

Collected and edited by Zoltán Kőrös, Fórum Institute, 2012-2018
“I made 13 interviews with Uncle Arnold (1925-2019), which is 30 hours of material; the war and prisoner of war theme is published in the book In the Land of Muzka (90 pages), he is one of the main characters in our film In the Land of Muzka, here is a 40 minute excerpt from the more than 5 hours of footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d16qIZSftUc”

The material will be available for research in 2024.