Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum

Author:Anne Applebaum
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, History, Azizex666, Politics
ISBN: 9780385536431
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2012-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

We consumed the half pint of barley coffee we received for breakfast, the soup and vegetable we got for lunch and the vegetable served us as dinner standing on the hillside in front of the camp kitchen, where the cauldrons and cooks were protected against the rain by corrugated sheet-iron mounted on four posts. We poured the hot soup down our throats, spooned out the vegetable (automatically counting the little pieces of horse meat put in it three times a week) …29

As in the Gulag, there was a hierarchy in Recsk—former social democrats were treated better than former members of center-right parties, for example, and some prisoners were allowed to collaborate and become foremen. The prisoners called them nachalniks, the Russian word for “boss.” Also as in the Gulag there were elaborate systems of control and punishment. The prisoners were regularly made to stand and be counted, no matter the weather. This took a long time because the guards’ knowledge of numbers was so weak. Those who disobeyed any of the rules could be put in a punishment barrack and deprived of food or could be sent to spend the night lying on a plank in a “wet” cell, where water seeped in from the sides, sometimes knee-deep. To observe all of these Soviet innovations, and presumably to offer suggestions for improvement, Soviet advisers paid periodic visits to the camp, as did Rákosi. As in the USSR a Potemkin village was created in anticipation of their arrival: prisoners were cleaned, workplaces were tidied up, flowers were even planted around the camp perimeter.

Just as the Gulag began to close down after Stalin died, so too did Recsk cease to operate after the Soviet leader’s demise. Garasin’s reward—or perhaps his punishment—for importing a Soviet-style concentration camp to Hungary was to become, in subsequent years, the Hungarian ambassador to Mongolia. His party files also contain pleas for help from his Hungarian comrades—he needed money for throat operations that could only be done in Moscow, and his pension was very low. On his seventieth birthday, someone wrote a letter recommending that the Hungarian Politburo give him a medal. Soon after that, he died.30

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