Somogy Döröcske: My Escape From Hell

by Tom Kando

I was born in Budapest at the beginning of World War Two, and I spent my first seven years in Hungary. 

By the end of the war, much of Budapest was reduced to rubble - like Dresden and other cities. The battle for Hungary’s capital between the Soviet Red Army and the Germans lasted from December 1944 to February 1945, and it cost 100,000 lives, including those of some of my relatives.. 

My parents had been good patriots in the struggle against the Nazis, so the post-war government rewarded them. And guess what the reward was? A “farm” of some sort, way out in the boondocks! 

My mom and dad knew less about farming than most Americans know about Hungarian poetry - Nothing. My mother was a photographer and my father was a painter. They were through-and-through urban intellectuals who could probably not distinguish between a horse and a mule. 

But bureaucracies being what they are, plus the end-of-war pandemonium, resulted in this surrealistic scenario: The government allocated a farm to my parents. 

Instead of politely turning down the offer, my parents accepted. They assumed, rightly, that we might be safer in the countryside, and also less likely to starve to death. 
And the countryside it was - with a vengeance! The “farm” consisted of a small vineyard plus an enclosure with two pigs. 

The village was called Somogy Döröcske. It was so small and tucked away in the most backward part of rural Hungary that it wasn’t on any map available at that time. It is somewhere halfway between Budapest and the Croatian border. I recently Googled it. Today, it has a population of 133. Wikipedia says that in the early 18th century the area was listed as “uninhabited,” and later owned by a noble family. 
My parents, my sisters Madeleine and Juliette and I moved there in the summer of 1946. I was five and a half.

Somogy Döröcske is located at the edge of the great Eastern European plain called the Alföld. The summers are long, hot and muggy. Fields of maize and green beans stretch to the horizon in all directions. Flocks of cranes fly in formation in the cloudless skies, and one can see in the distance those unique Eastern European landmarks: Wells, topped by long, slanted wooden arms sticking skyward, each with a a bucket dangling from the top. 

We took the train from Budapest’s Kelety Station to Kaposvar , which was the closest railroad station to our god-forsaken destination. 

At the Kaposvar station, Mr Nemet was waiting for us with his horse cart. He was a farmer in Somogy Döröcske and he had been summoned to pick us up, and to assist us in settling on our new farm. Nemet’s horse was in bad shape. The sickly animal was so thin that its ribs were poking against its skin. It took the horse over four hours to cover the 20 kilometers to our final destination, even though Nemet was whipping it mercilessly. 

Somogy Döröcske was indescribably primitive. It would be an understatement to say that conditions were Third World-like. It was much more primitive than, say, rural Mexico is today. There was no electricity, no telephone, no gas, no heating. 

Our house had a thatched roof and walls and floors made of earth. My sisters and I developed a creative use for the house’s dirt floor. We would pour water on it to make it soft and muddy. Then we’d dig holes and build moats and castles of mud made out of the floor itself! My mother would get exasperated, saying, “Kids, I told you to go outside if you want to build sand castles!” Then she would undo the children’s work and flatten the mud floor back to its regular shape. 

Because my sisters and I were young, healthy and of strong stock, and thanks to our parents’ constant efforts, we weathered the dirt and the lack of hygiene. Throughout our stay in Somogy Döröcske, we were covered with lice. So our parents shaved our heads completely, and drenched them in turpentine. We became accustomed to our bodies’ oily stench. 

The village consisted of one street, flanked by two rows of shacks similar to ours, and a church. The street was made of dirt, and there was a big ditch running parallel to it through the entire village, which was about 300 yards long. There was no telephone anywhere in the village, nor a post office. Cars were unknown. Money did not exist, there were no stores, there was no commerce, just barter. 

News from the outside world reached the village in an unbelievably quaint fashion. Once a week, the village was visited by an official-looking fellow on a horse. He wore a grey uniform and a grey cap and he had a drum. He would station himself in the village center and roll his drum. After the villagers were gathered around him, he would read the latest news to them and enunciate the latest government edicts. This was a twentieth-century European official, yet he resembled a medieval town crier. 

My parents went to Budapest periodically for supplies. This was always an enormous outing. First, they had to cover the 20 kilometers to the Kaposvar railroad station. Sometimes they could get a ride in Mr. Nemet’s horse cart. 

However, this came to and end when Mr. Nemet’s horse died. I remember this well, because on that occasion my parents took me with them to the city. It happened on our way back, two days later. Mr. Nemet was waiting in front of the station to pick us up, as usual. We began the long trek back to the village, the horse walking more slowly than ever, and Nemet beating him more relentlessly than ever. After a while, the beast stopped walking, and simply stood there, heaving and foaming, despite Nemet’s furious whipping frenzy. Finally, the horse collapsed on the road, tried desperately to breath a few times, and died. 

So we grabbed our belongings and walked the rest of the 20 kilometers to the village. From then on, the trip to Budapest always began (and ended) with a five hour walk to the railroad station. The children could no longer go along. During our parents’ absence, we were taken care of by Marika, a neighbor girl. 

The government had given us a small vineyard on the hillside next to the village, plus a couple of pigs. The grapes didn’t last long. We ate some, bartered some to the other villagers, and the rest perished. As to the pigs, we ended up slaughtering and eating them. Food was scarce. I had become attached to one of the pigs, naming him Jancsi (Hungarian for Johnny). I was sad to see him go, but this didn’t prevent me from eating his remains, as hunger was a chronic condition. In fact, my parents made us drink Jancsi’s blood, too, telling us that it would make us grow strong. 

Food scarcity and starvation were endemic. Many people starved to death in 1945. Some of the newspapers featured gruesome photographs of skeletal corpses lying on city sidewalks. 

One afternoon, a neighbor lady invited me into her house. She said that she had a gift for me, something very, very nice. I followed her into her kitchen. She opened a pantry, grabbed a jar and a wooden spoon, dipped it into the jar and offered it to me. I looked at a mysterious red gooey substance, and she said, “eat it Tom, it’s really yummy.” I did, and it was the most exquisite delicacy I had ever tasted. Never before had anyone given me such a treat. “It’s called jam,” she said, as I reached to her with the wooden spoon for another helping. 

Food was such a central problem that the penal code declared no crime more serious than stealing food. You could murder someone and probably just do prison time. But if you stole food, the authorities would most assuredly hang you. 

That’s what happened to Mr. Nemet. I had never liked the ugly old man, especially since I had seen him beat his horse to death. Then, I heard it from the bigger boys in the village: Nemet was hanged! They were all sitting in a circle in the dirt, talking about it excitedly. Being by far the youngest, I just stood in the back and listened, not saying a word. All I could figure out was that Nemet was hanged for stealing food, a large hunk of ham. 

Yet my mother refused to let her children starve, so she had to steal food. She did this when she came back from Budapest on the train and started walking the twenty kilometers to the village. She would pick beans and other vegetables from the fields along the road, and stuff them in her bag to bring home. She risked Nemet’s fate in order to feed her children. 

Death, violence and cruelty were common. Once, some of the bigger boys took me inside the church and showed me a dead baby lying there. Another time, I saw dozens of villagers squatting and standing in a circle at the town center, watching, cheering and hollering: A bunch of village dogs were dismembering a pathetic live fox. 

We stayed in the village less than a year. After a while, my parents realized that they were not meant to be farmers, so we went back to Budapest. This was the beginning of a journey which would take me to Paris, Amsterdam and eventually California. Thank God we survived Somogy Döröcske.

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