REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

12
Remembrance in Time
them. This problem was “solved” by the Soviet officers by creating Russian-language
confessions including false information. She couldn’t even read those confessions, but as
she and the others were promised to go home if they sign those documents, all of them
signed the false confessions.
Soon she was delivered again, again not home to Budapest, but to Balatonfüred. There,
after a trial without any legal background she was sentenced to ten years imprisonment.
After the sentence had been pronounced, Magdolna was taken to the prison of
Sopronkıhida, to an unheated cell for two, where there were fifteen prisoners closed at
the same time. The only fortune of hers – among the many afflictions – was that she and a
woman from Ukraine was appointed to wash the officers’ clothes for a better supplement.
She shared the extra food with the other prisoners, which meant an advantage for her later
fate.
Following Sopronkıhida she was taken to Lemberg (today Lvov – in Ukraine). The
journey by train, full of suffer, longed for three weeks, under inhuman conditions. There
was only a hole cut in the floor of the overcrowded compartment. The prisoners could
relieve themselves only through those holes; their sustenance was miserable and they
were constantly suffering of thirst.
It meant a serious mental shock for her that after arriving at the Lemberg camp, and
having an obligatory bath, men shaved women’s hairs among the rude and vulgar
comments of the guard. She spent only several days in Lemberg, and then she was taken
to the Donbass camp – situated in the coalfield of Donbass (Ukraine), where she worked
in the agriculture – on a potato-field. As it was usual at the similar places, the life was
directed by criminals, so the violation and brutality, many times leading to murders, was
an everyday phenomenon. However, there were some prisoners, whom she had formerly
known from the Sopronkıhida prison, where she had shared her extra food with them.
These prisoners protected the new-coming, weak young girl being unversed about the
local circumstances: she could be the first, to get food, and one time they even got back
her stolen clothes.
Soon she was entrained again, and after a journey, longing for several weeks she was
taken to Irkutsk and then to Taiset (Russia today). During the journey she became
seriously ill – became malarial, and she arrived in Siberia half-dead. Thanks to the
treatment by a well-intentioned doctor originated from Georgia, who could get medicine
for her, she got better. For her luck she was assigned to the camp kitchen as the assistant
of another Hungarian prisoner. Thanks to the relatively hearty meal she strengthened and
when she fully recovered, she became a seamstress in another camp.
But not that camp was the last station – she was delivered to several further camps,
where the weak girl had to fulfil the hardest physical works: she participated in woodcutting,
structural erection, and worked at the building of the Trans-Siberian railway –
putting down the rails – under awful weather-conditions, and getting food with poor
calorie. Officially, if the temperature was lower than -42 ºC, the prisoners were not taken
to work, but in the reality they had to work even at -50 ºC, she had to work 12 hours a