THE RECORD

October 06, 1999

Fiat Lux

by Ed Deak

I have been writing this column now for three months and thought that I would share with my readers a sense of the experiences that have lead to my views. It is said that we are all creatures of habit, but sometimes it pays to look behind the scenes to see what makes people behave, and why they think the way they do.

I was born in 1927 and grew up in a depression ridden Hungary under a fascist dictatorship in a lower middle-class, fascist, ultra conservative, royalist, highly religious family. We were taught from day one that being ruled by an aristocracy was the will of God. We started marching in columns and in step, singing military songs at the age of 6. The walls of our Catholic, parochial elementary schools were covered with battle pictures, blood and gore, with lances sticking out of bodies and heads rolling in the dust.

Our real military training began at 12 and by the age of 17 we were trained infantrymen. I was a platoon commander at 16, and a master marksman. We believed that the highest purpose of a man's life is to fight and die in battle and that of a woman to bear lots of children for the military.

Well I got my wish and fought in a war, but I didn't die in battle. I still don't know how I survived. It was a bitter lesson in growing up. By the age high school students graduate I had survived combat where most of my comrades died. I was a homeless refugee in a foreign land without a home, country, family, or language. My mother was gang raped by Russian soldiers, my grandparents died of the effects of starvation. One of my best friends was gassed and burned in Auschwitz and I had to accept the fact that all that I once believed in were lies.

By the summer of 1945 I was an 18 year old war veteran of the Hungarian Army, POW of the US Army, standing by an operation table in a German Wehrmacht MASH hospital in Austria, holding the legs of men while they were being amputated, or re-amputated.

Prior to being captured I was taken to East Germany for training in December 1944. In January 1945 the Russians broke through and began their march on Berlin. In February I was in a rearguard battalion covering the retreat of my still unequipped division, when I was slightly scratched on my right leg by the shrapnel of a small mortar shell. I wasn't sent to a hospital, but as we were starving the wound didn't heal. We marched across Germany and the end of the war found us in Austria. With a couple of friends I took off for home, but near the town of Goisern my leg gave up and I was taken to one of the hospitals the area was literally covered with.

My friends carried on to Hungary and when they crossed into the Russian zone they disappeared without a trace. They probably ended their lives in some Soviet Gulag in Siberia. My leg was operated on and saved. Then I was moved to another hospital deeper in the mountains. After I recuperated I volunteered to stay on and work as an orderly, helping the amputees and in the operation theatre.

The Germans had no antibiotics and because of the starvation diet the wounds didn't heal. We used to do about 3 amputations per day for months after the war. As I stood there for hours, often covered in blood, turning and twisting the victims' legs, as they were taken off, slowly the realization of the lies we grew up with began to sink in.

It was the beginning of my deprogramming from the brainwash of my early age and of the awakening process that hasn't stopped in over 50 years. I decided then that nobody will ever buy or sell me again, I shall fight for my own causes and that I shall find out why humanity has been making the same terrible mistakes throughout history?

Has the experience made me bitter? Do I have any regrets? In the beginning, yes, I was and did have, but that was many years ago. I do feel great sorrow for all the misery and suffering I have witnessed and for all the innocent people who had to go through hell because of the stupidity and corruption of their leaders. For me it was the best thing that could have happened as those events opened my eyes and I am now among the happiest of people.

Contrary to propaganda, if things have changed at all, it is for the worse. We now have more wars, more starvation, more destitution and more destruction going on in the world than ever before.

Hitler, Stalin, Mao and other phony prophets called their crimes by various names, like "the survival of the fittest", "class struggle", " the will of God" and so on. Today the same criminal intent for world domination by a certain class of people is encompassed by the expression "global competition."

The promise has always been the creation of wealth and everlasting life, the results always the destruction of millions.......for nothing.

Copyright (c) 1999, West's International