THE RECORD
December 19, 2001

Fiat Lux

by Ed Deak

THE MOST PRECIOUS GIFT OF ALL

A lot of snow fell in the night and well into the morning. The trees were groaning under the weight and small avalanches fell on our heads, as we pushed our way up the hill in search of a Christmas tree.

The snow has been our enemy many times in the past. It slowed us down when we had to run for our lives, made us cold and miserable when we couldn't light fires and it swallowed many of our friends without mercy. Yet, it's beauty, the soothing silence it brought to our troubled world and the snowballs we threw at each other made us realize that we were still alive, there was at least some kind of peace on Earth and perhaps there was still some hope in life for us.

The girl was seventeen, a year younger then I, but our combined life experiences amounted to hundreds of years. It was in the Summer that I first saw her collecting things into a basket in a flower filled meadow, across the Traun river at Obertraun in the Austrian Alps. It was 1945, the most horrible year in human history.

She was picking sorrel and edible herbs to ease the hunger that was our constant companion. I was learning to walk again after three months in bed. She never looked across at me, yet she saw me too, as I found out later. I was a skinny kid with a big, frostbitten nose and hair sticking about like a hedgehog's back, hobbling with a cane. My oversized pants sprung rhythmically up and down with every step. I was in awe over the beauty of the valley and this girl. She was perplexed by the dance of my trousers.

When they took me to a military hospital at Goisern in May, with my right leg swollen up like a purple football, I haven't slept in a bed for over six months and had no bath for five. In February in Poland a mortar shell hit about three feet behind me in a small hollow and though the shrapnel went over me, one of them scratched my right ankle. It was no more than a cut by barbed wire. But the starvation and the bugs eating us never gave it a chance to heal.

We retreated from Poland to the Czech Sudetenland where we were disarmed, then by railway, eighty men to a double-decker cattle-car, to the smoking ruins that were once the city of Nuremberg in Germany. There we began digging foxholes and building tank traps for the Germans during the day, marching in the night right across Bavaria and into Austria. We ate what we could beg, or steal.

This starved, thieving rabble was the secret weapon our great leaders hoped would take back our native Hungary from the Russians.

When they weighed me in the hospital I was 107 lbs. It took two tubfulls of hot water to scrape some of the dirt off my body. The orderly in charge of delousing took one look at the collection of bug eggs in the seams of my tattered uniform and burned it. They gave me a huge pair of German pants, full of shrapnel holes, but no belt, or braces. Later, when I was transferred to another hospital at Obertraun and began to walk again, I found a corrugated gas mask hose, split it in four and made myself a pair of braces out of it. And so I became the owner of the best sprung pair of pants in the Traun valley and earned a glance from a beautiful girl.

When I first saw her she was living with her parents and another couple in a small shed by the river. Then they moved into the hospital a collection of huts that used to be a mountain artillery training camp. I saw her many times after that, running across the camp, head down, pigtails flying, ignoring everything and everybody, followed by hundreds of wistful eyes, including mine. Yet, nobody ever accosted, or dared to touch her.

She was warm, yet unreachable, exuding an impenetrable aura of inner strength. She was everybody's little sister, the girl every soldier leaves behind, dreams about through the boredom and horrors of war, but never finds again.

Our social codes demanded a formal introduction and as we were both Hungarians it inevitably happened. Her parents were doing the hospital's laundry by hand, she was cleaning in exchange for some rations and a small room in one of the huts.

We had no papers, no magazines, no radio and couldn't read much German. There was no mail to get, and nobody to write to. Our only entertainment was talking, mostly about food, singing and walking. Groups of us would walk over to the picture postcard, prehistoric salt mining town of Hallstatt to watch some prewar movies heavily censored first by the Nazis, then by the Americans, where people lived in houses with furniture, had families, ate foods we'd been dreaming about and sang and danced their way to happiness. Those movies were our lifelines to sanity in a world bent to destroy us.

We found our little tree, brushed the snow off the branches, I cut it and we started down the hill. For some reason we kept bumping into each other a bit more than the uneven slope could justify and our hands kept sliding together, as we carried the tree. She was no longer the little convent girl we knew even a few weeks before, who kept her eyes on the ground and talked in shy monosyllables. Her cheeks were rosy from the cold and snow glittered on her eyelashes and hair. Her lips were laughing and joking, but when our eyes met she looked right into my soul, as if saying: "I trust you, boy, now cherish my trust, or go on your way!"

There was tremendous strength in her little hands and body and she had a will that could move mountains. As one of the much hated Hungarian minority in Rumania her early life was little more than perennial fear and moving. Her father, a railway clerk, was constantly transferred from one job to another. They never had a permanent home. She went to new schools every few months, never being able to make friends and getting beat up by bullies and even teachers because of her nationality. Nothing's changed to this day. This is still a way of life for all sides, hammered into children by families, schools and religions.

When Transylvania was temporarily returned to Hungary they had a short period of relative calm, but in 1944 their home was bombed and they lost most of their possessions. When the Russians broke through they had five minutes to gather things and flee. Her mother threw a sheet on the floor, grabbed whatever she could and they were off into hardships few could understand now.

After a few months on the Austrian-Hungarian border they had to flee again. Her father had a broken leg and couldn't walk. They bought a horse and cart, loaded all their earthly possessions and food they could get onto it and started off into the mountains of Austria. At sixteen she was leading the horse by the head over icy and snowy passes in worn out city shoes, wet and freezing for months.

The Russians were behind them, the Western fighters machine-gunning them on the narrow roads. They had nowhere to run and while people and animals were dying and screaming all around, they could only stand and wait to be cut to pieces. The Home Guard robbed them of all their food, just as the first Americans we saw robbed us of our watches, fountain pens and rings. They weren't allowed to stay anywhere and had to keep on moving until they ended up in that dead end valley, with nowhere else to go.

We didn't dare to admit what our small circle of friends could clearly see: the almost invisible embers that began to glow in our hearts. The small Christmas tree we cut for their room had only a few ribbons and candles for decorations and no presents under it, yet it meant more to us than all the trees we ever had before. There was something about it we couldn't understand. We didn't yet know that the most precious gift was waiting for us and within a day our lives would be changed forever.

On Boxing day we again walked to the movies with a group from the hospital. On the way back we somehow left the others behind. We ran, hand in hand, silently giggling, between the tunnel like snow walls of the avalanche area, past the little castle on the lakeshore, until we came to the small shelter by the roadside. She felt a little faint, which wasn't unusual in our emaciated state, so we sat down, waiting for the others we could hear coming down the road.

I never knew what gave me the courage, but on a sudden impulse, as she lifted up her head I just bent down and for a moment our lips barely touched. This was a very serious matter in our world. I closed my eyes and waited for the explosion, but it never came. She was sitting there, head bent down, clutching my hand with an iron grip and we were no longer alone in the world.

Mt. Plassen across the lake, the lights of the salt mine and Hallstatt dancing in the waters became a giant Christmas tree and the happiness we found in each other was the most precious gift anybody can receive in a lifetime.

We didn't say a word for a long time, just hang on to each other's hands and the embers in our hearts flared up until we could hardly breathe.

We were well versed in the cruelties of life, on a never ending losing streak,

paying for the sins of a few greedy leaders who gambled and lost and took us with them on their spiral to oblivion. We'd found our precious gift, but we were only leaves in a storm that blew us anywhere it wanted. We had no home, no country, no future and even our past was nothing but lies. Nobody wanted us, we were burden on the conscience of a world that didn't know whether to permit us to live, or hand us over to Stalin.

We knew that our time together, innocent and childish, was running out. In a few weeks, or a few months we'd have to leave and never see each other again. Our lives were in precarious balance.

After the war the British and the Americans began the massive, forced repatriation of refugees and ex-soldiers. There were midnight raids on DP camps, families were torn apart, shootings, trickery, mass suicides until some Western troops and even officers mutinied and refused to follow orders they knew meant certain death to innocent people.

There were nineteen Hungarian wounded in the camp and when the order for our repatriation came in late November I was the only one who refused to go. Although technically prisoners of war, we had no American troops guarding us, but the area commander sent a message that I'd be put in chains and on the train. I was a "Pepi", or orderly by then and also the batman of the head of the camp, the Viennese Col. Dr. Reisinger. My Austrian and German friends set up warning and interference plans to delay any arresting party and give me a chance to escape.

My luck held again. Just then the UN outlawed forced repatriations, but would local commanders abide by it? Nobody knew and I always had my bags packed, ready to jump out of the window and run into the mountains. My refusal also gave me a one way ticket to Siberia, as a traitor, if the new masters of my country could get me.

As Winter turned to Spring our hopes for staying together were dying. The hospital was winding down and soon we had to leave. Our time was dwindling to weeks, days and then came the moment when we had to say good-bye. We've been losing everything for years, but the pain of our parting just about killed me.
The train had no glass in the windows, only narrow strips across wooden panels. I had no purpose left in life and sat like a zombie in the dark, an iron band squeezing my chest tighter and tighter and the clatter of the wheels was hammering into my head: "You fool...you fool...you fool!" I could see her face and she was telling me that there must be a place for us somewhere in the world and we must find it, or perish trying. We made a silent promise to each other that we'd never give up and we kept it.

For six years we searched for a home where we could be together. Sometimes countries and seas separated us, sometimes we met for fleeting moments in transit camps waiting for transports, on street corners in strange cities, in strange countries. Sometimes we lived close to each other, sometimes we worked in the same places. At one time she saw a drawing on a camp room wall and knew that I have been there.

Yet, our souls were always together breaking through the clouds, joyously dancing in the sunshine. We had no phones, yet we could always talk to each other with our minds and in times of need soothe our pains and fears, never giving up our precious gift.

Marta and I were married on a rainy March day in England in 1951. It was pouring when we entered the church, but when we came out the sun flooded the drenched streets of Cambridge with gold. I looked up and thought: "Well, old friend, now that we've all broken through the clouds, please stick around and light our road ahead. We'll keep our little flames going, but could do with a bit of help from you, so that we'd never get lost again." I wasn't certain whether it was just a speck of cloud passing over his face, but I thought I could see him wink...

We now know that he did. The road ahead was some of the hardest yet to come, but nothing mattered any more. The little flames we lit on that Christmas by Hallstatt Lake kept burning and growing through the years. We kept our promise and our friend the sun never set since then....

We went Christmas tree hunting again this year and as we were walking around in the snow I was looking at her and wondered: "How is it that I became old and she's still seventeen...?" But then, I was always lucky....

Merry Christmas to all who have found the most precious gift life can give, but even a merrier one to those who're still searching. May your search be short and crowned with success, may the embers in your hearts glow and flare until the whole world turns to gold and nobody's sun will ever set again.

Copyright (c) 2001, West's International