Hungary’s communist government opened its first and most infamous labor camp 70 years ago, on July 19, 1950. Conservative news and opinion portal Mandiner asked historians about that dark chapter in the country’s history.
One of about 100 internment and labor camps Hungary operated in the early 1950s, Recsk was the largest, most feared, and seldom spoken about.
“The fact that a secret forced labor camp could be maintained within Hungary is a compelling example of how the communist dictatorship was incredibly cruel and how it could weave such a dense web of fear. While Andrássy út 60 [another gulag camp] was a dreaded and well-known symbol of terror, Recsk was unknown to society for many decades,” said Kiss Réka, the chairman of the National Remembrance Committee.
Recsk was located in Hungary’s northern Mátra mountains, some 600 meters to a nearby quarry and over its three-year existence from 1950 to 1953 it held a total of 1,500 political prisoners without any court conviction. These included aristocrats, officers of the previous regime, opponents of the communist system, members of the clergy, intellectuals, and artists. They were forced to work in the quarry all week long.
Mátyás Rákosi, infamous leader of communist Hungary at the time, issued the following directive to the personnel of the camp: “Don’t just guard them. Hate them.”
Security and secrecy around the camp was so tight that for the first year its existence remained a complete secret, and there were only two successful escapes.
In the first one, the single man who managed to sneak out of the camp, fled to Czechoslovakia, but upon learning that the members of his family had been arrested, he gave himself up.
In the second escape attempt, one of the prisoners stole a guard’s uniform and accompanied seven others seemingly to work in the quarry. While seven of the eight were eventually apprehended, one of them, Gyula Michnay made it to Vienna, Austria and gave the first account of the camp to Radio Free Europe, reading the names of 600 inmates he committed to memory. He died in 2011 at the age of 89.
The inmates had to work 13 to 14 hours a day and many died from exhaustion, malnutrition and the regular tortures they were subjected to.
The mass grave of those who died there has not yet been discovered.
After the death of Joseph Stalin on March 5, 1953, and following Imre Nagy replacing Mátyás Rákosi as Hungary’s prime minister, the camp was closed in March of that year.
The site, including the guard towers, was bulldozed to the ground and those freed from the camp were warned not to ever utter a word are face the penalty of six years in prison. Réka also said that records regarding the camp were also mostly destroyed once the camp was closed, which has contributed to why the camp is less well-known in the public memory.
One of the former inmates, poet György Faludy, wrote in his recollections, “We were advised to report the curios [to the authorities] and tell our relatives that we were away on a study trip in the Soviet Union. The slogan was: ‘Quiet to the grave or go to the grave'”.
In the same autobiographic novel, My Happy Days in Hell, Faludy quoted two of his fellow inmates, Count Lajos Miklós Dálnoki and Social Democrat politician György Gábori, both survivors of the Nazi camp in Dachau, who said that “Recsk was more gruesome”.
Title image: Archive photo of the Recsk labor camp entrance.
