On the Front [antikvár]

Introduction to the American Edition Following Hungary's decline as a major Central European power around 1500 AD, the nation passed through a number of major crises. The two most significant of these were the Battle of Mohács (1526) and the subsequent Ottoman Turkish occupation and Habsburg rule; and the Treaty of Trianon (1920) following World War I, which resulted in the dismemberment of historic Hungary and the Magyar nation. Hungary's involvement in World War II on the wrong side was the direct result of the Trianon catastrophe and of the nation's struggle for territorial revisionism. So was the country's Soviet occupation in the final months of the war. It was this occupation that tore Hungary out of the fabric of Western Civilization, and for a half century made her part of the Eastern Orthodox Slavic world, which is totally foreign to her Western traditions. One of the consequences of this odious Soviet domination was the reappearance of the institution of slavery. It came in the form of the Soviet forced labor camps, to which hundreds of thousands of Hungarians were deported. A unique form of this modem-day slavery was the malenky robot ["little work"], under the guise of which tens of thousands of Hungarian civilians were collected and then dispersed in various Soviet slave labor camps. The Soviet conquerors and their unscrupulous Hungarian collaborators were not very selective. They took everyone who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. They deported young and old, irrespective of gender. They even collected and sent to the Gulag fifteen to sixteen year old girls, as well as expectant mothers. It is nearly impossible to describe the misery and exploitation that awaited these unfortunate Hungarians in the slave labor camps of the Soviet Gulag. If they were lucky enough to survive and return home, their misery and exploitation did not cease. Communist Hungarian authorities, who were anxious to please their Soviet masters, continued to view these repatriates as war criminals and treated them accordingly. Most of them died in poverty, misery, and much before their time. This book by Mr. Sándor Zsiros — a respected former teacher, and editor of the historical-cultural periodical Örökség [Heritage] — describes the workings of this barbarian system as applied to the village of Felsözsolca, on the outskirts of the university town of Miskolc. The author describes the Soviet mihtary conquest of his hometown, the excesses, plunderings, and rapes committed by the barbarian Soviet troops, the collection of civilians for malenky robot, the ignominious role of their Hungarian collaborators in this collection process, and the transportation of the prisoners to Soviet slave labor camps. And he performs this task partially