In The Hands of History (Part Two) – Geza Nagy & Brian Walton: A Voice From Russia

Geza Nagy and his fellow Hungarian soldiers began the longest walk of their lives by following a trackless path across endless expanses of ice and snow. They shivered their way across blindingly white landscapes during the day. At night, the darkness was all consuming, not only up in the sky, but also in each man’s soul. Who knows how many of them dropped dead along the way? This nightmare continued for weeks on end. Five long months of frost bite or knee deep mud, with defeat and death shadowing their every step. Somehow, despite the distance and the weather, in a land swarming with enemy partisans, thousands of haggard, tired Hungarian soldiers, epitomized by men like Geza Nagy, managed to stumble their way back to Hungary. They were home, but the war was far from over.

World War 2 hit Hungary hard – photo of a badly damaged Chain Bridge with Buda Castle in the distance

Out of Death & Into Life
Brian said that Nagy was only allowed a brief respite in his homeland before the Soviet Army reappeared. They had fought their way from the Don to the Danube. Communism was ascendant in Hungary and for that matter, in Eastern Europe as well. The Soviet Army brought the Cold War with them. Having been an officer in the old Hungarian Army made Nagy a wanted man. As an intellectual, he was also an enemy of the state. Nagy did not wait to be arrested, he left his country behind.  Somehow he had survived to live another life. And what a life it turned out to be. Geza Nagy’s postwar life raises more questions than answers. What was his role during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956? What was he doing in his work for Interpol? How did he get to Canada, then the United States? A life of learning and scholarship had been transformed into one filled with mystery, intrigue and adventure. Did this compensate for the shame of defeat, loss and exile that had preceded it? Who can say? Perhaps even Nagy himself did not know the answer to that question.

 

A Soviet soldier hangs a sign in Budapest with the city’s name translated into Russian

While Geza Nagy was running from one war to the next, Brian Walton was hard at work in school, excelling in every subject imaginable. He was a brilliant student, one of his nation’s brightest minds, the polar opposite of his surroundings. The post-war Britain he grew up in was not one of majesty and splendor, but of gritty factories and brown skies. Britain may have been on the winning side during the war, but it had hardly been victorious. The war left a long shadow over the British economy that stretched all the way into the 1960’s. After completing his university education at Cambridge, Brian Walton fled west as well. He came to the United States where professorships and pay were much greater. America was the land of opportunity for those exiled by war, economics or ideology.

Good Men & Bad Causes – The Voice of Russia
The legacy of World War II shaped the lives of Nagy and Walton as it did to millions of others. It pushed them far away from their respective homelands. It also brought them together. Who would have imagined that a brilliant intellectual from a small village in the Zemplin Hills of Hungary and a British scholar raised in the public housing of gritty, industrial Stockport would come to teach the history of western Civilization in a beautiful backwater of the Appalachian Mountains? They brought brilliance with them, but also their own attitudes and prejudices as well. Brian said that Nagy still professed an undying belief in the cause for which he had fought, even though it nearly destroyed him and his country. That cause turned out to be a hopeless one. The attempt to restore historic Hungary by aligning with the fascists only brought suffering, sorrow and decades of Soviet occupation to Hungary. Nagy and his country came to regret their mistake not just one time, but continuously.

Good men dying for a bad cause – A Hungarian soldiers cemetery in the Ukraine

“Plenty of good men have died for bad causes” were the words Brian once used to describe the disastrous folly of so many wrong-headed wars. That quote brings to mind all of those Hungarian soldiers who were swallowed up by the sheer size, scale and epic mismanagement of the Hungarian 2^nd Army. Nagy escaped with his life, but only for a while. Eventually the Eastern Front caught up with him as well. Brian said Nagy used to cough horribly from bronchial problems he had contracted during the icy retreat. The wheezing, the hoarse coughing, might be interpreted as a voice from Russia, echoing down the decades as a cruel reminder of the horrors of war. In 1976, Geza Nagy finally died. His heart, of such great courage, was not enough to overcome the weakness of his lungs.

Haunted by History – The Difference Between Us
As for Brian Walton, at the time of Nagy’s death he was much younger, healthier and in the prime of his life. He would teach all the way into the 21^st century. In his lifetime the British Empire collapsed, but the British economy surged once again. The row house in which he grew up was knocked down and housing for the middle class erected in its place. The war into which he was born became a distant, yet distinct memory. He never quite trusted the Germans, but fear of the Teutonic juggernaut, which had once ruled Europe and threatened the very existence of Britain, slowly disappeared. Time and distance healed many of the war’s wounds, but scars still remained.

The dream of a united Europe may prove illusory (Credit: Leena Saarinen)

Brian never really believed that Europe could be truly unified. The European Union was an artificial creation, an attempt to keep the Germans from becoming too powerful. If not German military power, than German economic power would come to rule Europe. The French were obsessed with being difficult, the British were not continentals and never would be, the Italians were wonderful people, but their politicians ridiculous, other European countries were too small. The only exception was Russia, which wasn’t really European. It was riddled with corruption and hell bent on screwing things up. Europe’s past was its future, but God forbid another cataclysmic war should come to Europe. Brian never had to see that day, he died in July just as Russian troops were crossing the border into the Ukraine.

*An End Note: Brian Walton, like Geza Nagy spent his professional life studying and teaching history. He had a natural curiosity about all things historical, but even the most brilliant scholars are limited by time and interest. This was especially true for Brian when it came to Eastern European history of which only knew a very limited amount. Perhaps this had something to do with the era he was born into. For nearly fifty years, Eastern Europe was closed off behind an Iron Curtain. Most of what Brian knew about the region’s past came from Eastern Europeans themselves, men such as Geza Nagy. The anecdotal evidence from one man’s experiences can be more telling than thousands of pages of facts. This was certainly true of Geza Nagy and it was also true of Brian Walton. These men not only taught history, they also helped make it. By looking back at their lives and their experiences we can, just for a moment, recapture the past. In death, as in life, they are still teaching us history.

 

In the Hands of History (Part One) – Geza Nagy & Brian Walton: Two Fronts/One War

In the late summer of 1977 Dr. Geza Nagy took his last breath. Nagy died deep in the Smoky Mountains of southwestern North Carolina, thousands of miles away from where he was born in the uplands of northwestern Hungary. His final job was as a professor of history at Western Carolina University. Nagy was one of countless ethnic Hungarians who had fled westward in the aftermath of World War II. In Nagy’s case, it was the Communist takeover of Hungary which set his life on a wandering and wayward course which led him first to Canada and then the United States. An obituary for Nagy printed in the Sylva Herald and Ruralite on August 18, 1977 sketched an outline of his life:
“A native of Damak, Hungary and a resident of Cullowhee for the past 15 years, he was educated at Heidelburg and Sorbonne Universities. He received his doctorate in philosophy and international law from Hungarian University. During World War II he was a captain in the Hungarian Army. Following the communist takeover of his country he escaped in Austria. He was active in the Hungarian Revolution and was also engaged as an Interpol agent. He served as professor of languages at Presbyterian College in Pikeville, Ky. And was a professor in Germany. He was a professor at Western Carolina University from 1962 until his retirement in 1976 due to his health. Dr. Nagy was the author of several books published in Hungary on historical subjects and the medieval history of Central Europe.”
Those were the facts, but they only hint at the mystery and adventure that was the life of Geza Nagy.

Photo of a Russian child taken by a Hungarian soldier during the invasion & occupation of the Soviet Union (Credit: Fortepan.hu)

Living History – Two Men, Two Fronts
I never knew Geza Nagy, but I learned of him many years ago from a professor and friend of mine who had been a colleague of Nagy. I was interested in the Eastern Front during World War II and my friend, Brian Walton was a Cambridge educated historian who had a vast knowledge of all things historical. He could give an armchair lecture on almost any historical topic relating to European or American history. The war was different though. It was not just a historical fact, it was a personal experience. Brian’s father, George had been a World War II veteran, signing up the day Great Britain went to war against Germany. He spent the war’s duration in the Royal Navy where he was on no less than five ships that were sunk in the North Sea. Brian himself had been born during the middle of the war in Stockport, a suburb of the northern English city of Manchester.  He spent some of the first nights of his life in bomb shelters. His mother held him close to her as the dull thunder of exploding bombs shook the ground above. Brian once told me that on his street alone, there were five monuments marking where Luftwaffe bombs had landed.  That was his knowledge of the war. It did not come from textbooks, but from life.

Damage from Luftwaffe bombing of Manchester, England during World War II

When I asked him if he could tell me about the war on the Eastern Front, he admitted a general ignorance of that part of the conflict. He paused for a few moments and then suddenly his voice thundered, “the whole thing was just madness, madness by the Germans.” The weather was terrible, the roads were bad, Russia was backwards and primitive, the land was vast and unconquerable, it swallowed invading armies. The opinions expressed were nothing new, they were commonly held. What he said next though, caught my attention. He had personally known someone who had fought on the Eastern Front. This man was not a German, but a Hungarian. The Hungarians had been aligned with the Germans. They had fought side by side. The man’s name was Geza Nagy. He had been an officer in the Hungarian Army. Brian had worked with Nagy for over a decade. Their nations had once been on opposite sides, before the two of them had ended up on the same side, thousands of miles from their respective homelands, teaching in the same history department. Though their professional backgrounds were relatively similar, their experiences with the war and its aftermath could not have been more different.

Bridge of wreckage over the River Don in 1942 (Credit: Deutsches Bundearchiv)

Approaching The Gates Of Hell 
“When you are standing on the banks of the Don River in November you just know this was a real bad idea.” According to Brian that was Geza Nagy’s synopsis of what was going through his mind while he was stationed on the Eastern Front. Nagy was referring to the late fall of 1942. As the brutal Russian winter approached, the Hungarian 2nd Army found itself over a thousand miles east of its own territory. What force or ideal brought a couple of hundred thousand Hungarians, men like Nagy, to such a god forsaken war zone? The Hungarians had made a deal with the devil. In return for getting back “historic” lands taken from them in the post-World War I peace, the Hungarians had joined the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The verdant, forested landscapes of lower Slovakia, northern Transylvania and the sub-Carpathians were a distant memory in the hard bitten soil of southern Russia. Nagy may have been a scholar and professor, an expert linguist and published author, but deep inside the Eastern Front in 1942 his accomplishments and breadth knowledge meant nothing. Here he was an officer, a captain in the 2^nd Army, about to fight for his life.

Brian said that Nagy recalled discussions with his fellow officers about how the campaign was heading towards disaster. They would have known first hand. The Hungarians had been poorly equipped by their German Allies. They lacked the men, material and fighting skill needed to overcome the natural and human obstacles presented to them by the Soviet Union. They had been left to guard the flank of the German forces that had been sucked into the maelstrom of Stalingrad. They were scattered across a hundred miles in and around the city of Voronezh, exposed to the elements, exposed to the enemy, miles of muddy roads behind them, facing howling winds and blinding blizzards. Then out of the winter mist, the Soviet Army appeared.

The remnants of the Hungarian Army retreating from the Soviet union during the winter of 1943 (Credit: Tamas Konok)

Scattered to the Fates
In the aptly titled The Will To Survive: A History of Hungary, Bryan Cartledge describes what happened next: “The anticipated Soviet assault on the Hungarian sector near Voronzeh, in which the Russians outnumbered the Second Army three to one in men and ten to one in artillery, began on 12 January 1943. After forty-eight hours, one Hungarian division was in full retreat and three days later two divisions abandoned their positions without waiting for the Russians to attack; within a week the Second Army had been virtually annihilated – 130,000 men out of its total strength 200,000 had been killed, wounded or captured.”

Even with those horrific losses, there were still thousands upon thousands of Hungarian troops scattered across the frozen plains facing the unimaginable, a retreat across endless plains and limitless horizons. One of those facing this daunting prospect was Geza Nagy.