Tag #152236 - Interview #92910 (Judita Haikis)

When I told my father, he said: ‘I’ve fought for the Soviet power and want to live where the Soviet power is. I’ve had enough of fighting’. My mother, though she was a communist, understood very soon what was going on and often spoke very emotionally about it. I think, in his heart, my father agreed with her, but he always told mother that this was the fault of some people, but not the regime. My father rarely criticized some officials, but if somebody in his presence expressed his concerns about the Soviet power, my father always spoke in its favor. Some people did it from fear: many people were afraid of speaking their mind in fear of arrests 12 that went on in the USSR. However, my father was a very brave man. When the Soviet power was established in Subcarpathia, they began to arrest the Hungarian officials for the charges of their service for fascists. They were innocent, but they were to go to prison anyway. In 1945 my father saved many of these people. He saved Laszlo Sandor, a free lance employee of the ‘Mai Nap’ newspaper, from the camp where he was taken just for being a Hungarian, which meant fascist for them. My father witnessed that Sandor had always sympathized with communists. There were other similar cases. Of course, later I realized that my father could not have kept his belief in communist ideas living in the USSR. He got disappointed and acknowledged it and suffered from it very much.