Tag #154198 - Interview #94325 (Stepan Neuman)

During World War I my father was recruited to the Hungarian army [1]. He was sent to the [Russian] front. He was a private and took part in combat action in the Carpathians. There, in the trenches, my father became an ardent pacifist. During intervals he wrote about the horrors of the war. He wrote about what he saw with his own eyes. My father sent his front line reports to newspapers and they published them. I still have a pen with which my father wrote his field reports. This was a fountain pen which was to be filled up with ink. My father brought a few reports home.

My father had an amazingly beautiful and distinct handwriting, very fine. There was little paper available at the front line, and my father tried to put as much text as possible on one page. I’ve always tried to imitate my father, even his handwriting, but I failed to do it. Other soldiers often asked my father to write letters home to let them know that their husband was alive and hoping to come back home soon.

My father was at the front line until 1916. Near the town of Stryy [540 km from Kiev] my father was wounded in his hand with shrapnel. He was sent to a hospital in Mukachevo. He had three fingers on his left hand amputated. After his release from the hospital he was demobilized due to his wound and returned to Budapest.