Tag #156778 - Interview #78659 (Vera Szekeres-Varsa)

In 1915 he was shot in the lungs on the Eastern Front and was hospitalized. He recovered too soon, thanks to his strong, athletic body, and was sent back to the front. He spent six weeks in the trenches, where everyone had a cold or flu, and he caught TB. Then he was taken prisoner of war40 and in early 1916 he was sent to Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. He was sent to the officers' section of a vast prisoner-of-war camp. He told me how they tried to get rid of the lice. They buried the shirt, stuck a straw in the ground, and the lice would crawl through it. Then they dug up the shirt, dirty but free of lice. From time to time, there was no food, and that was terrible. He made friends with a certain József Fénykövi (he changed his name from Sonnenstein shortly before the war), who had a cube of sugar. It was their dinner-for-two because Fénykövi shared it with him. They moved around quite freely within the camp. For example, they amused themselves by setting up plays; of course, the boys played the female parts, too. Then there was a typhoid breakout. He never told me this, but when I met Señora Fénykövi in 1973, she told to me how my father had visited Fénykövi and cared for him when he was lying in the infected barrack. She, in turn, had never heard the story of the cube of sugar. So, these two men had done a lot for each other, but they only shared the stories of the other’s good deeds.

After the October Revolution41 the Russian army dissolved, and very slowly, with many difficulties, he came home relatively sound. He traveled for a day, then waited for two days in some Siberian village, then traveled again, then waited again. Eventually, he came home. But Fénykövi chose to go to China and ended up in Spain, where he became very rich.