From Front Line to Coal Mine

This is the story of Karoly, a man whose family protected Jewish refugees who were trying to escape the advance of Nazi Germany from the west and the advancing Russians Red Army and their Romanian allies to the east. Karoly was used as human-shield by Romanian ’liberators’ in Hungary. When, after the war, Hungary was under Russian Communist control, he was sent to prison. Karoly was committed as a political prisoner for being a member of the Independent Small-holders Party, the communist party’s only serious political rival. Under the communist regime anyone who held authority in the community was a threat and Karoly was arrested under a trumped up charge. He was sent to Márianosztra where he was given the option of starvation or working as a miner in a forced labour camp. Karoly worked in a coalmine until he escaped the cruel communist regime in 1956. This is the story of a man who cheated death and suffered unimaginable privations before escaping to England to start again from nothing, a broken man.