The voluntary guide
The former Gulag-prisoner Zoltán Gúth, who had rambled all over Siberia, and some young guys of sixteen and eighteen whom he decided to join as a voluntary guide, got on a train in Szombathely at the beginning of 1957. They didn’t have enough money for a smuggler and for a truck. It was widely known that the trains which went from Szombathely to Kőszeg regularly slowed down at a certain point of the railroad, by the fields outside of the villages, because the latter were controlled by forces of the Soviet army and of the Hungarian political police. When the train reached a walking pace near Bozsok, people began to jump off it. There were children, parents with babies, and couples, although the majority of them were young people. There were people who came with luggage, but Zoltan Gúth and his companions had nothing with them. Those who didn’t drag bags could run. "They flocked the field like locusts. There were at least twenty, even more. Some fell, others didn’t. Everybody was in a hurry and then we crossed a small river. There were remains of an old bridge there, we could cross it there,” he recalled. It was about a half an hour walk from Austria. The wire fencing had been destroyed by then during the previous months, it was trodden to the earth by the emigrants: "We could see the plowed up land, and others, but by then everything had been destroyed. People who had passed before, destroyed it. People flied across that territory to Austria for months. In November, December, in January, they went across there all the winter.” On the other side of the border, the refugees were expected. Zoltán Gúth said goodbye to his friends. Although he managed to get to Austria with them, he turned and walked back to Hungary in the same way he had left the country. "My wife and my children had returned to the Soviet Union by then. I wanted to follow them and I wanted to go to the Soviet Union. I didn’t know I wouldn’t be allowed to do so. I hoped I would get the permission,” Gúth recalled.
