Balint Mezei

On a Red Cross Train to the West – People, Missions, Stories and a Few Questions Regarding the Fate of the Hungarian Hospital Trains in 1944–1945.

The primary mission of the hospital trains that started operating in 1941/42 was to transport wounded soldiers who, in principle, had already been treated, from the theatre of military operations to the Corps and Red Cross hospitals in the hinterland. These trains were exceptionally well-equipped according to the standards of the time, and their routes changed in 1944 as the Germans and their allies retreated, so that they were almost exclusively westbound and headed to the Czech, Austrian and German territories. Hospital Train no. 107 made it all the way to Denmark in April 1945, and its crew saw the end of the war in Europe in Prague. Mihály Bak MD served as a surgeon on duty on this train, and his memoirs, published in 1987, are both an invaluable primary source on the subject and an excellent period piece. In my study I aim to reconstruct the last routes the Hungarian hospital trains followed, and address a few questions regarding their operation.

The Image of State Socialism in Hungarian Secondary School
Textbooks. Mainstream Narratives (1990–2010)

The article seeks to give a picture about how Hungarian state socialism has been represented in mainstream secondary school textbooks published between 1990 and 2010, based on a thorough analysis of three of them. In Hungary, the entire primary, middle and secondary school textbook market was liberalised after the systemic change in 1990, which allowed the history teachers to choose between different textbooks and, accordingly, historical narratives. In general it can be said the three selected textbooks aimed to describe the state socialist system objectively, first of all the Kádár era (1956–1989) and its so-called ʻgoulash communism’ decades (1963–1985). However, these mainstream narratives are not completely balanced and the textbooks’ terminology is not unambiguous.

On a Hungarian Red Cross (Hospital) Train to the Eastern Front in 1942–1943 – The Wartime Diary and Photos of LT. József Reményi

József Reményi was born on July 8, 1911 in Demecser, to a shopkeeper family with five children. At the end of the 1930’s, he moved to Budapest to work for the joint stock company Tungsram as a public accountant. During WWII, he served on the hospital trains of the Second Hungarian Army fighting in the Don bend, as a manager of economy responsible for food supplies. He was an ensign in reserve, a second lieutenant and, later on, a lieutenant. He was sent to the Eastern Front 17 times, serving on the hospital train Nos 152 and 154. He experienced the horrors of the war at close quarters and recorded these along with everyday events of the hospital train in his diary written for his wife during his 6th and 8th mission, between December 1942 and March 1943. He also took hundreds of photos, a selection of which was published along with his diary in 2015 and 2016.

A Strange War and The Solitude of the Last Generation of Soviet Veterans

30 years ago, the withdrawal of the Soviet forces from Afghanistan officially concluded the last armed conflict of the Soviet Union, which had begun in 1979 and since then has often been compared to the United States' war in Vietnam. Based on Cold War paradigms in Western historiography, the Soviet strategic intervention in Afghanistan is usually labeled as the symptom of various crises inside the Soviet single party-state leadership in the late '70s, which later escalated into an ill-fated, ten-year-long war. According to many Western textbooks (monographs), the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was in fact influenced by internal problems, and Gorbachev's new diplomacy is generally seen as a symbol of the fall of the Union's military power. In total more than 14,000 Soviet soldiers died or went missing in the Afghan War. The 18-19-year-old boys (young men) conscripted into the Soviet Army (about 150 soldiers of Hungarian nationality from Zakarpattia among them 1), who spent the most of their military service in Afghanistan, were mentally unprepared for this new type of warfare, which significantly differed from the Great Patriotic War they had learned about in school. The generation of 'Afgantsy' 2 has not yet processed the trauma it went through during the war. This is not surprising given the limitations on the public sphere (even in the late Soviet system) and the general lack of interest from the new political regimes' part, especially in Ukraine, in acknowledging the veterans' heroism or helping them reintegrate into their own community, to the new (-born capitalist) society.

30 years ago, the withdrawal of the Soviet forces from Afghanistan officially concluded the last armed conflict of the Soviet Union, which had begun in 1979 and since then has often been compared to the United States’ war in Vietnam.
In total more than 14,000 soviet soldiers died or went missing in the Afghan War. The 18-19-yearold young men conscripted into the Soviet Army (about 150 soldiers of Hungarian nationality from Zakarpattia among them), who spent the most of their military service in Afghanistan, were mentally unprepared for this new type of warfare, which significantly differed from the Great Patriotic War they had learned about in school.
This study briefly presents the methodology, limitations, and difficulties, as well as the participants, background, timeline, objectives, and results of an oral history research project conducted by a group of Hungarian students and researchers from ELTE between 2010 and 2013 in Zakarpattia Oblast, Ukraine.