Klara Hartmann: arrested aged 14

Klara Hartmann was born in 1930 in northeast Hungary. She was arrested in January 1945 by the Red Army and sentenced to ten years forced labour for espionage. She was sent to Kiev prison, followed by a labour camp in Vorkut, Siberia, and the Steplag camp in Kazakhstan. Klara was freed in 1953 and returned to Hungary. She was interviewed on 8 June 2009 by Anne-Marie Losonczy.

CERCEC

It was very hard, often atrocious - but I now feel that a lot of what I went through back then played an important part in the life I went on to lead. It was a bit like a school... a very tough school.

Klara Hartmann was born on 30 May 1930 in Miskolc, in the north of Hungary. She has no memory of her parents, both farmers, who died very young. She was raised by an uncle, a police officer in Miskolc.

As the Red Army advanced on the region in January 1945, her aunt and uncle fled the town, leaving their 14-year-old niece behind them, alone. The next day, Soviet soldiers found her in the family home and sent her on the long and gruelling journey to Kiev prison, along with hundreds of other Hungarian detainees. Here, she was interrogated and tortured for almost a year before being sentenced to ten years forced labour for allegedly spying for the Germans.

Klara was next sent to a labour camp in the Vorkuta region of Siberia, where she was put on construction duty. The only Hungarian in the camp, she was bullied by Soviet inmates and found no one to share her solitude. In 1949 she was transferred to a newly built camp in Kazakhstan, which held only political prisoners. Here, surrounded by mainly Ukrainian prisoners, Klara finally received the help and solidarity of her fellow inmates.

In the summer of 1953, after the death of Stalin, she began the long journey back to Hungary. Along the way, in Kiev, she met her first husband, a young Hungarian farmer who – like her – had just been freed. She no longer had any family in Hungary, so the couple started their new life together in his hometown in the north-east of the country.

After their divorce, Klara went back to construction work. The lingering stigma of her imprisonment in the Gulag made it difficult to pursue higher education, but, with the help of a workplace doctor, she was able to train as a nurse and work in a psychiatric hospital in Transdanubia.

She remarried and – not being able to have children herself – raised her husband’s orphaned nephew, who would eventually make her a grandmother.

“It’s a story of solitude,” Klara says of her experience in the Gulag. “It was a bit like a school... A very tough school.”