Istvan Bielik

'...men are much weaker than women; they are not capable to endure as much as a woman. They may be stronger when it comes to work, but life just throws them off their feet… We, women are made to endure – we are cats. Cats endure a lot; we do too. '

' My husband was really sick. Of course, back then, he was not my husband! He had parotitis and the pus from the infection was going up to his brain; the doctor said medication costs 500 rubels. I kneeled on my bed and said, - God, if I have to save

'They told us not to be afraid, we are only being taken to the Hungarian border to work at the railway station for three months. They told us that those who had a relative or someone else at home to ask them to bring a sufficient amount of food and

'When we were in Szerencs, my father said to me, ’Katili, do not go home because then your mother will be hung’. Perhaps he had a feeling that if I am not with him, he is going to die for sure. He contracted dysentery, the doctors immediately gave h

'One time my roommates have asked, ‘Haven’t you brought meat?’ To which I replied: ‘Meat? Where do they give meat?’ It turned out that next to Mine Nr. 5 there was a dead horse, probably shot in the war. I was hungry anyway, so I shall go, I thought

'It is hard to imagine the feeling of having a stomach wall too thin to ever feel well fed. When we got home, I was eating all the time. My mother was constantly asking me what to cook. Anything, whatever, was my answer. She made potato dumplings. A

'I was working down in the mines where we pushed coal with our bare hands and the help of some wooden planks, lying down in the 50-60 centimeters wide shafts. I had wounds all over my knees. Our shifts were quite repetitive: up-down, up-down. And in

'The whole thing started with a drum roll. A gathering was announced and people unsuspectingly went to the meeting held at the school. We were tricked by the authorities into thinking that the topic will be the war that was coming to an end – of cou

'We did not even have proper funeral services. What funerals those were! When Katika Braun died, they rolled her to the grave in a handbarrow. When they reached it, they just turned over the handbarrow, her body falling into the pit. Her limbs were

'One of our mates had a violin. He played for us while we were marching to work and back home. It was good. At least it made us forget our troubles for a while. The songs are still in my head. We sang ‘I long for my home country...’, but we were nev

'In the beginning, we didn’t even have a well. We had to dig it ourselves. We have also constructed the baths. On our day off. The mess hall was also built by us, bringing the stones one by one to a designated location. Before that we washed ourselv

'Men gave up the hope of getting home pretty quickly, they were devastated – the women cared for them, babied them, and tried to encourage them. From the 360 women, nobody died there, every one of them came home; however, we had to bury 180 men in t

'50 people boarded the railway car full of icy snow swept in by the wind and with windows that could not be closed. It was terribly cold; men and women together in a railway car. We managed to take care of our needs by standing in the door, but the

'In the beginning we were all in the laundry room. The men had to do the washing. We washed everything by hand. After a year, we were transported to the mines. Two of us were assigned to do the work of four Russians. In the mines, six trams used to

'We had a huge amount of bed bugs. When I sat down on my cot, they were like little piggies, wanting to eat my feet. They adored me. Therefore, in the summer we rather slept in the courtyard. There was disinfection, but a lot of times it was ineffec

'If somebody died among us, we had to bury them naked like an animal, knowing that our fate could be similar, too.
My cousin has lost one of his legs in a mining accident – a tram was let loose and it tore his leg off. When I visited him in the hos

'After 8 hours of work, coming up from the mines our wet clothes have frozen; we dragged ourselves to the barrack with hunger in our stomach and an armed guard behind us. There was a mate of mine who ate a dead bird found on the road because he coul

The last story-tellers of Málenkij robot

The term ‘Gulag’ refers to a system of labor camps that were present in the whole of the Stalinist Soviet Union. The Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees (GUPVI) in charge of handling of foreign civilian internees and POW in the Soviet Union during and in the aftermath of World War II. In many ways the GUPVI system was similar to GULAG.Its major function was the organization of foreign forced labor in the Soviet Union. Otherwise the conditions in both camp systems were similar: hard labor, poor nutrition and living conditions, high mortality rate. Málenkij robot – the origin of this expression comes from the Russian 'malenkaja rabota', meaning a little work. Most of the people taken for malenkij robot were made to work in mines, in factories, and on logging and construction sites; a minority were sent to collective and state farms in inhumane conditions. A total of about 700,000 Hungarians were deported to Soviet labor camps; only about 400,000 of them returned home. During the deportation and the time spent in the work camps approximately 300,000 people died. Most of the deported civilians were made prisoners of war, whilst a minority were placed in detention camps. The latter, including many women and girls, were taken there on the pretext that they were of German descent. About 32.000 Swabians, the German-speaking minority of Hungary deported to forced labor in 1944 and 1945. After returning home, they forced the mentally and often physically injured people into silence. Considering their age, only a small number of the survivors of the forced labor camps are still alive. This is the last chance to prevent their stories from disappearing into the maze of history and thus honoring them. Their stories are not only memories – they are also reminders that horrors like them cannot happen ever again.

Istvan Bielik

Istvan Bielik worked for Népszava the oldest hungarian daily paper from 2007 to 2014 as a photojournalist where he learned the the tricks of the profession. In 2014 he worked a year for origo.hu. From 2017 he has been working as a freelancer for Nők Lapja the oldest hungarian magazine and for 24.hu news portal as well. His works has been rewarded with prestigious awards: he was awarded the Grand Prize of the 32nd Hungarian Press Photo Contest in 2013 for the reportage about the Syrian civil war. In 2015, he reported on the armed conflict in East-Ukraine. In the same year he coverd the refugee crisis from Turkey to Western- Europe, and participated in the World Press Photo Organization's Joop Swart Masterclass. In 2017 he took part in the workshop of Magnum Photos as a recipient of the Robert Capa Centre’s scholarship. In 2018 he has beed received Hemző Károly Grant for his works made in a demanding formal language with serious social sensitivity. He received József Pécsi Photography Grant in 2015 and in 2018.