Between 1950 and 1953, Hungary’s State Protection Authority (Államvédelmi Hatóság, or ÁVH, the secret police) operated a forced labor camp near the small town of Recsk. Founded without any legal justification, it extended Joseph Stalin’s gulag model into the then-communist country. Some 1,500 political prisoners were imprisoned in barracks and behind barbed wire, where they performed 12 to 14 hours of backbreaking work at a nearby mine each day—all on the basis of trumped-up charges. After Stalin’s death, in 1953, Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy closed this forced labor camp (together with…
