Monday, Apr. 14, 1952

Janos

He was a thin, pale boy, with long, wavy hair and a profile as delicate as a girl's. He appeared to be about eight years old. When the authorities at Austria's Wagna refugee camp tried to question him, he could only stare at them with round, uncomprehending eyes. At last his data was entered in the records: "Name--unknown; parents--unknown; place of birth--unknown; height--141 centimeters. Identifying features: scar on chin; scar on belly. Deaf and dumb."

That, plus the fact that he had been picked up crossing a bridge on the Yugoslav border, was all that the authorities knew or could guess about Janos. A fellow refugee, a draftsman from Budapest, had invented the name for him. A faint look of pleasure in Janos' eyes seemed to indicate that he could hear, and that he liked the name. The mystery of his real identity and origin remained.

Pantomime. On his fourth day in camp, the authorities sat Janos down before some sheets of blank foolscap and by gestures urged him to draw. Janos threw his pencil to the floor and ran away. Time after time the camp officers coaxed him back with lumps of sugar. Gradually, as thin fingers traced deliberate line after line on the yellow paper, a crude autobiography in hieroglyphics began to take shape.

Janos' pictures were peopled with little stick figures. Small suns represented days, flat circles indicated the passing years. His first drawing showed a house, baby carriage, and 13 of the yearly circles, the last one incomplete. Authorities guessed that meant he was 12 1/2 years old. Just under the sixth circle, Janos drew a line and pointed at his mouth and ears to show when he had lost his voice and hearing. Two circles later, he pantomimed the shooting of a machine gun. A succeeding sketch, showing the dotted lines of bullets headed straight from the muzzle of a machine-pistol to the heads of a man and a woman--presumably his father & mother --explained the shooting. The pistol was held by a soldier marked clearly with a hammer & sickle.

A farmhouse ablaze, an exploding bomb, a boy running into a woods, a vineyard recognizably Yugoslavian by the way the vines were staked, another farmhouse and another man & wife told further chapters of the deaf-mute odyssey. A final drawing showed the Austrian guard picking him up at the border.

Questions. There were many unanswered questions in the saga. Authorities hoped that treatment at a state hospital for the deaf & dumb at Graz might provide the answers to some of them: doctors guessed that shock had taken his speech. Meanwhile, Janos himself offered one more sphinxlike hint'. On the night last week before he left Wagna for Graz, the boy's restlessness awakened some of the other refugees. Suddenly they heard a high-pitched, quavering voice. It was Janos talking in his sleep. "I must wait five more years!" he cried in Serbian. When he woke next morning, he had lapsed again into helpless silence.

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