Border Incident

In the sleepy Austrian border hamlet of Helenenschacht, where six months ago Hungarian refugees by the dozens streamed across to freedom, an explosion last week brought the regulars in Schappl's Inn out into the raw, squally afternoon. Before them, on the Hungarian side of the double fence of barbed wire that now seals off the border, lay a young girl in agony. Her right leg was smashed and streaming blood, her face smeared with blood and mud. She rolled and writhed, all the time screaming. When she saw the Helenenschacht people she cried, "Please, please, help me, help me!"

The earth where the girl lay was torn up. The Austrians saw immediately that the girl had been injured by a mine, and concluded that there were probably other mines in the strip. At the edge of the woods beyond the frontier six Hungarian soldiers stood watching the girl. Neither the Austrians nor the Hungarian soldiers made a move to help her. Some of the Austrians drifted off, ashamed of their helplessness in the face not only of the mines but of the fact that the girl was beyond the fence in Hungarian territory.

For one hour and 45 minutes the girl struggled alone. A dozen times, hobbling on her unbroken leg, she tried to pull herself up and over the wire. The more she struggled the more blood she lost. The ground around her turned red. She never stopped screaming, though her screams grew weaker, and she continued to beg for help. At last a file of Hungarian soldiers came out of the woods. The lead man carried a mine detector. The soldiers fired a few shots to scare away the Austrians. Then, applying a tourniquet to the girl's leg, they put her on a stretcher and carried her back into Kadar's Hungary.

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