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There are many white spots in our history, in our family history and in our national history - said Gábor Margittai in the introduction to his presentation. We also know very little about the stories of prisoners of war, he added, because they were not allowed to be talked about, because a soldier felt ashamed and humiliated if he was taken prisoner.
The film Prisoners of Donkey Island, which was also shown to the audience of MCC in Miskolc during the evening, takes us to the island of Asinara in Sardinia. Gábor Margittai and his wife have created a film about people's stories, stories of suffering. The separatist Sardinians who live here do not talk about these terrible stories. The guidebooks only mention them in a few lines, the history books do not even refer to them. Documentary filmmaker Gábor and his wife followed a rumour, and went backwards from Sardinia along the route. The same route that more than 100 years ago had to be taken by tortured, starving and sick prisoners of war from the Monarchy through Serbia and Albania to southern Italy.
Once called the island of the damned, Asinara is now a tourist destination and a national park. Most visitors to the island are unaware that beneath its feet lie the bones of former prisoners of war. To this day, remains of the camp and even the bones of the dead are still being unearthed as the sea washes away the mass graves.
"Donkey Island, in the middle of nowhere, was claimed by both God and the Devil," said Gábor Margittai, referring to the beauty of the island and the inhuman horrors that took place there. Not only were prisoners of war camped there, but in the 1970s it also served as a prison island. Mafioso or paedophile criminals who wanted to be well separated from the rest of society were imprisoned here.
Much can be reconstructed about the fate of prisoners of war from the prisoner of war diaries, which also give the locations. Most of the crew spent the night in the open air, hundreds freezing to death every dawn. The weakest were stripped of the rotten carrots they scraped from here and there, comrades tore each other's clothes off, and some accounts even suggest cannibalism. Despite the terrible conditions, their faith remained in the camp: there are the chapels built by the prisoners of war.
In Asina, a drama of humanity was unfolding. Of the 85,000 Austro-Hungarian soldiers, 23,000 survived when they arrived on the island, and about 6,000 came out alive after the war ended. Many of those who survived also died young because of the trauma of war and captivity.
In 2016, János Áder inaugurated a memorial at the small chapel on the island, so that those who pass by would remember the Hungarian soldiers who died here. Gábor Margittai is also fighting for the preservation of their memory and has since continued the research he started here.
