Prisoners & Captives

BLACK MONASTERY--Aladar Kuncz-- Harcourt, Brace ($2.75). On the small shelf of the world's prison literature, side by side with Feodor Dostoevsky's The House of Death and e. e. cummings' The Enormous Room, a place will be found for the late Aladar Kuncz's Black Monastery. The record of a five-year imprisonment in France during the War, this book is a subtly horrible monument to man's inhumanity to man. Superficially less gruesome than many a record of front-line fighting, its nightmarish quality develops imperceptibly, will leave most readers shaking their heads in an unsuccessful attempt to forget it.

Aladar Kuncz, a young Hungarian teacher, was spending his 1914 summer holiday in a Breton seaside village. News of the War's beginning sent him scurrying to Paris, where with hundreds of his countrymen he besieged his consulate, tried to get transportation home or to some neutral country. Too late for the last train, he and his kind were interned "for the duration of the War." Luckily for them, they had no idea how long that was to be. After a few weeks' temporary detention in a garage at Perigueux. Kuncz and his comrades were sent to Noirmoutier, an island off the west coast, imprisoned in a medieval monastery there. In the summer of 1916 they were transferred to the neighboring Ile d'Yeu, kept there until April 1919. Ex-Prisoner Kuncz has no stories of atrocities to tell, recalls no tortures but cold, filth, monotony, celibacy, imprisonment. The cumulative strength of his story lies in its quiet matter-of-factness. which magnifies no pettiness, shows through a clear lens a dreadfully long perspective.

Kuncz filled in his days at Noirmoutier by reading, writing, lecturing on literature. A sculptor made pin-money by making and selling little statuettes of his well-remembered mistress. Some ran a gambling game, others bowled on a home-made alley. The poorer prisoners acted as servants for the richer. Two madmen, one of whom thought he was God, provided occasional entertainment. In the early years perversion was comparatively rare, but, to the sex-starved prisoners, the occasional girls they saw, on their convoyed trips outside the walls, seemed part-angels, part succubi. Once Kuncz and a few companions tunneled their way out of Noirmoutier, got aboard a fishing boat one of them had seen, in which they planned to sail to Spain. When they found the boat had neither oars nor sails they came ashore, got back undiscovered.

They were all glad to leave Noirmoutier but they found Ile d'Yeu worse: their quarters were underground, insanitary, overcrowded, their bodies weaker, their spirits lower. Homosexuality grew to such an extent that one of the most outstanding perverts, who played the feminine lead in their amateur shows, was treated respectfully as a real woman, ''achieved the creation of a sort of salon." When one day the prisoners saw the U. S. fleet steaming past their island, they knew the War was lost. But they still had many weary months to wait. When Ex-Prisoner Kuncz finally got back to Hungary, "we got out of the train in Gyor and bought some horsemeat sausages, and I asked one of the station officials if he knew anything about my brother-in-law, who had lived in that town. He said he had died. That seemed natural."

The Author. A Hungarian of Transylvania (now Rumania). Aladar Kuncz had small reputation in his own country, was unknown outside. But his friends knew he was an essayist, biographer, a knowledgeable connoisseur of literature. In poor health, he worked away at Black Monastery, his one big book, lived to see it published (May 1931) seven weeks before his death. Though the Versailles Treaty whittled Hungary down to an impoverished fraction of its pre-War self, 20,000 copies of Author Kuncz's last testament have been sold there.

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