– It was a long and bumpy road that led him to this point. But let’s start at the beginning: what was your childhood like?
– There was nothing special about it. I’m 64 now, and when I think back to my childhood, nothing flashy comes to mind. Even today, there are many broken families and children of divorced parents in the country and throughout the world. I was like that too, I was maybe four years old when my mother divorced my father. We lived in a small village in Felnémet, not far from Eger. We lived in a house with a dirt floor, socially quite difficult conditions, my mother worked in the sawmill. I still have good memories, I got everything a child could get. Then sometime in 1967, we moved to Eger, where I continued primary school. We were two brothers: I say we were only because my sister died at the age of 16. My mother became a housekeeper and got a service apartment in Eger. So nothing special happened until 1971 when I lost my sister to suicide. They used to ask me what path led me to the world of prisons, they look for how I socialized, where were the breaks. You can make bad decisions at a young age, and those have their consequences, but I wasn’t a worse kid than the others. I liked to play football and swordplay, I didn’t sit in the corner, but no one lives their childhood to become a criminal. That’s about it.
“How did the study go?”
– I spent the first grade in Felném, we moved to Eger when I was in the second grade, then my grades deteriorated. This could even be a consequence of environmental change. I know this about my son, because when we moved from Galgamács to Mezőtúr, when we took him out of kindergarten, he had a hard time adjusting to the other place afterwards, he even fought, but he recovered after half a year. He will now be in school this year. A hundred words have the same ending, I wasn’t a good student, I even failed, but I was allowed to pass the supplementary exam. My mother said I had a good head, I could memorize what I wanted. But apart from singing and gymnastics, I didn’t like anything else, just dreaming, looking out the window.
“And what was in those dreams?”
– When I was a child, I wanted to be an aviator, I always looked at the planes in the sky. But I think that’s the peculiarity of children: they want to be pilots, or policemen, firemen and soldiers. I didn’t have a definite goal in front of me, in those dreams I rather felt some kind of envy when I saw people older than me. I must have been in the sixth or seventh grade when I looked out the window of the elementary school and watched the boys who had already dropped out of school but didn’t work yet, they just came and went and I envied them because I had to sit on the bench. I longed for freedom. This is also the work of the devil, a sugary image in front of the children, because this is not freedom. Freedom is when someone follows his path, which starts with learning and gives his career a chance by finishing school. But I didn’t think so then.
– Did you not encounter faith or God in any form in your childhood?
– I received first communion according to my mother’s expectations, I was also enrolled in religious studies, but I have no good memories of it. I don’t want to hurt Catholicism, the church, maybe it’s not their fault, but nothing is left of it. Before my sister’s death, at the age of 12, I received first communion, but I had it, pipe, that’s all, but I didn’t know God. I think it is a great grace and gift if someone develops an image of God in childhood. Obviously, a lot depends on the parents. The devil once sent me a thought that my child would be like me, but God reassured me inside that this was not true. After all, he grew up in a Christian family, so it’s no surprise to him that we go to church on Sundays, pray before meals, and that his father tells Bible stories. I don’t blame the parents, because we can only give what we have, and if the parent doesn’t have God present in his life, then he can’t give it, he can’t serve with it.
Photo: Tamás Tihanyi / Fejér County Newspaper
“What was the first step in the wrong direction?”
– Maybe the alcohol, already at a young age, 13-14 years old. The Bible says that bad company can corrupt good morals. It doesn’t matter who you look up to. It hurts to say this, because it’s like I’m blaming him, but that’s not true: there was a boy three or four years older in my circle of friends, and I really looked up to him because he had already been to prison. So the first bad step was alcohol, because of which the family quarrels came. My mother remarried, to my foster father, with whom she has been living for more than fifty years. There were many conflicts, they asked me not to wander off, my mother once even cut my clothes to prevent me from leaving the house. When he closed the door, I climbed out the window. They couldn’t handle it at home anymore and I fell in with the wrong company, who are not so bad anyway: they were the key children of the housing estate. But we tried everything. Some people smoke a weed cigarette and don’t smoke any more, some smoke once a month, and still others get hooked and become drug addicts. It’s the same with alcohol, some people don’t drink anymore after the first drink, only on occasions, while others become alcoholics. Biblical truth is the “vain life inherited from our fathers”. My grandfather had a wine tasting room, he drank, my father drank, and when I drank my first glass of beer and felt its effects, my genes began to remember and my inner nature clung to what I brought from my fathers. I didn’t drink to feel good, not because I was thirsty, but to get drunk. It’s sad that there are a lot of people who feel the same way, drinking one more Deci brandy after five beers to get drunk. Those who live like this have no order. And I wasn’t okay either. Sin came into my life very quickly, I left school, went to a hotel as a running boy, where I stole money, which meant that I was constantly afraid. Because sin always comes with fear. And I drowned my fear in drink to show who I am. After a family quarrel, I met the aforementioned man in Eger at a liquor meter, we went to Lake Balaton and the first burglary of my life happened. Much to my mother’s chagrin, her son became a burglar, although that is not what a mother gives birth to. And the child didn’t want to be a burglar either, but a pilot or a firefighter. But he became a criminal who traveled the world of prisons. The devil paints a lot of things in front of people, but he never tells the whole truth: he promises a lot, gives a little, and in the end takes everything away. Eleven months after the first burglary, I was arrested, and by that time, I had already committed crimes in ten counties of the country. I had a lot of burglaries behind me and I got ten months. This is how the chaotic march towards spiritual misery began, the entrance to which was the prison in Tököl.
“How could you endure the days in there?”
– God stayed by my side even in my ungodly life. He didn’t let my teeth get knocked out, I didn’t become sexually aberrant – just preserved. It was not my tough, manly attitude that saved me from all danger, but God’s grace, which I did not yet know. God is the one who can reverse the irreversible, only he has the power to do so. Believers already know this, and God will give it to non-believers to find out. It is an ugly painting of the devil when someone, for example, romanticizes the world of prisons on social media and posts images that make it desirable. These are partial truths, ninety-nine percent and one percent. They don’t show when the person is crying facing the wall because their child is not there. When he is deprived of what even an animal clings to: his freedom. A prisoner is a doubly prisoner. On the one hand, he is in the captivity of the devil, a prisoner of his sins, and on the other hand, he is also a prisoner in a physical sense. Prison is a treadmill, a gray world where you have to survive the day and then the next day. Many people say that people become conformists, they get used to so-called comfort, to being served and organized for them from morning to night, and they don’t even have to turn off the lights. But you can’t get used to it, I think. When a person steps out into the open world, he enters a different atmosphere physically, because even the air outside is different. Outside the gate, you are freed from the pressure of the inner souls, which pours out, from the frustration, from the inner repression: all of this suddenly ceases. Many people who enter prisons to serve say that they feel some kind of pressure there. Well, that’s what they feel. Even a non-believer can sense this.
“You’re going back anyway.”
– Yes, the last time I was in Szeged prison, in the triple facility, I took the best news in the world there. I told the prisoners, look at my life! I did not claim that I succeeded, because I held on to God’s mercy and He kept me on this path. They can succeed too! There are procedures for reintegrating criminals into society, but only God has a perfect program for this that works in the life of those who choose Him. Prison is a survival camp and it is very bad news for society and those in it that it does not raise better people. It is a necessary evil, there is no better, no better has been invented. Of course, they say to cut off their hands and kill them, but the laws are not like that. They get kicked out of society because they broke the rules, but they don’t change, because no good has ever come out of putting a lot of bad people in a pile. Speech is the most powerful shaper of all human relationships. I met people in Szeged prison who started serving life sentences, and it all started with two drinks. Then there were two bottles in one of the pubs in the eighth district, and there many people talk, say “smartness”, then they go and do something bad, someone dies, and thirty years in prison follows. But how did it start? With the mouth, with speech. The Bible says that life and death are in the power of the tongue, those we love, we eat the fruit of it. The prison is a barred academy where the environment trains worse people. The good news is that you can talk about God, you can tell good news, you can turn to God, you can choose another path that leads not to hell, but to heaven. God does not look at our past, where we come from, but where we are going and want to go.
– According to experts, roughly nine years is the limit that you can spend in prison without mental damage. Are you permanently injured?
– I was punished eight times and spent more than thirty years in prison, half of my life. Of course I feel its weight. There is only one reason that I am mentally and physically one. The apostle Paul wrote the letter from prison: “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” The preserving power and salt of man is the presence of God. My last sentence was over twenty years, for armed robbery. The great grace came from the fact that I converted for a year and a half after my fall, and I spent that long time with the Lord, moreover actively. I founded a church, acquired a profession, did things that proved to be useful for my environment and I believe that God was pleased with them. Communion with God became what protected and preserved me from my greatest enemy, which was not my environment, but myself. The moment I talk about him is also communion with God. Christ’s sacrifice gave me a moment when I heard the gospel, and then I approached God and addressed him with my own words. I gave him all I had, my whole miserable life, from my childhood to the day I confessed. For me, the great washing was when I asked for his forgiveness and accepted the sacrifice of Jesus, which he made for me. I confessed to God that my life has become worthless, but if He can still do something with this life, I will give it to Him.
“And he knew.”
“I have a house, a car, a home.” It is already a miracle that at the age of 64 I can say that my daughter will be three years old in October, my son’s seventh birthday will be celebrated in December, and my wife is waiting for me. None of this would happen if I didn’t repent. These are huge things, I’m very grateful for all of them, but that’s not the point. The point is, I have a place in heaven. The bottom line is that God forgave my sins and freed me from this perishable house, from which I am now leaving, by making an incorruptible one instead. And it’s so good that it’s not just a fairy tale.
