Four hundred tons of secret maps

While walking around Riga, we accidentally come across a map shop in the former Berga Bazārs passage. At first glance, it simply looks like a good shop, with a good selection of international maps and guidebooks.

But then we discover the shelf of Russian maps, which looks as if offering detailed maps of non-existent worlds. An atlas of the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, Stalin’s anti-Israel along the Amur, where only one percent of Jews live today, but they still publish a Yiddish-language newspaper, and learning Yiddish is mandatory in elementary school. A map for getting around Lake Ladoga, when only getting there is harder than getting to the Moon. An atlas for the residents of Murmansk, where it was not difficult to get with a free train ticket for Hungarians during WWI, they just had to build the railway.

Prokudin-Gorsky: Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war on the construction of the Murmansk railway (the “Murmelbahn”)

But the real fun is yet to come. It is only when we pay that we notice the infinte stacks of map sections standing from floor to ceiling behind the counter with the trilingual inscription that these are top secret topographic maps of the Soviet Army.

We look inside. Hungary is covered by four 1:500,000 secitons, but there are also 1:25,000 maps of larger cities. Our city names written in Cyrillic letters sound like when I hear them from old men all over the former Soviet Union who once served in the occupying Red Army. Out of curiosity, I look for the former Soviet military airport in Mátyásföld, east of Budapest, which I knew when it was still operating, and which after their withdrawal turned out to have been mannered by Georgian officers. However, the detailed map of Budapest hides the existence of the airport even from their own officers: it marks arable lands in its place.

The shop boy, enjoying our enthusiasm, also shows us a detailed map of Washington D.C. with the Pentagon and the White House, where each facility is marked with a different color according to its function and population density. It turns out that the Soviet army was creating similarly detailed maps of the entire world they were interested in and updating them at least every decade.

“How did you lay hands on this material?” I ask the tactless question, but the boy answers readily. He tells us that in 1992, during the Soviet army’s withdrawal from Latvia, the owner of this shop worked with them as a civilian employee, and he heard about the secret map material being handed over to the paper factory for destruction. He immedietaly began negotiating with the responsible comrade in order to purchase at least the most interesting sections. The army at first refused, then, a week later, they asked $14,000 for the material they wanted. Our man got the money – don’t ask how, the boy adds –, and went to the warehouse to get the goods. However, the warehousemen were too lazy to sort out the requested sections, and told him to take it all. He transported from there four hundred tons of map sections in several railroad wagons, and there is still plenty of them today. Except for San Francisco, the boy adds, because someone from there once discovered the shop and wrote an article about it. After that, the locals bought up all their sections like hotcakes. There is already a shortage of Washington, too.

At about the final words, a group of six or seven young Americans enter the shop. They are looking for a section of South Carolina, the city of Greenville. They get it and their jaws drop. “Oh my God, here’s our lakeside cottage”, one of the girls screams. “Here’s our church!” They immediately buy two copies. “Shouldn’t we have four? How many more of this are left?” “Seventy-one more.”

The leader of the group explains that they are helping out at a local Latvian scout camp, the others for the first time, but he has been coming back. “And how did you find this shop?” “A friend of mine had been here and he said I absolutely must check it out, because OMG, what material is there here!”

It’s truly amazing, bizarre and depressing to see so clearly the appetite with which the Soviet army and, of course, the Soviet state that controlled it, kept track of the part of the world they were interested in. And it’s a little psychological background addition to the current insatiable appetite of the Russian state.

Just for the sake of a souvenir, we buy the 1989 edition of the Hungarian section including Budapest (yes, it was still updated then, immediately before their withdrawal!), as well as a good reference book: The Red Atlas. How the Soviet Union secretly mapped the world, 2017. Only after leaving the store I recall that I didn’t check out how the Soviet barracks in the Western Hungarian Hajmáskér and the surrounding Soviet firing range in the Bakony mountains where we practiced so much when I was a tank driver, were depicted, if at all. I have to go back and check it.

Production report on a sunken world

We – my brother Gyuri and I – got to know Lajos Erdélyi in our childhood from his photo album about the Jewish cemeteries of Transylvania. This was, I think, the first book that gave news, showed pictures and offered short but thought-provoking analyses of those cemeteries and their richly carved tombstones, which at that time were still sunken into the ground and overgrown with bushes all over Eastern Europe, waiting to be rediscovered. It was this book that started us, like many others, to discover these cemeteries and the former Jewish culture of our Eastern Europe. And the photos in this book also served as models for how to photograph these cemeteries, the pathos of the tombstones leaning forward, the helplessness of the stones standing in frightened rows, the cheerfulness of the anthropomorphic symbolic animals.

This album was probably the closest to the author himself, who said several times: “I was a Hungarian among Romanians, and a Jew among Hungarians”. His memoir as to what it meant to be “a Jew among Hungarians”, was just published in Litera. But this thin, poorly printed Kriterion edition was merely a love child in his work as a photographer and writer. The “legitimate” offspring were the photographs he took as an employee of the Hungarian-language Romanian newspaper Új Élet (New Life) about the life of the Socialist country from Oradea to the Danube Delta. In 2023, the negatives of these photographs, Lajos Erdélyi’s complete archive, were given by his heirs to the Blinken OSA Archive in Budapest, where, after two years of work, an exhibition entitled The insensitive photojournalist has now opened, selected and curated by Lenke Szilágyi and Zsuzsanna Zádori.

The newspaper needed production reports on the successes of Socialist industrialization, on the incredible new achievements under Ceauşescu, on a prosperous and happy country. Lajos Erdélyi went where he was sent, and photographed what was needed. But in his pictures, alongside the concrete and steel monsters, there is always a piece of real life. And that dominates the picture.

By collecting and invetorying a multitude of such pieces of real life, this archive became the chronicle of a sunken world that many of us have seen and recognize, but those who come after us will only be able to see it in Lajos Erdélyi’s pictures.

A literally sunken world that we have not seen: the last years of the village of Bözödújfalu (Bezidu Nou), which was doomed to be flooded in 1988. It must have been painful for all of Lajos Erdélyi’s identities to document the destruction of this Székely village that, from the 17th century on, converted to Judaism.

Those who saw these photos in Új Élet, where they were published in the form of poorly printed stamps, can only now really see them for the first time. The curators sometimes display original newspaper prints side by side with the enlarged version of the detailed and sensitive photo. The latter in this format tells stories that perhaps was better not to be caught by the censors of the time.

And the camera with which Lajos Erdélyi photographed all of this. The Nikon F camera was given to him as a gift by his former schoolmate and fellow prisoner in the concentration camp, Raymond Naftali, who emigrated to America.