Árpád Göncz: “Ideas have a longer half-life”

Árpád Göncz: “Ideas have a longer half-life”

Whether you see your life as successful or unsuccessful depends on what kind of hearth and home you set out from. I can call my life a string of collapses, failures and blind alleys. And I can say I’ve ended up, after twists and turns, just where I wanted to be, and I can do, I’m free to do the things I want to do for the rest of my life…. I’m not at odds with myself, I’m at odds with the world; I’m just as out of sorts as everyone else. But I feel I can allow myself, in the time I’m left with, to live for the future, not in the past. And if there should ever be five minutes, five political minutes in Hungary when there’s a need for a man who can get on with both communists and populars (népi). Népi, here meaning adherents of a right-wing school of thought espousing values that attach to the Hungarian peasantry, people or nation, and has a clean record, I’ll be there if I’m needed.

From the interview with Árpád Göncz made
 by András B. Hegedűs on February 14, 1985
 

I was born in Budapest on February 10, 1922. My father didn’t go to university, and in the terminology of the 1950s I was classed as of “other” extraction. Discrimination by social origin introduced under the Rákosi regime and retained into the 1960s involved a quota system that almost precluded young people of “other” or “class-alien” extraction from entering state-run higher education. Not a member of the intelligentsia—I might perhaps be called middle class. I can trace back my family to 1735. I have a copy of a deed of nobility with that date on it. Apparently the original can be found in Zala County Archives. The coat of arms is very strange, with a dove at the top holding a white cross. I haven’t any evidence for doing so, but I once thought I could claim for an ancestor a courtier of Tamás Nádasdy, 1498–1562, palatine and captain of Buda Castle, known as the Black Bey. A certain Miklós Gönczi, a “gymnasiarch” or school principal at the Sárvár court, and a translator and author whose work found its way into print. My whole family comes from Zala County, but the village of Gönc is up north. The family is Catholic, and I think they may have arrived in Zala under some settlement scheme to do with the Counter-Reformation. The Miklós Gönczi I mentioned moved there from Gönc, which is in Abaúj County. Family tradition has it that my great-grandfather lived in Csáktornya. He was an imperial army officer who’d taken his hussars over to the Hungarian side in 1848. During the siege of Buda Castle, he was married in Ráckeve to a middle-class Buda girl and took her to live with him at Zrinyi Castle in Csáktornya.

            My grandfather was the Csáktornya postmaster before he found his way to Budapest in some way or other. He had no protection or connections behind him in the capital, but he managed to become deputy postmaster general in 1918 and keep the job in the Commune period, the Hungarian Soviet Republic of March 21 –August 6, 1919. After that he was retired. My grandfather was a prime example of the very puritan intelligentsia of the reign of Francis Joseph. He refused the official carriage or telephone that went with his job. He was a man who lived by a very strict, straightforward moral code, an utter puritan, imbued with the liberalism of the 1910s. I was very fond of him. In fact, he may have stood closer to me than any other member of the family. He died at the age of 62.

            My father was a typical “cadre’s son” in a family of four girls and one boy. He was utterly spoiled and continued to be so till the end of his life. After secondary school, he started working for the post office and went on to write books about the principles of tennis, as he was the country’s perennial second-best tennis player and perhaps its best tennis coach. When he was older he worked for small and medium-sized textile firms, then as a statistician at the Újpest Meat Industrial Enterprise, from where he retired. He was an official, in other words. He divorced my mother when I was six and we had the bitter experience of living without a father, with my grandparents in Bors utca in Buda. My father remarried my mother in old age and she nursed him. He and I were never close.

            My family was a typical product of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Of my four aunts, one married an Austrian railway official, later a director, and so I have some Austrian cousins. The next wed a colonel of engineers of Romanian extraction, so I also have some Romanian cousins who only speak Romanian. Two of the four aunts stayed in Hungary. But the family also includes Styrians, Italians, Croats, Jews, Hungarian Germans, and goodness knows who, from all over the Carpathian Basin.

            My mother was from South Transylvania. Born in Tustya in Hunyad County, now Tuştea, Romania. She was orphaned, which left a mark on her whole life. She brought the Jewish blood into the family: her mother had been a Székely (Szekler) Sabbatarian and her father a Jew. She grew up in a highly educated upper middle-class family with social democratic inclinations, where the head of the family was a timber wholesaler, then a textile mill owner, and also an art collector and linguist. After Trianon, the family fled to Pest, and became “truck dwellers”. The arrival of  the Entente occupation forces and Hungary’s territorial losses under the Treaty of Trianon caused more than 400,000 people to flee from the lost lands into “Trianon Hungary” after 1918. Many were reduced to living in trucks in railway sidings. Their situation did not normalize until 1924.

            I received my primary education at the New School, a reformed, private school and very good. There were twelve selected pupils in a class. It wasn’t a Montessori school, but the system was very similar. So, I was still getting top marks on the strength of what I’d learnt there, right up to the fourth year of gymnasium. Academically oriented secondary school, usually begun in the fifth grade in that period.

            In 1932, I enrolled at the Werbőczy Gymnasium. I didn’t like the Werbőczy—it was a deeply corrupt school. I got top marks, but of course, the son of the majority shareholder in the Győr Artillery Factory got top marks, as well, and the son of the state secretary for education was up front, as well. The child of another holder of high state office was the chief toady. I loathed that school, especially when the laws against the Jews came in. There were sixty of us in the class, ten of them Jews. There was a group of nine of us who were good friends, a very interesting mix. My best friend was Karcsi Nagy, the son of a lieutenant general. Then there was Pista Gombocz, nephew of Zoltán Gombocz and son of István Gombocz. Zoltán Gombocz (1877–1935), a celebrated professor of linguistics; Árpád Göncz’s schoolfellow seems likely to have been the son of Zoltán’s younger brother, Endre Gombocz (1882–1945), a well-known botanist. Then there was Dini Zsigmondi, then Dénes Liedemann, the violinist, now a professor of violin at the University of Seattle, and Sanyi Goldziher, the one saint I’ve known in my life, who couldn’t be saved because he accepted his destiny along with his fellows and died in the end. Our circle also included a son of the Márkus family that owned Est Lapokat Est Lapkiadó Részvénytársaságot (Est Newspaper Publishing PLC), was not owned by Márkus, as Árpád Göncz recalls, but by Andor Miklós (1880–1933), who had founded the company in 1910, and Elek Markó, son of the clerk of the works of Parliament. Then there was Henrik Herczog, who came from an imperial German family, of which he probably belonged to, to the third generation to live in Hungary. So, we were quite a mixed bunch, the elite of the class, nine of us, all excellent students, and very good friends too for a long time. I passed my school certificate with top marks, and then joined the Földhitel Intézet, an agricultural bank founded in Budapest in 1863 as a clerk in what was a front-ranking financial institution.

            The bank later became a cooperative credit institution, charged with carrying out the partial land reform, i. e. parcelling out the land sequestered. After that, it dealt with Jewish property. The bank also had large estates of its own, which it ran very well. During the war years, we strove to issue the papers for as many people as possible in the territories that had been reannexed to Hungary. I didn’t like my work. Why did I become a bank employee? Because my parents knew someone who took me on. Looking at it with today’s eyes, it was an amazingly smart job. We were at work from nine till two. At two, we could go out to Margaret Island, where the company had a tennis court, a boathouse and a restaurant, where you could eat for pennies. Back in those days of leather armchairs, the junior clerks paid a quarter of what the managers paid for their food, not the other way round. They didn’t pay us for eleven months a year, but for 14 or even 15, because that’s what the annual bonuses came to. I as a young banking officer got a summer and a winter bonus. We also got fuel and a slaughtered pig, ready prepared. So the welfare perks we not just above the national average, but quite inconceivably generous by today’s standards. Meanwhile I managed to study law by correspondence, receiving my doctor’s degree in 1944.

            What I remember of law is mainly Roman law, history of law and philosophy of law, and I still feel the legal system is the spine or skeleton of history. So I can also look at things in a legal way.

            Influenced by the populist writers, the writers of the “népi mozgalom” (popular movement) that arose in and around Hungary in the 1920s and 1930s reacted against urbane/urban (urbánus) culture by turning to the subject of the rural poor, often through rural research in the form of sociography—semi-scholarly description of social conditions. Perhaps László Németh is best known of all.

I started to become left wing, yet with a deep-Magyar complex. This refers to the “deep Magyar/shallow Magyar” pair of opposites advanced in László Németh’s 1939 study Kisebbségben (in a minority).

My favourite poet was Mihály Babits, which almost excluded the influence of László Németh, but didn’t exclude the political conclusions at the root of the land reform, i. e. radical peasant politics. I didn’t distinguish between left and right-wing populist writers. I read the rural researchers, everything considered to be sociography, from The Tard Situation onwards (A tardi helyzet) 1936, by Zoltán Szabó (1912–1984). I didn’t like Dezső Szabó. (1879–1945), one of the founders of the populist movement. I was at an evening of his in Lövölde tér and sat near the front, where I was spattered with Szabó’s spittle and gall and hardly managed to sit it out. I was horrified by his kind of prejudice and angry malice. I could hardly stand it probably because of my family situation and the situation I’d chosen. I must already have possessed my propensity to be open in every direction: I felt that Sinka was one of the greatest Hungarian poets, but that didn’t stop me from loving Thomas Mann or seeing Mihály Babits as a great poet. But I was alarmed by fanaticism anywhere. When Sanyi Fekete in prison did a sociological survey of reading habits, he recognized my answers straight away, as there wasn’t another sheet on which István Sinka and Thomas Mann appeared side by side. I can afford the luxury of loving authors on both sides, approaching from different directions, and anyway, I was probably more interested in the ones that differed from me. I think I was basically benign as a reader and a thinker. I’m far more suspicious these days.

            I was open towards the conventional, dignified, upright, patient Hungarian society or officer stratum of the end of the century, which I knew from my grandfather. But I was also open to other classes: I saw the Jewish petty and haute bourgeoisie, the imperial haute bourgeoisie, and I took the view that the peasantry held the future of the Hungarian community. I read the peasant radical literature of the time, grew up on folksongs as a Scout, and accepted folk culture as my own.

            Our family and extended family were just as divided among the rival intellectual strands as Hungarian society was. The amusing thing was that I stood at the centre of this, not identifying myself with any of them. And I haven’t identified myself with anyone else since. People in general have a father complex, I have father aversion. The moment I have to sit at someone’s feet and look up with respect, I get cold shivers down my spine. I’ve wanted all my life to belong somewhere, but I’ve never belonged anywhere, because inwardly, to myself, I’ve always criticized whatever I’ve belonged to.

            I ran into politics aged 17 or 18. If I try to define my outlook in those days, one feature was the Hungarian community, a second folk culture, a third peasant radicalism—a demand for land reform—and a fourth a yearning for a communal way of life that I certainly hadn’t formulated clearly, but must have followed from the Scout movement and all the communal activity I’d known at school.

            Then I came across the Pál Teleki Panel. (Teleki Pál Munkaközösség) I can’t reconstruct how I came into contact with them, because as a Scout I joined hök, the Hárshegy, later Honvéd (army) Patrol Leaders’ Circle, and although I was opposed to its system of ideas strongly military, even chauvinistic, nationalistic spirit, I wasn’t opposed to its way of life. This was an excellent community containing some outstanding people drawn from the leading strata of the Werbőczy and the 7th Scout troop, most of whom generally stood up very well. The Pál Teleki Panel, on the other hand, was a creation of the Piarist Gymnasium’s (Secondary School’s) Scout troop, arising out of the liberal political movement and activity of the old Piarist students. The executive consisted of Tibor Hám (1914–1990), a physician and Smallholders politician, who started the Pál Teleki Panel in 1943. He was a member of Parliament and leading party official after the war, then arrested over the conspiracy trial, but acquitted. He fled to the West in 1948, and became prominent in US émigré organizations. Pali Jaczkó, (1916–?), lawyer, Smallholders politician, and Pál Teleki Panel founder. He took part in the wartime resistance, and became a member of Parliament in 1945, but fell victim to the 1947 Hungarian Community trial. He was released in 1954 and emigrated to Switzerland in 1956. Kálmán Saláta and Gyuszi Lukács—all old Piarist students, with Jóska Bognár as probably the sole exception. Bognár was from Szombathely, so an outsider. Also an old Piarist was Gyurka Szabó, in whose flat Bajcsy-Zsilinszky was arrested. Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky (1886–1944) had taken refuge in the Botanical Gardens flat of the widow of Professor Zoltán Szabó, where he was arrested in the small hours of November 23, 1944 by Arrow-Cross men and executed on December 24 at Sopronkőhida.

Tamás Cholnoky (born 1923), an architect, was a fellow Scout with Kálmán Saláta and helped to hide him in Pest when he prepared to flee abroad before the Community Trial. He also emigrated to the United States. This Panel had an outlook very close to mine, in its efforts towards universality, its openness, and, something new for me, its search for a left-wing path, for it had some communists in its leadership. Others who belonged with us were film-maker Tamás Banovich, Kati Ilosvay, and Zsuzsa Bánky, another outsider. When the Pál Teleki Panel formed after various shifts within other associations among former Piarist students, the members were entirely national and peasant-radical in their outlook, but also more liberal than I knew. The whole thing, with its liberalism and openness, came as a kind of refreshment to me. We were very varied in our professions. Tibor Hám was a medical doctor, Bognár a secondary-school teacher of German, Kálmán Saláta and Pali Jaczkó lawyers, Pista Tóth an army officer and incidentally a member of the Free Hungarian Community, Kecskés a financial expert in the Finance Ministry, Gyuri Szabó a biologist, Tamás Cholnoky an architect, and Gyuszi Lukács a physicist and librarian. We all took a moral position that rested on tolerance and democracy. There I heard for the first time the expression “people’s democracy”, which I don’t think people emphasized later on; I remember being struck by it being “people’s” and “democracy” as well. In any case, the Panel was organized quite democratically, with free debate and a constant flow of information from cultured people with knowledge of languages, who were clearly expecting a German defeat when the war broke out. They made contact (me included) with the Györffy collegians. Györffy College (1940­–48) was concerned mainly with helping young people from a peasant background gain university education and gave rise to the people’s college movement. István Györffy (1884–1939) was a social anthropologist and university professor, and a communist. I was just finishing my studies for a law degree when the war broke out. Elek Kecskés, Hám Tibor, Jóska Bognár and I would have long conversations as we walked along the banks of the Danube. Then I began to realize what contacts they had. They put out feelers and I put out feelers. We had direct contact above all with the Smallholders Party, through Bajcsy-Zsilinszky by way of Gyuri Szabó, but we were also in touch with Zoltán Tildy (1889–1961) a leader of the Smallholders Party, Prime Minister in 1945–1946, then president of the republic in 1946–1948. He joined the Imre Nagy government on October 28 – November 4, 1956, but was later arrested and imprisoned until 1959.  The resistance, and the Császár brothers, Lajos és József Császár, members of the Teve utca resistance group, captured by the Arrow-Cross and were executed. We had control of the Teve utca apprentice hostel. We were also responsible for defacing the statue of Gyula Gömbös (1886–1936), army officer, a far right politician, and Prime Minister in 1932–1936.

In the midst of the war, we arranged on Smallholders premises, beneath portraits of Churchill and Roosevelt, a Christmas Eve celebration for French prisoners of war and Polish refugees in Hungary, where Jeszcze Polska was sung, (Jeszcze Polska nie znigela “Poland is not lost” is the first line of the Polish national anthem.) We later produced pamphlets.

            The Pál Teleki Panel was still not in the Smallholders Party. When the latter was re-formed after the war as the Independent Smallholders’ and Farm Workers’ and Citizens’ Party, a branch was started in the capital, as well. Then the fully and consciously prepared stratum of the intelligentsia, 30–32-year olds, that carried out the intellectual tasks of the Pál Teleki Panel, joined the citizens’ section of the Smallholders Party. Their intellectual preparedness gave them huge weight and their integrity attracted the more intelligent peasant representatives to them, as well. These young people and some of the peasant representatives formed the centre of the Smallholders Party after 1944.

At the beginning of 1945, I became as a Pál Teleki Panel member private secretary to Béla Kovács (1908–1959) initially on the right of the Smallholders Party, he became general secretary and a minister, but was imprisoned from 1947 to April 1956. Though state minister and agriculture minister in the Imre Nagy government, he came out in favour of collectivizing agriculture and was given a seat in Parliament in 1958.

            I was exempt from military service as a university student until the very end of the war, but then under the Szálasi regime, the quisling regime of the Arrow-Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi (1897–1946) came to power in a coup on October 15, 1944. I had to join the 25th Reserve Mountain Infantry Battalion. I seconded myself a week later, expecting troops under Miklós Béla Dálnoki (1890–1948), commander of the First Army, who went over to the Soviets with his staff after the Arrow-Cross coup of April 15–16, 1944 and became prime minister of the Provisional National Government (December 22, 1944 to November 15, 1945) to arrive from Kassa (Kosice) and I’d learnt from Jóska Bognár how to stamp people’s travel warrants using a two-pengő coin and soot scraped off railway wheels. So I sent myself hither and thither, and when I had no more money or food, I had to report for duty, but next day we started back with 250 carts and the oxcarts of the 25th Reserve Mountain Infantry Battalion, back as far as Diósjenő in the pouring winter rain, without a single officer, with invalids and acting officers newly recruited into the battalion.

However tragic, it’s one for the comic papers that I was the last ox-driving infantry man in Hungary, and after we’d delivered the consignment of lousy, ragged trousers, brand-new ski equipment, and warm winter clothing back to Diósjenő, not issuing any of it to us, of course, they burnt the whole lot. I was sent with three or four others over to Várpalota. I got hold of some scabies ointment, as I’d managed to catch scabies after 24 hours with the military, and when it became clear that they would send the Várpalota company to Germany, I absconded.

            Earlier, when we were incinerating the battalion office of the 25th Mountain Infantry, we had the sense to obtain warrants and furlough papers for ourselves, stamped and signed, with all the other stamps as well. So I came up to Budapest at the beginning of December. There I went to the Országút Franciscans—the Franciscan house in Margit körút—which was one of the centres of resistance taking with me a hand grenade, 200 live cartridges and a rifle. The Franciscans locked me into the offices of Egység Útja, “Road to Unity”, a newspaper, knocking on the door twice a day with something to eat. I read theology for three days and waited until my friend Miska Szűr turned up and said the Mihály Táncsics Battalion had been formed. The Mihály Táncsics Battalion was formed out of the university Auxiliary Guard set up in 1944 as a semi-military organization to rescue victims of persecution and resistance fighters, and take part in armed resistance at the Collegium Medicum in Köztelek utca, and took me there.

            The Táncsics Battalion had two companies, one of economists and the other of medics. The latter was joined by Eötvös collegians, Werbőczy people and others. When I arrived with military experience, I was appointed head of service as a non-commissioned sergeant.

            It was a good unit. It resisted and saved people, like all such units at the time. We saved some Jews on the run, some Székely (Szekler) university students stranded in Hungary, some army deserters, and some students who didn’t want to be “evacuated”. We trained, collected weapons, brought Jews out of the ghetto wearing Arrow-Cross armbands, fabricated IDs, and organized people. I had a sixteen-year-old stealing me a pistol out of a German holster on the tram. We got Hungarian uniforms from the Budaörsi út barracks. Our commander, the medical doctor Jóska Monostori, János Monostori (Machinák) had given battle training to the Karancslejtős Miners’ resistance force. He was executed by the gendarmerie on December 3, 1944. wore an Arrow-Cross armband. Miska Szűr, a boy of Polish/Hungarian extraction, commanded the commando unit at the Collegium Medicum. We weren’t a very soldierly unit, but good company, ranging from Guszti Heckenast through Dezső Tóth (1925–1985), a literary historian who took part in the armed resistance. He became a senior communist official in 1964 and served as deputy minister of culture from 1977 until his death. (Now a deputy minister, to Tibor Klaniczay, i. e. the Eötvös collegians.) Other members were Géza Körtvélyes, Béla Pukánszky, and the painter András Csanády. János Kass, Béla Pukánszky and I managed to clean out the Arrow-Cross premises at Rákoshegy, taking away every last revolver, decorated like Christmas trees, with 15–20 rifles hanging off us; I had a machine gun. But I was shot in the leg when we were attacked the same evening by camp gendarmerie at Rákoshegy, where we were in touch with the local communist cell.

            That evening they somehow got me across Elizabeth Bridge, at the last possible moment—it was full of holes by then. I went to Bors utca. My mother knew I was in Budapest as I’d met her on Christmas Eve, but my father didn’t. He thought I was safely in Germany. But it turned out I was here after all with a shot-up leg. I spent the whole last two weeks of the siege at No. 3 Bors utca in the cellars. Bors utca had been shot to pieces by then. The Eastern Front ran along Városmajor utca. Father András Kun, a former Minorite monk, committed mass murder in 1944 and was executed as a war criminal. He and his band had been rampaging in the corner house next to us, for instance throwing a lieutenant general out of the third floor as an army deserter. I had a revolver with two cartridges, one intended for Father Kun and the other for myself—they weren’t going to get off lightly—but that never happened in the end.

            So the war ended for me early in February 1945, and I was back in contact with the Pál Teleki Panel immediately. The Panel merged into the Smallholders Party and I was assigned to work with Béla Kovács. I was in the second rank of politics. First they wanted me as a member of Parliament. My naivety showed when I said I wasn’t qualified—that you needed to know more for that. Still, it probably saved my life. So I headed Béla Kovács’s secretariat. He was secretary general of the Smallholders Party at the time and deputy agriculture minister under Imre Nagy, and owed his prestige to long service in peasant associations and to scrupulous honesty. He was deputy agriculture minister to Ferenc Donáth, (1913–1986), a communist official, but arrested in 1951. Prominent in the Imre Nagy team in 1956, he was interned with him at Snagov and sentenced to twelve years in the 1958 trial. He served two years before being amnestied. (But a spectre in our eyes for his conduct of the land reform.) (I could not know then that we’d later become good friends in prison.) My work had mainly to do with day-to-day party matters.

            Béla Kovács was the most dynamic and plebeian member of the Smallholder leadership, but not the most ambitious by any means. Tildy, for instance, was a vain and ambitious man, ruled by his wife. There was a basically vain man behind the indecisive Feri Nagy as well, impelling him to act out of character. Béla didn’t wanted to be any different, but he was full of suspicions. He was a raw, thoroughgoing peasant, with explosive force and a liking for plebeian solutions. He was always uncertain of himself in front of me or anyone else in city trousers rather than in peasant breeches.

Reformed Church gentry of the Hungarian Community or of the Jewish liberal gentry in the Smallholders Party were all trousered men in Béla’s eyes, so he surrounded himself with an intellectually weak but rapacious group of people, mainly from Baranya County. The ones in the party he could stand best were the centre, those of his own intellectual background, most of them from the Pál Teleki Panel and peasants attracted to it. Béla jealously kept everything in his own hands, not trusting the people who worked in the Smallholders Party. They were indeed a very mixed bunch, ranging from crypto-communists with party cards hidden in their pockets to kalotos, Members of the National Organization of Catholic Agricultural Youth Units, and the right-wing Hungarian Community, who were anti-German, but held racist ideas.

            Kovács loathed Hungarian Community people. Bálint Arany, its actual intellectual leader, headed the Smallholders personnel department, keeping party staff and cadre policy under his own control. I was delegated from several directions to be a screening committee member. Looking back now, I’d say if there’s one thing not to do, it’s to join a screening committee. I worked away at it until it came to the case of the managing director of the Electricity Works, whom I didn’t know was a member of the Hungarian Community, though I knew he was very congenial. But the whole screening committee bayed for his blood, so there was no hope of me, alone, shielding him from social democrats, peasants’ party people and communists. There was nothing firm you could bring up against him. I expressed my minority opinion, but I had to sign the paper. I was thrown off within 24 hours, as Bálint Arany wouldn’t stand for me failing to defend a Hungarian Community member. Another side of the meetings was that I kept finding myself up against an almost hysterical Jewish opposition. They would huddle into a corner to stop me hearing and take jobs away from people who’d saved lives, because there were 24 colour pencils missing somewhere. It was dreadfully hard, as if I had my back to the wall, with hatred and rage, prejudiced rage, in the air. So, I was very glad to be done with it.

            I’d heard of the Hungarian Community before. I had a friend or two with reservations about it. My impression was that it had grown out of an alliance of secret societies in the Horthy period. I’d describe it as the racial protection society of the Reformed Transylvanian gentry, responding to German expansionism and German racism with Hungarian racism. It was strongly anti-German, but I took the view from the outset that it was quite mad to try to defend the Hungarian community by excluding a sizeable chunk of it. Who would remain? They could exclude the kun and the jász as well. (Nomadic tribes Cumanians, Jazygians who settled in the Carpathian Basin in the Middle Ages.) There were many respectable people among them, and although they never told me to join, they kept after me. They probably sensed my resistance, as every time I came up against the Hungarian Community as an organization, in any kind of struggle for position, they always walked right over me. I’m firmly convinced that the Hungarian Community still exists and its surviving members still meet. The Hungarian Friendly Society in America is obviously a more open and liberal version of the Hungarian Community, projected onto American conditions. But it had obviously penetrated through the Smallholders Party, as Kálmán Saláta was a member (1917–1958).

Saláta was a lawyer, member of the armed resistance, and then a Smallholders parliamentarian. He was arrested for conspiracy in autumn 1946, and expelled from the party before fleeing to the West.

            Anyway, Béla Kovács saw red if he heard the name Hungarian Community, and he died in the belief that he had been its victim. He felt that they’d betrayed him in the end, not defended him, that Ferenc Nagy’s hesitation led to Kovács’s arrest, and there may have been some truth in that. He had a big quarrel with Feri as well. He saw in him a representative of the Hungarian Community.

            I remained as Béla Kovács’s secretary until they took him away. Right through, in fact. I have to say that I didn’t enjoy the work; a boss/secretary relationship is like a father/son relationship, which I couldn’t stand. After Béla’s arrest, I became parliamentary secretary to the Smallholders group in Parliament. Meanwhile I also became chairman of the Greater Budapest organization of Independent Youth, the youth wing of the Smallholders Party in 1945–8, and, editor of its paper.

            The conflicts over the land reform and the illegalities came down hard on the Smallholders Party. Today I see what I couldn’t see at the time: the Smallholders Party wanted a regulated, restrained land reform. What I mean by restrained is not the kind of anarchic, uncontainable land reform that was the only possible kind at that time for attaining the purpose, for the Independent Smallholders was the party of the middle peasants, the ones who farmed well, mainly Transdanubian peasants, not the party of the agricultural proletariat. Its members of Parliament were large-scale farmers with golden cornfields or silver cornfields at least. Békés County, where the agricultural labourers had their say, was the land of anarchic trespassing as well. We were inundated with reports from people who’d had a hundred hold (1 cadastral hold = 0.57 hectares) taken from them, even though they’d been in the resistance, in some cases people who’d had some of their ten or twelve hold taken from them to provide land for all. The complaints flooded in about abuses by the police and people being hit over the head. They arrived initially with Béla, of course, but I saw these with my own eyes as well. Though Béla was a plebeian and a sincere believer in land reform, he was the one who had the public’s indignation raining down on him, over acts against both the letter and the spirit of the law. None of us condoned how the People’s College students had arbitrarily driven social democrats out of the college or used mob tactics to rid it of such sons of peasant families.

            I’ll risk saying that the country was a blank sheet of paper at that time. You could say what you liked to the ones who’d stayed behind instead of joining the flight of the gentry. I don’t say there weren’t some like that among my acquaintance, joining any but the communist party in their confusion just to save themselves. Nor would I say they didn’t  try to get themselves jobs in an opportunistic way, but still, this was a milieu that could be influenced in any direction. Some had experience in public administration and were conditioned to think that a regulation should be enforced. They made tens of thousands of opponents in a quite superfluous way. This put the Smallholders Party into a position of self-evident support for legality. But it argued itself into too much. It was a heterogeneous party of various interests and views that it couldn’t translate into a share of power, as the real source of power was the Soviet army. I can remember how the parties would regularly agree on something and draw up an inter-party agreement, only to have Voroshilov (Kliment Voroshilov, 1881–1969, a Soviet military and political leader who chaired the Allied Control Commission in Hungary in 1945–7.) say that if this, that and the other didn’t happen, Hungary would have to clear its reparations backlog within eight days. So the Smallholders backed down time and again in a bid to avoid civil war and famine.

The Smallholders Party leaders believed to the end that the occupation of the country would cease—probably because there were so many lawyers in its leadership. The idea of legality was imbedded in them, so once the peace was concluded, the occupation army would withdraw, and if there were a democratic party about when that happened, it could take over power. They had regular talks with the Russians, and although I wasn’t there myself, I know they negotiated with Voroshilov and others.

The Smallholders Party gave a reception in Voroshilov’s honour and he swore by democratic development. Just one example of how this worked out in practice: Árpád Szabó was the parliamentary speaker when I was a parliamentary secretary. He was a junior-school teacher from Békés County, as bald as Rákosi, but thin, and a great hunter. Once he invited Tildy to go hunting with him in his village and Tildy persuaded him to invite Voroshilov as well. “Uncle Árpád,” I said to him, “bring me a hare if you manage to shoot one.” “Of course, son, I’ll bring one.” Two days later he comes into Parliament and I ask him if he’s brought a hare. “A hare, huh!” says he. It turned out that they’d gone hunting, shot hare, pheasant, the lot and laid them out in a row. Then the Russians had picked them all up and thrown them in their jeep and driven off. He called them everything under the sun. It’s quite incomprehensible in terms of hunting ethics for somebody who’s been invited somewhere to gather up the silver spoons and make off with them, just because he’s stronger. The incident gives a very accurate picture of conditions at that time.

            But I had hardly any influence in politics at that time. I was a servant, due to my age, which was 23.

            I mentioned before I was one of the leaders of Independent Youth, though the one to negotiate was normally Jenő, the younger brother of Tibor Hám. But as in the Smallholders Party, so in Independent Youth, the pressure was very strong.

There was Kristó Nagy, for instance, a Hungarian Community member, and after he fell, there was the communists’ nominee, who handed over his pass so people could get into the Great Council. I stood up to them, as I’d stood up to the Hungarian Community. And in the end, they deprived me of my presidency.

            Bognár’s case was typical of the fragmentation in the Smallholders Party. He’d headed the Budapest organization of the Pál Teleki Panel, to which (Ervin Gáspár, 1912–1977, a Smallholders member of Parliament and editor of the periodical Fórum in 1946–50.) and Gyula Ortutay, (1910–1978) belonged. (Ortutay first a Smallholders Party politician, later a pro-communist, then minister of culture in 1946–50. He then went into academic life as a social anthropologist.)

 When it became known that Saláta, Jaczkó and Tibor Hám had been arrested, Rákosi had his people phone Bognár, and give him a choice: custody or service to the cause. Jóska Bognár chose the latter. I remember him coming towards me as I went into Parliament and I wanted to ask his advice about something as an old friend, but as soon as he saw me, he turned and scuttled away to avoid speaking to me. Still, I wouldn’t say the part Jóska Bognár played in politics was entirely negative. He and Ferenc Erdei, (1910–1971) writer of sociography and member of the National Peasants Party, contacted the communists in 1944, and held government office from 1948 to 1956. He then withdrew into academic life. The two of them were after all the cleverest ones in that administration, and Bognár eventually attained a position where he could say more of the truth than anyone else. I consider Ortutay far more disreputable because he was always an informer, a plant. I don’t feel any angry with Bognár, although I had expected more of him at one time.

            Erdei lied in my face. When I was working in agriculture and he became minister, everyone told him what any second-year agronomy student would: the way to grow more wheat was not to sow a greater area but to sow it and till it better. Erdei heard everybody out, from university professors down to practising farmers, and then announced that we were all agreed on continuing the grain campaign, i. e. we’d sow another 20,000 cadastral hold with wheat that year. I just looked at him, wondering how a man who had risked his neck in the past could have come a point where he denied the simplest professional truth. So these people operated below their moral standards and below their intellectual standards, because they’d been covered in shit as well.

            To draw a portrait of Béla Kovács let me begin with the circumstances in which I met him and how I came to work alongside him. When I went back to my original job at the Land Credit Institute in 1945, I had a proven record in the resistance movement, even a scar on my thigh. So there was no disputing or doubting where I stood and I suddenly gained a lot of repute at the bank. Instead of someone quite unknown I suddenly became someone important to others. Still, I was taken aback to be offered through the Pál Teleki Panel the job of personal secretary to Béla Kovács at Smallholders Party headquarters. I had no idea what it would entail. I was about ten years younger than the Pál Teleki Panel members working with the Smallholders parliamentary group, and my task would be to work beside Béla as one who had served in the armed resistance, and to represent the interests of the Panel group through daily contact. It was important to know what was going on around Béla and who was gaining access to him—the latter almost impossible to say, as he was besieged by thousands. I didn’t fully grasp this at the time or realize this kind of secretaryship wouldn’t be my cup of tea. A secretary, after all, is a personal assistant, there to change and feed his boss, push him out the door and make him go where I wanted. Nor did I like him being my “master”. I have thoroughly disenchanting memories of the time when nominations were being made for high sheriff. (High sheriff in Hungarian főispán is a chief officer of the state in a county or city.)

            So the period I spent alongside Béla Kovács was one of the most unpleasant in my life. We never developed really close relations. I saw he was distrustful on the one hand and talented and bold on the other. In my view, he was the one on the peasant side of the Smallholders who was the most intransigent in representing the party’s policy, but also the most radical and the best negotiator. He was the closest to the left in his ideas and his populism. He showed personal courage in standing up to Rákosi and Co. and he was the toughest negotiating partners, stubbornly defending his position and having absolute authority within the party. They say that once, when half-drunk he asked Rákosi at a meeting, “Hey, Mátyás, haven’t you got a neck? How shall we hang you?”

 He certainly stood out from the bourgeois environment around him. For the Smallholders was a strange amalgam. It had peasant representatives, most of them promoting local interests, but there was also a well-known Catholic priest and a group of Catholic intellectuals, and the Pál Teleki Panel as well. Then there was a layer of Jewish petty bourgeoisie, some provincial traders and artisans, and representatives of the Hungarian Community.

 For my part, I think the Hungarian Community was very harmful for representing in practical politics an ideology of the exclusiveness of the Hungarian community, which had existed in the Horthy period and survived after ’45 in secret societies.

 Béla Kovács had a deep aversion to the Ortutay group, who were generally known to be communists with party cards in their inside pockets. Ortutay reported back after every meeting of the parliamentary group, or even during it, and everyone knew that. Béla told me to keep those two groups away from him, which didn’t make me very popular. Béla was in the office by six in the morning and handled all the money matters himself. He didn’t delegate anything or any powers at all. If he had to negotiate with foreigners, he became very nervous, probably because he didn’t feel he was on firm ground for want of language knowledge. The man was huge, very determined, very hard, a rapid decision-maker, and blessed with the qualities of a very good statesman. Béla Kovács’s political demise didn’t come from one day to the next, but it was violent. He was in the line of fire, as the most radical and most plebeian figure in the Smallholders Party.

            I left my job in Parliament in 1948.

            I became a parliamentary secretary after Béla Kovács was taken off. I feel with hindsight that I could have made a lot more of such a parliamentary function than I did at the time. I didn’t get involved in political decision-making. I was present at meetings of the Smallholders parliamentary group, but I have no recollection of playing any kind of creative role. Looking back on my political past today, I have to say I was an anti-politician, seeing things very much from outside. I was inclined not to see the trees for the wood, whereas a good politician usually fails to see the wood for the trees, because the trees are the everyday tasks. It was probably a redemption for me to be free from day-to-day politics.

            I identified in spirit and practice with the Pál Teleki Panel, i. e. with the centre. For one thing, this was the only group to have perfected its ideas of a democratic system of institutions, to have a tangible history of resistance and hold specific notions of democratic transformation and its methods, consequences, popular basis, and systems of law and education. My closest ties in those days were with Györffy collegians, for instance Tóni Gyenes, but he went cool on me when he got into Parliament. If there was any human disillusionment for me in politics, it was this: to see that somebody could turn into an enemy overnight even if I’d done nothing to promote it.

            Not long after Béla Kovács was arrested, I was as well, and taken to the political department of the Defence Ministry, to be told there was a Romanian extradition request out for me. I was kept in for about three weeks, for a time in the same cell as Dénes Dorogsági, Béla Kovács’s secretary at the ministry. We were interrogated day and night. We weren’t beaten. At least, I wasn’t. But I’d be questioned for eight hours by successive investigating officers, standing in front of a lamp, and the same again all day. I was on my feet, if I remember right, for 36 hours non-stop. If I fell over I’d be stood up again with the rifle butt. It was a bitter place, a bitter, merciless place. We were guarded by soldiers with sub-machine guns. Every morning they’d push you out naked to wash under a cold shower. Then they’d hand in a litre of coffee, but not let you urinate till midday, and if you tried to cover the traces, you could eat your soup from the same bowl as you’d peed in during the day, as there was nothing else you could do.

            One investigator, I remember, was a sergeant named Szerényi, my chief investigator, although there were several. The political boss during the interrogations was György Kardos (1918–1985).The commanding officer was called György Pálffy and his deputy was a General Lajos Földi (1909–1987), staff captain, later major general.  As far as I know, Földi was the one who ended my torture, and I was freed a couple of days later. (György Földi had joined the communist party and the Defence Ministry in February 1945. He was arrested on Pálffy’s orders in 1948 but not tried until 1952. He received a death sentence, but was freed in September 1953, and rehabilitated in 1964.)

            But the pressure continued even after they let me go. I tried to leave the country, but they caught me at the border. They took me to Szombathely and then to No. 60 Andrássy út in Budapest, to the State Security Authority, where I was kept for three or four days.     In the end, they let me go. I got away but I was out of a job.

 I was married by then. I’d met Zsuzsa while I was still at gymnasium. I suppose she was 13 and I was 15 when we first met at a dancing class. We went skating as a group, we went to parties as a group. Young people in those days didn’t go in pairs, they went in a pack. We got married in 1946 and moved into a flat we were given by my godfather. I’ve lived in the same house ever since, just two flats away.

            By the time I was out of a job, we already had our first child. Then came quite a difficult stage in my life, as I couldn’t find a regular job for about a year and a half. I wrote the life story of Asbóth the tennis champion for the Pesti Hírlap. I learnt to drive with a view to being a taxi driver. I tried a great many things, but none of them really went, and we were mighty poor, so poor that when we went to my mother’s for lunch, we’d toss a 20-fillér coin to see who’d go on the tram and who’d walk, because we didn’t have the money for two tickets. Just when I was at my wit’s end, I met an old acquaintance from the Scouts and the resistance movement, Kálmán Lammel (1924–1985) an agricultural engineer and nature conservationist, who invited me to join his father’s heating engineering business as a labourer.

            I really enjoyed that stage in my life. I had an immediate boss, a 19-year-old lad from Transylvania, an apprentice, and I was a labourer. There I learnt how to weld. When they nationalized the Lammel firm, I became an ironworker in Lágymányos. I was taken on first at the April 4 Engineering Factory as a pipe welder in Budafoki út. Then they sent me to the building site of the Mátravidék Power Station. That was one of the bitterest experiences in my life. The labourers would clean the skilled men’s bicycles and motor cycles and carry their tools for them. I’d never seen such a sharp distinction before. I’d just installed pipes for flat heating systems before. Here you had to bend pipes 40 or 50 cm in diameter, to an accuracy of a millimetre and work to an incredible degree of precision.

            I stood in the three-storey shop and saw how they worked and what to do, and I knew I couldn’t do it. I was a class alien, I was dumb, I was different in every way. We worked twelve hours a day. The Mátravidék Power Station was a realm of worker aristocrats, full of privileged men and I felt quite strange among them.

            I then got a job at the Chemical Engineering Factory through Sándor Fillipek, the economist father of an old friend, Tamás Fügedi, assistant at the Economics Research Institute back in Varga’s time. The factory had originally made equipment for sugar refineries and distilleries and had excellent coppersmiths. It was a small shop of about 400 workers, with a very old and decrepit, windswept assembly hall and primitive plant, but excellent, confident old skilled workers.

            I lived in Óbuda, at No. 88 Bécsi út. I’d get up at half past four to reach the factory by seven, at No. 1 Noszlopy utca. It was a real proletarian factory making cooling equipment. My first task was out in the yard, to cut five or six-metre strips off a sheet one-and-a-half cm thick. I got the worst welding pistol, that was the tuition fee. They asked me about my schooling. I said I had a law degree, they had a good laugh at that. It was the best community I’d met in my life. I was accepted in minutes. There wasn’t a word of argument among us.

             I wasn’t 30 yet, but I’d been a lawyer, bank official, journalist, resistance member, party functionary and ironworker. I was often asked later why an agronomist had needed to be a welder, why welding called for a law degree. These questions were often coming up. I was a loner throughout my life—I went everywhere without the grounding, but always by outside compulsion. My inner compulsion was to do well whatever I happened to be doing. You have to hold your own; nobody likes falling behind and being pitied. I still had the physique for it. On the other hand, I managed to sleep through five hours of Wagner when we had a subscription to the Opera.

            During that time, my wife was completing a three-year social worker’s course at the University of Economics. For a short time after the war, she’d worked at Ilus Földi’s Settlement. Her work meant comprehensive social care aimed at integrating an individual into the social environment, gaining acceptance for his or her past and future as a member of a community, and handling the social questions within society and the local community. But when social deprivation was abolished here by decree, she’d been moved to a desk job in the tax section of the 12th District Council.

            I was sought by my mechanical and agricultural engineer friend Kálmán Lammel at the Soil Improvement Enterprise. There he was assistant to Imre Rázsó and Professor Ernő Kund, apostles of soil-erosion defences. They’d set up a terracing team at the enterprise. Terracing meant digging trenches on a hill that followed the contours. This catches the precipitation as it falls and drains it off without damage. I was taken on as a leveller. I learnt how to level and survey on a three-week course. That was in 1950, when the Korean War broke out and we heard news of it there. I was only a team leader for a very short time. We worked devotedly and enthusiastically until it turned out that this method was highly unsuitable for Hungarian rainfall conditions. It later developed a lot and it now forms an integral part of soil protection, and I’m very proud to have become a proper expert in the subject. I wrote quite a few articles and one of them was included in a university textbook, a specialist book written by my daughter Panni.

I first learnt the trade and then set about getting an agriculture degree in the meantime. So I learnt XYZ before I’d learnt my ABC.

 My daily life was very hard, out in the field from Monday to Friday till the Soil Improvement Enterprise wound up the section and I was moved to Agroterv, Agricultural Engineering Design Enterprise. There I became head of the soil protection section, where we drew up the plans. I’m very proud of this: I devised a methodology of soil-protection design in Hungary that was in use for a long time. What I struggled to work out on my own is almost the same method as the one used by the Americans, who were leaders in the field. But Hungary had Soviet advisers, who didn’t think it fitted in with a socialist sense of beauty to plant fruit trees along contour lines, even if it meant that they trapped the water. Anyway, these field visits meant a lot to me, as I learnt about Hungary’s hill districts down to a depth of 1.20 metres. Even today, if I go somewhere I’ve worked in the past, I want to turn up every side road, because I know we planned the plantations at Agroterv. I know we planted the avenue or belt of trees around us. Almost every homestead and farm in Transdanubia brings back my youth to me. So the provinces are a quite personal matter to me.

            I was in constant touch with state farms and cooperatives. I had inside knowledge of the mood in the villages in the 1950s. We’d arrive somewhere by car and they’d shut the windows. You saw curtains twitch as they watched. At first we worked on state farms, later on cooperatives too. During the land redistribution, the whole country seemed to have turned into a poppy field. Nobody spread fertilizer, nobody homogenized soils. They stuck a vast herd of beasts on the state farms, saying fodder would be sent out centrally after it had been squeezed out of the peasants, who had nothing to hand in, and so famished calves would try to crop the remaining grass under the snow. There was astonishing formalism in the way they tried to resolve things in terms of reporting techniques, not actually sort them out. They’d issue five orders a day during harvest, with everybody chipping in on how the combines should work. If a bearing wore out, it was political or a case of sabotage.

I worked among some outstanding professionals at Agroterv, all trained agronomists who’d been bailiffs on state farms or big estates at some time and felt personally committed to the land and farm production. The team at Agroterv worked very well, professionally and morally. It had been put together by Pali Isinger, who selected the best, everyone from foresters to agricultural engineers, based on his decades of experience. He’d begun to train a new team of agronomists, but their case was clear from the adage that agronomists went faster than sowing: they never stayed put more than a year to a year and a half. Each had a bed and a trunk. The trunk was kept under the bed without unpacking it, so its owner could move on as soon as he was sacked, or if taken into custody, he’d have his breeches with him. Agronomists were scapegoats for everything, always intimidated. Agroterv’s main line in those days was “rapid activity proportioning”: going out to look at land and see what could be grown on it ideally, what was the optimum manpower, and what was the livestock capacity. Then activity boundaries were marked on a map, with proportions between them, and a plan for rotating the stock. That provided the basis for our settlement planning department to draw up farm plans. Those doing the research brought twenty or thirty years’ experience. They were morally and professionally intact, loyal, honest and hardworking, prone to sharp professional debates among themselves, but with a capacity to keep these out of their private lives that I’ve never met anywhere but Agroterv. Most of them were later transferred to the Agricultural Research Institute.

            Meanwhile I’d done an agricultural university correspondence course at Gödöllő in the crop cultivation department. I finished four courses by ’56, then somehow they forgot to expel me. When I came out of prison, I went out to Gödöllő with my index (mark book). The woman looked at my record and said, “Why, you got top marks in everything, why didn’t you finish?” “Oh, one reason or another.” Thereupon the woman went pale and rushed over to a fat-arsed female, who took the record book from my hand and said, “Right, you can’t change the world and study at the same time.” Ten minutes later it had a stamp in it banning me from all universities in the country.

            I was in Felsőgöd at my mother-in-law’s for Imre Nagy’s speech in 1953. Imre Nagy, appointed prime minister on Soviet insistence as part of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign, outlined his programme of reform in Parliament on July 4, 1953. We listened and then Zsuzsa and I looked at each other and agreed that some kind of new world was upon us, as someone had spoken in Hungarian and told the truth for the first time in several years. It was impossible not to see the importance of the thing. It was then I learnt that Jóska Varga was in Recsk. (József Varga (1923–1998), lawyer and head of the Smallholders’ Independent Youth movement, was arrested and interned under the communists in Recsk, the main labour camp for political prisoners in the early 1950s). 

 Meanwhile I got on with my agronomy work, under difficult conditions, as we’d been transferred not long before to ommi (National Agricultural Quality Control Institute) where there was already a soil protection design group. The pay there was lower, so we had to battle when we arrived against the director, with committee and union help. He was a decent enough man, but he didn’t want tensions over pay.

            Then suddenly in October 1956, people somehow started to take an interest in me. Not long before, I’d been down to see Béla Kovács, having been asked by Jóska Szentiványi, a lawyer of Transylvanian extraction who was married to a second or third cousin of mine, to see how Béla was and try to counteract the pressure that Dermis Kopsas, Bognár and others were putting on him.

 Szentiványi had worked inside the Smallholders and had great influence on the civilian wing of the party, and now he was trying to rebuild his political future. But I also met József Antall (1896–1974), originally minister of the interior, then finance minister, then party director, a highly respected and absolutely sincere man who’d worked on saving Poles. József Antall was a lawyer and Smallholder politician, father of József Antall, prime minister in 1990–93, used his official position in the Interior Ministry to assist Polish refugees after the German occupation of Poland in 1939.

            Many things about that period have become blurred for me, especially what happened on October 22, 1956. Somehow the great tension, excitement, anxiety and enthusiasm have all become mixed. I heard news on the 22nd from a hasty friend of the demonstration next day—he was almost beside himself as he stammered it to me—but I was in the midst of a pay battle with ommi and that was taking up all my attention, as it put the jobs of all my staff as well as myself at risk.

            So I didn’t take part in the day-to-day events, but I have lots of memories of the antecedents, of the Petőfi Circle, of my contribution to the agricultural debate against the “Garden Hungary” slogan. The Petőfi Circle held a debate at the University of Economics on October 17, 1956, on an article by Gábor Pap entitled “Garden Hungary”, led by the agricultural economist Ferenc Fekete, a member of the Circle’s executive, and of the tense mood and atmosphere of the Kodály evening, and several memories of the Irodalmi Ujság. (The Irodalmi Ujság (Literary News), weekly paper of the Hungarian Writers’ Union, was prominent in airing ideas of reform in 1955–6.)

 So I was in with the events and following developments in Poland as well. I remember that as I went home, a newsboy crying out about the Polish events at the terminus of the 11 or 17 tram was surrounded by people almost snatching papers out of his hand. I woke up to rifle shots on the morning of the 24th. I woke Zsuzsa, saying there was shooting. She opened her eyes and asked me if I couldn’t have waited until she woke up of her own accord and why I had to wake her for that, which spoke well of her nerves, unlike mine.

            But I spent the 23rd as a civilian. All I saw of events at the Radio were tanks from Piliscsaba rumbling down Bécsi út, where we lived. János Solymosi—a thoroughgoing soldier, proud of how in every case he’d only obeyed orders, and a hearty supporter of the revolution until the Russians came in—Colonel Solymosi shook his fist at the people from his jeep and the people shouted at the soldiers. If I remember right, they went by with open turrets and barrels in the air. It must have been about ten or eleven o’clock. There were thousands of people on each side of the street, shouting, “Don’t shoot Hungarians, don’t shoot Hungarians!”

            We heard news of shooting at the Radio and people wounded, then that they were coming from the Lampart and had got hold of weapons. I was only active to a very small extent. I went round the city on a bike. I was at Parliament, in Kossuth tér, when Imre Nagy came out on the balcony and agreed to be prime minister. My nine-year-old daughter Kinga sat on my shoulders; we watched the newspapers burn like torches. I saw a whole lot. I saw the square after the bloodshed in front of Parliament—not the bodies, but the rubble.

            It was clear to me that one revolution had turned into another. It no longer depended on university students or generals, writers or professors, but on marginal elements, layabouts, industrial apprentices, who’d been bilked and insulted to the bone, and saw it all at first as splendid fun. But I must add that these lads, who had nothing much else to do with politics, managed to transform the fun by their honest inner energy; they were remarkably honest and they emerged more developed in a cultural sense.

            I also have shattered memories of how I came to be at the discussion on the 31st at Imre Nagy’s—Tibor Zimányi, Sándor Kiss and a few others. I was standing at the door of Parliament when Angyal arrived, István Angyal, roaring drunk, face black, saying he wanted to talk to Imre Nagy. I think he was also at the talks where Imre Nagy received us as representing the whole Hungarian opposition movement. The ones present that I remember were Pista Márkus, Jónás, Dudás, Bognár at Imre Nagy’s side, in fact almost every shade of the 1944 opposition. Dudás took the floor, insisting that Bognár and Erdei leave, we wouldn’t negotiate with them. Imre Nagy looked up and said, “Gentlemen, from this moment onwards we shall have to negotiate differently, because there is a danger of a third world war,” and he announced the news of the attack on Suez. I experienced that there, with Imre Nagy. The chill of history ran through me and I shuddered at it. Imre Nagy obviously gauged the precise world political implications immediately. He was incredibly genial and absolutely honest. We had full trust in him.

            I was in on another action at that time. I went down to invite Béla Kovács to come up to Budapest. We got a car from Tóni Gyenes at the Revolutionary Committee of Hungarian Intellectuals (now the premises of the Patriotic People’s Front), a black ministry car belonging to the notorious deputy minister for procurement, and to make it easier to get down to Pécs, I was given a ministry section chief to accompany me and an open order. The order said we were on a journey to do with organizing provisions for Budapest. We had no trouble in the black Pobeda with a ministry chauffeur getting through the ring of tanks round Pest. We were stopped on the edge of Érd, they took us before the revolutionary council in the Érd school, which looked exactly like a little winter palace. They received us by saying this was the fourth time they’d caught some Ávós, (Secret policemen working for the State Security Authority). They stood before us,and I’ll never forget their faces distorted with hatred. I don’t know how long this went on, but in the end I managed to talk to the chairman or secretary of the revolutionary council, an exhausted teacher, and tell him where we were going and why. He advised us to turn back, because the same scene might be repeated at the first village we passed through. He gave us an armed guard and we went back to the car amidst shouts from a bloodthirsty mob and returned home.

 Early next morning I went down for Béla Kovács in a little private plane. I tried to persuade him to come up to Pest. Just after me there arrived a lorry load of insurgents with Viktor Perr, the former Smallholders member of Parliament and a dear friend of Béla’s, who managed to persuade him. They gave me a seat in their lorry and I came up with the insurgents, arriving dog tired at the Smallholders building.

            About November 10 I ran into a journalist acquaintance, Pál Magyar, who said the Embassy of India was ready to intercede if the Hungarian democratic organizations would sign a request for this. An old friend, András Szesztay, brought me together with István Bibó (1911–1979), a philosopher, academician, and prominent post-war politician, state minister in Imre Nagy’s government.

We realized in seconds that we agreed on everything under the sun. He told me of the memoranda which had been sent to the British and American diplomatic missions. The whole business of arranging the Indian mediation fell to me. I got the signature of the workers’ council and I was among those who signed for the Peasants Association. József Antall probably signed for the Smallholders and András Révész for the Social Democrats. The original copy of the request is now held in New Delhi as a very, very important document.

            After our request, Kumara Padmanabha Sivasankava Menon, Indian ambassador in Moscow, was Prime Minister Nehru’s special envoy in Budapest on December 2–7, 1956. He passed proposals of the Hungarian Democratic Independence Movement to the Soviet government. Menon was an astute, well-informed international lawyer based in Moscow, but also accredited in Budapest. In Budapest there was a chargé d’affaires ad interim in 1956-1959 called Mohammad Ataur Rahman. He was the one who changed the Indian government’s attitude to the Hungarian Revolution. This was explained to the Indian legislature by Nehru, who spoke of an excellent young representative on the basis of whose reports the previous attitude had changed. I met perhaps two or three times with Menon, each time in company of Bibó. Menon stayed in the Margaret Island Grand Hotel.

 About that time, there were Indian aid consignments arriving in Budapest aboard Indian warplanes. We met Rahman regularly, almost every day. The Indian mission was receiving every paper and memo at that time. The young people and the active backbone of the revolution had no trust in the Americans or the British.  The American and British missions tried to get information out of the Indians.

            A plan for a possible settlement that would have satisfied 95 per cent of the Hungarian public had been drawn up by Bibó and Ferenc Farkas (1903–1966, economist, publisher and National Peasant Party member of Parliament in 1945–51.) and agreed with the Smallholders Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the Revolutionary Council of Intellectuals. This was to be handed to Menon for him to pass on to the Russians as a proposal, but no reply was received. We did hand it to Menon, but there was no reply. They didn’t refuse to receive it, but they didn’t respond either. This agreement reflected the consensus opinion in Hungary on the Russians, and to put it bluntly, awarded them a fixed status in Hungary. The content of the document posed no danger to the Soviet Union or to any Hungarian administration. What made it dangerous was the consensus itself. It was really a compromise agreement. And I can’t remember so great a consensus ever accompanying any other political idea in Hungary.

            Our other important act was to smuggle Imre Nagy’s manuscript out of the country. I was approached by Kardos about this, through Juci Sós. Juci’s place in Keleti Károly utca was a kind of intellectual centre or motor of the revolution, under constant observation. Kardos told me there was some material written by Imre Nagy that had to be sent abroad, and if Imre Nagy were tried, it would be possible to prove that he’d been a communist after all.

 I looked up my old friend László Regéczy-Nagy. It was at his place where I met Christopher Lee Cope, the first secretary at the British Legation. Laci Regéczy was Cope’s chauffeur at the British mission. Cope agreed to have the document sent out to London. By this time, we were being followed, but we still arranged the handover of the manuscript. It appeared as I requested as one of the Marxism Pamphlets, under the title The Infantile Disorder of Communism, It was also published in English in Imre Nagy on Communism: in defence of the new course. New York/London, 1957.

            Around the end of the year, my role was practically over. What followed was something like an earthworm cut in two. I went into work, but my situation had become impossible.

            The one who got me arrested was Miklós Szabó. He was living in Vienna or Strasbourg with Pali Jónás and Sándor Kiss. So he learnt from them about the manucript and that it was going to be published.

            When they interrogated me, I thought I was over the hard part; my interrogator told me with a devilish laugh that we were now going to talk about things I hadn’t mentioned so far. At that moment I felt the noose round my neck, as he warned me to be cautious as every gram counted. In the end, I was told they ought to hang me twice by the feet.

            I was arrested at the end of May 1957 at home. On the same day as Bibó. My little son was sitting next to me when they came and did a house search. They took me into Gyorskocsi utca Prison where they told me that the investigation documents stated that I was suspected of leading a conspiracy to overthrow the order of state of the People’s Republic. The investigation documents was signed by Béla Biszku (1921–2007), a partisan and communist party member in the closing stages of World War II. Biszku later became a Politburo and government member under the Kádár regime.

 My interrogator was Major Csiki. This Csiki was an incredibly loyal but primitive man. I also had doings with Bibó’s examining judge, Lieutenant István Könczöl.

            What was unbearable was that the executions took place in Gyorskocsi utca, in the prison courtyard below. Sometimes there’d be the engine of a lorry running all the time or they’d put two or three radio sets in the window. The gramophone or the radio would be blaring and it was always that song Pancsoló kislány (Little girl bathing). I recently mentioned to someone that the song still conveys to me the atmosphere of an execution. Yes, they used to hang people to that song.

            The investigation phase lasted 14 or 16 months, I can’t remember exactly. It was a long time. The trial must have been in July, after Imre Nagy’s. The eminent psychologist Ferenc Mérei (1909–1986) was sentenced on April 1, 1959 to ten years, Sándor Fekete to nine, György Litván to six, András B. Hegedűs to two years, and Jenő Széll to five; László Kardos was given life imprisonment on August 9, 1958, István Márkus ten years, Sándor Herpai eight, István Kemény four, and Péter Józsa five.

 Our case ran parallel with Kardos’s. In the end, Kardos got exactly the same sentence on the same charges as I did. And Bibó, too. Occasionally, during those 14–16 months I was allowed to receive letters from my wife, but no numbers or names could appear in them. The letter would be sent back if there were too many names in it. It was no use Zsuzsa explaining that there were four children to start with. Once she cleverly brought in four books—War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and Joseph and The Magic Mountain—which meant twelve volumes in all. My interrogator almost had a fit.

I was given lumps of sugar regularly because he said he didn’t like to work with tired people. Once Zsuzsa smuggled in three oranges, and another time a letter written in dark blue ink on a dark blue scarf. She asked for permission to bring me language books with example sentences, in which she’d underlined the sentences that made up her letter. I was very proud of my wife for being so ingenious. We had a very strong spiritual link between us. There were no visits allowed until the second month after the sentence. For16-and-a-half months.

 The trial lasted six days. The People’s Tribunal of the Supreme Court reached its verdict on August 2, 1958. István Bibó and Árpád Göncz received life sentences, László Regéczy-Nagy 15 years.

The main witness against me in the trial was Miklós Szabó. The charge was “treason tantamount to conspiracy with a foreign power to overthrow the state system of the Hungarian People’s Republic”, which may have resulted in a death sentence. Knowing that a guilty verdict in this case meant that the sentence would be carried out within two hours imposed unimaginable stress. What I remember is the atmosphere of it all, and the conduct of the two defence lawyers and of István Bibó and Laci Regéczy. I can say ours was an absolutely clean trial—nobody mistreated anybody.

            When the psychiatric examination was carried out before the trial, I realized that they were preparing me for a possible death sentence. I told the psychiatrist that I was ready to state that I was in sound mind—there was no sense in doing the examination.

 When we went back, the jailer said it didn’t hurt when they hang somebody; it was no worse than having a tooth out.

I had trusted my lawyer Ákos Major. Major (1908–1987) took part in the resistance in the summer of 1944 and then chaired the National Council of People’s Tribunals in 1946–8. He was removed from his post as a judge in 1953.  We had an unpleasant encounter at our first ‘consultation’. Major kept repeating all the time that we’d end up on the garbage heap of history. I was dumbfounded after a quarter of an hour, and said we should leave that up to history. “Szálasi said the same,” Major retorted. I then asked the silliest question of my life, if he had defended Szálasi as well? He went red and replied, “I sentenced him to death.” He began our second meeting in the same tone, but I then said to him, “Listen, Doctor, lower your sword, we’ll have time to fence afterwards. Now we’re going to be allies for a couple of months, whether you like it or not.” His one method of defence at the trial, whatever was said, was to stand up and say István Bibó was responsible for that. This prompted me to stand up and say this was my case and I was answerable for it. Laci Regéczy’s lawyer did the same, saying Árpád Göncz was answerable for everything, whereupon Laci Regéczy would stand up and say it was his case.

Only Bibó’s lawyer, Ottó Holló, behaved as a counsel should. In effect I did have a defence counsel in the shape of the prosecutor János Kovács. Curiously, there arose some kind of sympathy between us. He’d put the questions in a way that I could defend myself, or he informed me that I didn’t have to answer that because I wasn’t obliged to incriminate myself.

Heading the panel of judges was an obscene character called János Borbély, the most obscene creature you can imagine. He was a malignant man, who’d rub his hands while he pronounced death sentences, saying with a smile, “Stand up, I sentence you to death.” When the prosecutor didn’t request death sentences for us, he jumped up and said “Now look here!” whereupon the prosecutor said, “I’ve stated, if you please, that I’m asking for the second most serious sentence. The judge had obviously not been informed of that afternoon’s decision.

I ran into him on the bus recently. I began to stare at him. He began to look for a seat, then he jumped up, and went to the rear platform of the bus and turned his back.

            Actually, the personal memories I have of the trial are pleasant ones. There was Juci Sós’s enchanting behaviour as a witness, coming towards me with open arms. She took it all on herself, with such incredible enthusiasm that it was clear not a word of it was true. Then there was the incredibly brave and firm behaviour of the writer Sándor Derzsi. András Szesztay was scared, but he testified honestly.  Markos’s testimony was strange—he made a written statement from which it emerged that I’d practically made the revolution and done everything bad single-handed. When he then appeared before the court, tanned and in a snow-white short-sleeved shirt, and they asked him if he stood by his statement, he smiled sweetly and said no, so that the whole thing collapsed in moments. I didn’t like Béla Kovács’s testimony either; it didn’t do me any harm, but the tone of the whole thing was extremely irritable. The younger Antall, son of the Smallholders’ József Antall, was to have been an important witness, but he called in sick, so he wasn’t there.

                        Very many people were questioned about me during the trial and there were a few confrontations. It was interesting to see who told my wife of the verdict of the trial. When Zsuzsa first came with my mother to visit me in the transit prison, Törőcsik, a jailor, took my arm and said, “Göncz, you’re in for life, aren’t you?” I said yes in front of them. That’s how my wife learnt of it.

            Bibó’s final statement was an elevated, clear, moral speech, a real defence speech that assumed that his adversaries could be convinced or were well-intentioned. I only said three or four sentences.

            On December 19, 1958, I was taken from Gyorskocsi utca to the Small Prison, where I was locked up with János Virág. He was a strange bird, who called himself a psychologist but practised psychology on the level of a department store Santa, with only a trade certificate to his name. Basically he was a warm-hearted, good-tempered man who was scared stiff and did everything he could to get released. Some close relation of his, a brother I think, had been executed, his brother-in-law Péter Mansfeld was executed on March 21, 1959 aged 18. He is often said to have been the youngest victim of the post-revolutionary reprisals. I remained with Virág in the same cell throughout my stay in the Small Prison. From there we were taken together to the “House of Lords”, the Vác Prison.

            I’d claimed to know English, which was a good move, as I managed to learn it inside. One of the sorrier ventures in my life was to begin with three or four books on graphology. There must have been some kind of graphological campaign at the Interior Ministry at the time, where methods of identifying handwriting were taught.

            Another thing was that ever since I’d been sentenced, not a minute went by without somebody reporting on me, but that didn’t disturb me much as I’d never had anything to hide. A cultured informer was more pleasant to have around than an uncultured man who didn’t like to wash. In any case, nobody becomes an informer of his own free will; there’s usually a rope round his neck, or he wants to get out as soon as possible. So I didn’t feel moral indignation or anger against the informers.

 It was fantastic how I managed to live in the Little Prison until it was closed in May 1959. We had to collect our clothes overnight. We had no idea where they were taking us. There was total uncertainty and anxiety.

            They took us to Vác, where we landed in the “House of Lords”. The journey was memorable too as the transport was full of people I’d known from way back. Once Rudi Földvári spoke up: “As I look around here I feel like Napoleon before the sphinx.” “Why?” we asked. “Because there are centuries looking down on us,” he replied. There wasn’t any among us with less than a life sentence. So the laugh went up, and that’s how we arrived. Once we got there, they immediately took away the books, allowing only Sanyi Haraszti to keep his German books on the grounds that they were written in East German.

            I went from the House of Lords to the chemical works. This counted as a trusted position. We did routine analyses on colours and dyes. We always had to do the same tests, primitive analytical chemistry on the level of a semi-skilled worker. I could say it was industrial spying or intelligence, the kind of mass work that couldn’t have been done openly elsewhere. I then worked in the coat gluing shop for a short while, which wasn’t too pleasant as we had to make sure the raincoats made couldn’t be stolen by the guards. For a while I worked as a paver on the flood defences by the Danube in Vác; then I loaded bricks and coal in the same place.

I was transferred to the translation bureau from the chemical works, and there I was in a pleasant cell with young people: Józsi Papp, Imi Mécs. (Imre Mécs (1933), an engineer prominent in forming the national guard during the Revolution in 1956, was arrested in June 1957 and sentenced to death on May 22, 1958, but had his sentence changed to life imprisonment in February 1959. He resumed opposition activity about 1975.) And Lacika Hegedűs.

There were 12 of us, all fifty-sixers. Laci Rabovszky was a technical university student of architecture from Békéscsaba, who’d been involved in the Békéscsaba affair. Laci Hegedűs had been an accomplice of Gyuri Radó, as Imi Mécs. Feri Michala was a senior lecturer at Miskolc University and a practical engineer of unparalleled knowledge. I will never forget one conversation that we listened to for half the night. Józsi Papp was the son of a peasant family, brown-skinned, protestant, a physicist from Debrecen, while Imi Mécs was fair-haired, Catholic, and of middle-class origin. Both were of almost matchless talents, while Michala was a technical genius. These three began to probe each other’s knowledge. I don’t think the nuclear disarmament conferences were of a higher standard! Anyway, the rest of us listened, understanding odd words of the conversation.

            But before we were taken to the House of Lords they put us the ‘fresh arrivals’ from the Little Prison into a special common cell. That was the best cell of all time. There were Bibó, Donáth, Varga, Gyuri Fazekas, Gyuszi Váradi, Laci Zólomy, Pista Kovács, with Bandi Herczeg and Visnyei as ‘moles’. Both of them had come back from abroad. Herczeg, an old FBI man, was a very pleasant, well-mannered, cultivated, entertaining man, who spoke English excellently, with the nature of a snake. Visnyei belonged to the Gehlen organization, the central intelligence body of the Federal Republic of Germany, named after the former Nazi general Reinhard Gehlen who organized it.

            For about nine months before the amnesty of April 4, 1960, people were being called in and asked where they’d go, how were their families and where they’d work, and the news went round we’d be home by autumn. The guards were always dropping hints. When they called me in, they brought up Béla Kovács, saying he was his own master, he worked for them—they tried to kid us with stuff like that.

Actually, very few of us went home. There were individual amnesties for Donáth, Gyula Háy, Tibor Déry (1894–1977) and General Váradi, and of course some others, but I don’t know whether there were individual amnesties for them.

Déry’s release was interesting. He, incidentally, was one of the least popular men in the prison. The Vác Prison was 90–95 per cent a prison for workers, full of young tough guys. Déry was received with huge respect and recognition when he was brought over from Márianosztra Prison. Where he went wrong was that he kept distance with the people in the cell, and not responding likewise when people addressed him in the familiar style. It immediately went round that he’d been given an iron bedstead, not a straw mattress on the floor as we had. So, he shut himself off from prison society.

            Anyway, the atmosphere was bitter when hardly anyone was included in the amnesty and the release of Déry was a contributing to the strike that soon broke out. News of the strike was spread everywhere by the health orderlies accompanying the guard. I was in a cell with Pista Bibó at the time, and we were told that the two of us should not take part or they’d blame the whole thing on us. The only possible reply was that we’d take part, of course. With the hunger strike over, it was rumoured there wouldn’t be any reprisals. About a week later, the prisoners were split up. I remember some 30 of us were taken to Márianosztra, where they cleared a floor for us, leaving every second cell empty. We met with incredible hatred. Other prisoners—mainly convicted gendarmes—greeted us as reds, and the guards as murderers. It was a ghastly place, Márianosztra, the worst prison of all by far. And sparks of hatred. Disciplinaries came thick and fast; the window was whitewashed over. There I was with Pista Bibó, old Gabi Mészáros, senior obstetrician at Tata Hospital, Dezső Kertész, a military doctor, and János Horváth, a wing commander of fighter planes, among others.

            Then they took me from Márianosztra to the Fő utca military prison, where they were working on a conspiracy trial. When they transferred me, I was very lucky to be put in a great common cell, whereas they should have kept me separately. There I came across an Ávós captain who was thoroughly well informed and had been brought in a couple of days before for causing some nasty accident. Within a day I’d heard everything from him about what was up outside, what the political situation was, that Kádár was preparing to go to America to negotiate on the Hungarian question with the United Nations. He knew who I was and was familiar with my case..

            After a month, I was taken back from Fő utca to the Transit Prison, where I was in a cell by myself for a while. Then at the beginning of 1961, I was sent back to the Vác translation bureau, where I worked till the end. I became a privileged prisoner. We had access to The Times there, but not Népszabadság. In ’62, during the Cuban crisis, we were so well informed that when I came out, I knew the situation better than the outside people for the next two years. We worked eight hours a day, and read like crazy for another eight hours.

            The week-long amnesty put dreadful strain on the nerves. Some even died of it, like a Putnok lawyer. By the ninth day it was quite obvious that we were staying.

Prison is a strange place, borne lightly by those on the borders of introversion and extroversion, survived by those who can stand withdrawing into the corner of the upper bunk and keeping quiet. On the other hand, you need a capacity to keep on good terms with people, to be extroverted enough for that, or you become solitary. Feri Mérei—writer of the book of his prison dreams—might come up with the clearest intellectual formulation, something I can’t do without a knowledge of psychology. Interestingly, the intellectual superiority of Mérei, his absolutely free intellect, somehow repelled people who hadn’t got the basic eight grades of education. He could converse and communicate perfectly with people like us. Sándor Fekete wasn’t popular either. He had his own channels of communication with the top leadership of the prison, but that served for him to act as a mediator. I’ve mentioned his sociological survey of reading, but it shows how incredibly well read he was and what synoptic and systematic abilities he had that he managed to compile a literary index of Hungarian history from memory.

            The great amnesty of 1963 brought freedom for the vast majority of Hungary’s political prisoners. Bibó had to be released as the world press was focusing on him. I clearly remember that Regéczy-Nagy and I were kept in under the May 1 stipulation. Anyway, a rescue operation got underway, involving everyone from Péter Veres to Zoltán Kodály. In fact, I heard later in America the émigrés put their weight behind it, which was very good for me, as those at home who were pressing for Bibó’s release—László Németh, Illyés etc.—hardly noticed our existence.

            I came out three months later. Until that time, they’d lumped us together with the common criminals, which made the atmosphere unbearable. They stole so much that when we went to work, we had an order that those leaving the cell had to lock it up and keep it locked all day. Lying, informing, slandering and intrusions in search of food became everyday occurrences. Only the translation bureau managed to stay isolated intellectually to some extent.

            I was released after an individual application to the Presidential Council by my wife; I had not asked for clemency. I lodged a complaint of an incorrect decision, but I wouldn’t have asked for clemency. I don’t know what exactly Zsuzsa had submitted. After much wrangling, she got an answer from the Presidential Council saying I was coming out, but she didn’t know when. Then Kálmán Deme, civilian head of our engineering group, phoned Imi, and he told Zsuzsa to meet me outside the prison. We got in a taxi and if I remember right we went straight to my mother’s in Bors utca. With flowers. When we got home, the Eroica was playing and four school mark books had been laid out by my children, all showing top marks in every subject.

            Strange as it may seem, I’d call my time in prison useful on the whole. First for personal ties, because my political career had been broken off in 1948 and was non-existent in 1956—the connections I made in the two weeks of the revolution were superficial. I then made a few close friends in the period up to my arrest, and these friendships deepened later.

 I feel these friends would do anything for me and I’d do anything for them. Then, there is another thing: I learnt a profession in the prison which has given me a decent living up to the present day. I learned how to translate. Translating led me towards literature and if I dare call myself a writer at all it’s because my translations taught me to write after the fashion of American authors. The third thing is that the six years may have seemed incredibly long at the time, with nothing happening, but looking back on them they seem quite short. The time that’s passed since has changed the bases of my life and seems now, in an internal sense, incredibly short, but incredibly long in terms of its inner content.

            I don’t feel hatred, not even for those who’d deserve it. The danger is that I’m ruled by a shallow spirit of having an understanding for everything. So it’s questionable whether I’m still suitable to be a politician. If I am good for something, it is mediation, I think. Another thing that made life inside easy was the absolutely clear situation. There were “we” and there were “them”. The prisoners and the jailers. Another thing: society supported my family anonymously while I was in. Someone would ring the bell, for instance, and leave an anonymous two thousand forints in an envelope; nobody would take money for the children’s extra lessons. When they went to school, the teacher took them by the hand etc.

            My youngest child was one year old when I went into prison, and seven when I got out, by which time the oldest was 16. They were little children and my wife had to support them. She was employed as a worker, at first on a machine, then in a shop packing stockings, then as an office worker in a cooperative called Sikk, with low pay and obscene bosses—malicious, obscene bosses. She couldn’t have managed with out help from the society around her.

            All four of my children finished university. Two became medical doctors, psychiatrists, very colourful personalities, obviously from their profession, and two became engineers, one a hydraulic engineer and the other a designer. They have great empathy and they’re very reliable.

            The first three months outside were heaven, especially the early weeks. Almost everyone was out by then, and our circle of friends was complete again, so my arrival became a kind of public affair. Pali Járdányi and people came round that very evening. He was the first to arrive. For weeks after that, we would be up talking every night till two or three in the morning. First and foremost, the visits came from friends from prison, and we had some unbelievably warm-hearted weeks together. In fact, I didn’t really look up anybody, everybody came to me. I think Feri Donáth arrived on the second day, Imi Mécs and Co. very soon, Lacika Hegedűs likewise, so something quite unlikely went on around me. I wallowed in the colours. I gaped at the buses and trams. I sized up every woman. It was new to me to see them made up, in high-heeled shoes, young, beautiful, wearing colourful clothes.

            I reported in next day, but I didn’t have to after that. I wasn’t under police surveillance as was out on individual pardon. I was free to go anywhere. I think on the third day Zsuzsa and I went down to Balaton and stayed in a friend’s villa, where we met up with friends next day and went sailing with them. It was amusing, because it turned out that the sailing trip was a very well organized spying operation: the one informing on me wanted to hear first hand about my experiences inside..

            My wife had enough money put by to keep us for a good two months. Then I went to see Karcsi Polinszky (we’d known each other since university) and he suggested I go as a translator to the Heavy Industry Research Institute. The other man who helped was Péter Erdős, whom I didn’t know, but he via Jenő Széll found duplicated theatre texts to correct and proof-read, and it paid quite reasonably. Then Pali Félix also helped, he asked me to translate for his paper, the Tudományszervezési Tájékoztató (Scientific Organization Bulletin). I had help from a fellow prisoner in getting into the official translation bureau, Országos Fordító és Fordításhitelesítő Iroda (National Translation and Authentication Bureau). That was our main livelihood for a good while. I worked there as a technical translator. As for the Publishing House Európa, Jenő Széll helped me to get my first translation through Elemér Hankiss. The first was a Huxley story and the second Golding’s The Spire. That set me off on a writing and translating career. I should add that I’d already translated Galsworthy’s Indian Summer of a Forsyte, part of the Forsyte Saga, while I was in prison. Gyuri Litván had brought it as a present to my wife once on our wedding anniversary. So, I submitted that to Európa as a trial translation.

 Through Bibó I managed to contact Ferenc Erdei for help, who arranged within 24 hours that I should be taken back onto the manual workforce of the Soil Improvement Enterprise. I went back as a soil improvement designer, but with a supervisor’s rank. I worked initially as a site manager at Sásd, and did that for quite a long time. Then they introduced a new design procedure which meant everything had to be done on the site.

            In 1965, I was among those who got a police warning after I happened to meet in the street a friend of mine, who’d been in prison with me. We had a coffee together. I was still working at Sásd at the time, with one other person, but under circumstances that precluded police surveillance, as I was travelling all over the country and spending weeks on some farm or other. One day, I had a telegram from Budapest saying I should return to Budapest straight away. I was told that in the future I could be sent out on assignments only if accompanied by a manager, the chief engineer, the party secretary. I went into Fő utca, and asked whether I was under police surveillance. Certainly not, they said. So I could travel anywhere I wanted? I was given a paper saying there were no criminal proceedings underway against me.

 My immediate boss was a former Technical University professor, and after long persuasion, he eventually took the risk of dismissing me.

But Golding’s The Spire was just coming out—I still see it as one of my most successful translations—with perfect timing, because with the help of Ica Vígh I was taken on within a week by the Literature Fund. That’s how I made the transition to literature. And, ever since, the soils of Hungary have been deterioratin, or, improving without my help.

            I haven’t been short of work from then on to the present day. Initially there was Elemér Hankiss smoothing my path with concern and care and great sympathy. The other person who helped me a lot at Európa was Gyuri Szekeres. I can also thank János Domokos for the fact that my relations with Európa were quite idyllic for a long time.

            A few people who gave me a helping hand were ones I consider great people as well as great writers, such as Magda Székely, Ágnes Nemes Nagy and Ági Gergely. And there were a few editors without whom I’d never have become what I did. Mari Borbás led me by the hand and taught me. Judit Márványi was always my first reader, someone whose opinion I trusted deeply, as I did Magda Székely’s as well. They all believed in me, and told me the truth. In other words, I could count on them.

            I’d always been excited by literature. A couple of years of literary translation gave me a stylistic tool for recounting my own experiences and ideas. I wrote my first work, Iron Bars, in ’68, and although my editors liked it, they advised me to put it back in my drawer. It didn’t come out until ’78, by which time it had been preceded by The Sandalled in ’74. Iron Bars is a play and The Sandalled a short novel. Five or six years later, a review of the latter one was published describing what message it had for today. The review didn’t flatter me. It seems that they like me as a fifty-sixer, and they like me as a person within the literary world, but it’s as if a corpse had stood up and walked out of the lime pit, as if decay should give birth to the writer. For I was nobody’s university buddy, I’m not one of the populars, not one of the urbanes, I’m not anybody’s pal, and no critic gains anything by praising my work.

            The second edition of The Sandalled appeared in one volume with Iron Bars and with Hungarian Medea. Then came a Polish edition of The Sandalled and an East German one, and since then Medea has been performed in Yugoslavia, Romania and East Germany.

            Meanwhile I was admitted into the Writers’ Union in 1968. I was on the board of the literary translation department until I was elected by a big majority to the council, and then to be chairman of the literary translation department.

            Discounting a few trips when I was at school, I hadn’t been anywhere until I got a 14-day trip to Poland from the Writers’ Union in 1979. That trip was wonderful and I’ll be in love with Warsaw as long as I live; the common memories of the distant and recent past bring it amazingly close to me. Then I was in Slovakia twice, and in ’82 I was invited by the American Hungarian Cultural Association in Washington, which was headed by Tibor Hám, a friend from my youth and one of the leaders of the Pál Teleki Panel. They organized for me a lecture tour to six universities, and, many cities, so that I took the lectures to 12 states altogether. Then I got a Soros Scholarship for two years, of which I spent five months abroad. I came home as a different man.

            What I’ve learnt so far in politics is that democracy is not a matter of goodwill, an idyll, or a kiss planted on the forehead, but of a system of institutions with precisely defined spheres of influence, where stronger interest groups prevail in free contest among them, but any minority view remains valid because it could be a majority view tomorrow. And as I did in the time of the Teleki Panel, I still feel that requirements for democracy are basic—pluralism, a democratic system of institutions, free enterprise to release human energies, and an increase in the numbers of independent spirits and independent economic units. I’d class myself with the opposition, but feel no obligation to take a negative view of everything. I feel I’m independent of groups but I don’t feel independent of my conscience.

            I’m an eternal re-starter, always starting again and again. The secret behind it is probably that I live for the future. Somehow, I obstinately forget the past. I censor past facts very thoroughly, but I constantly look to the future. Furthermore, I’m an obstinate optimist, always sure I can break through somewhere. I feel I have something to say. I’ve been through a few things from which I can generalize processes or the experience I gained from them.

            Whether you see your life successful or unsuccessful depends on from where you have set out. I can call my life a string of collapses, failures and blind alleys. But I can also say I’ve ended up, after twists and turns, just where I wanted to be, and, I can do, I’m free to do the things I have always wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Looking back, I do not have to disparage myself or withdraw a line or a sentence I ever said. I feel today at the age of 63 that I won’t leave this world with the feeling that I have not have done anything if I kick the bucket tomorrow. I’ve brought up four children and I live a fine, respectable married life with my wife. I’ve written down at least some of what I had to say, and, perhaps some of it has influenced things and come over. Now, I feel that every year I gain is a gift. I’m not at odds with myself, I’m at odds with the world; I’m just as out of sorts as everyone else. But I feel I can allow myself to live for the future, not in the past. And if there should ever be five minutes, five political minutes in Hungary when there’s a need for a man who can get on with both communists and populars alike, and has a clean record, I’ll be there if I’m needed.

* * * * *

As András B. Hegedűs and I were talking in January and February 1985 in his Gerlóczy utca flat and later at the Academy holiday resort house in Visegrád, neither of us guessed I would ever become Hungary’s head of state, something I still find surreal. Occurrences may build up in your life, assuming a course or a structure. For everyone’s life seems structured when you look back on it. I have to admit that now, when my life is very strictly controlled by protocol and very tight constraints—a contrast with the absolute freedom of the last thirty years—I still feel my days, mapped out in periods of five minutes, are random and chaotic.

            Perhaps my role as a mediator took a more serious turn with the Bibó Festschrift. As I recall, it had been planned for Bibó’s 70th birthday. Feri Donáth asked me if I’d like to join the team. Everyone, I think, knew me and I’d always known myself not to be someone who would dash into every project. But the Bibó Festschrift was obviously one I wanted to join because of my amicable and intellectual ties with Bibó and because of the importance of 1956. I was attracted by the idea of doing something meaningful and forward-looking for the first time in many years. My view of the book’s significance now is that it overcame some fairly sharp differences, allowing the popular opposition, the democratic opposition and a sizeable group of intellectuals.

When compiling the book, we had to rule out impatience, and allow opposing opinions to be put forward with good humour. I think the book fulfilled that task to the full. The book made a very deep impression in intellectual circles in Budapest, and was discussed widely. It was fascinating and instructive for me to hear the arguments of people in favour of taking part in the project, and, the excuses for not taking part. It enriched my knowledge of people and helped me to type them. I met people who said they agreed with the idea, and Bibó was important to them, but objected to certain participants in the team as suspicious or unworthy of Bibó’s realm of ideas. The motive for refusing participation in the team in most cases was antipathy to some members of the democratic opposition. Antipathy, uncertainty.

            The dominant view in Pest at that time was that these people were sandwich men of the communist system, tied to the old regime by their family connections and past: they were being used. I thought that was ridiculous. What lay behind it, I think, was fear of doing something. The intellectuals who lived in fear needed an excuse. Still, the 76 authors of the Bibó Festschrift came to include many members of the two great parliamentary parties of the future change of system, the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) and the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), of the intellectual leaders of those two parties, two camps.

 I was busy with organizing and gathering people. I didn’t deal with persuading them, or if I did, only on a very small scale. I was willing to accept people’s fears or anxieties if they spoke of them sincerely. I said if they were afraid, they shouldn’t take part, for there was a danger of destroying somebody’s livelihood. It is also interesting that this was a first encounter with Bibó’s ideas for most of the popular camp. It must have been an experience, even a revelation for many of them.

            András Knopp wrote in a confidential report that attention should be given to the collective presence of participants in the 1956 “counterrevolution”. True enough, but the participants in the ’56 group needed to be examined individually. We hadn’t had any contact with the communist party before, whereas the other group, the populists, had had their contacts with those in power—involving incessant debate with them, of course. The ones most distant from the post-’56 authorities were certainly the ’56 group that had worked in the workers’ councils, as I had, and later joined up with Bibó.

            Reform communists were known until the mid-1990s as revisionists or party opposition. This group as a whole was on the defensive. They were called communists, but they weren’t communists at all underneath, but people of European culture and a humanist cast of mind, far more like liberals or showing social democratic features. As I’d never been a party member, I could allow myself to be more left wing in some ways than the communist party was. They now feel alien in this world. I sometimes feel that in my central position—for I’m in the centre of the political spectrum, even if I feel that SZDSZ membership is closest to me—I’m alone in representing the cause of ’56 as we espoused it at that time.

            On the other hand, what Miklós Vásárhelyi said had the absolute value of source material. He’d obviously thought things through and spoke of things we hadn’t witnessed. Another valuable contribution came from Feri Donáth, and from Mérei too in terms of describing Bibó. I thought Imre Mécs’s remarks were very interesting, as he saw the events from an outside standpoint, as he’d been a university student. It emerged that ’56 had basically been a left-wing, socialist uprising. Left-wing and socialist. This would be very hard to ignore. Similarly, the plans  Bibó formulated called everywhere for a ban on exploitation, upper limits on private property, and the introduction of the institutional system of European parliamentarianism, which I’d call left-wing social democratic. We’ve come a long way since. Our situation was defined by Brezhnev’s immovability. Hungary’s dependence on the Soviet Union meant that an immobile, invariable mood prevailed. I think we all knew the regime would fall, but what would happen meanwhile and when it would fall we hadn’t the foggiest idea.

            My views, attitudes and relations with regard to the two increasingly prominent movements against the regime that emerged in the first half of the 1980s are very difficult to reconstruct. My position is easier. By that time I was in an ‘in-between’ position. The two movements—democratic opposition and popular writers—had one way or another grown out of the powers.      

 I kept myself at such a distance from the authorities that I couldn’t have entered either group. But my personal ties with those who joined them were pleasant and unproblematic. I think it was a neighbourly diplomatic relationship, but not an alliance or a state of comradeship in arms.

 I followed both movements attentively. I was very much in agreement with the samizdat periodical Beszélő. As a board member of the Writers’ Union, I sympathized with their ambitions but was alienated by their methods. At general meetings, I’d give my vote to the Csoóri group, organizing resistance to the authorities from within, and to the campaigns of the populars.

            The populists also looked at me with some sympathy. I had some unformed and uncertain reputation among them, but they never tried to win me to themselves. I never thought anybody would try to incorporate me into their plans. I lacked an inclination to offer myself. So you couldn’t put me in the popular wagon camp or the urbanite motor-car camp or camp site either. I felt at home on the edge of an unfenced wood in an old-fashioned tent.

            The antagonism of the two groups— népi (plebeian/popular) and urbánus(urbanite) —amounts to an unintentional class warfare disguised as ideological antithesis between the possessors of revalued assets of yore—a stratum of European cultivation, initially communist and then the first to reject communism—and plebeians trying to push up and replace them. Of course I’m summing up simplistically some very complex arguments. I am the kind of Hungarian bourgeois scion who did not possess that European cultivation, and so had nothing to revalue, but not being country-born, I’m not the kind of plebeian targeted for cooption, and again I fall between two stools.

            In György Aczél’s case, a high position had gone to an educated, well-informed man whose literary judgement was not bad. He later gained a satanic image that remains to this day. To some extent he instigated the liberalization of literature and speech, but the manipulation altered as well. Aczél’s method was chocolate-bar compulsion. He was a typical Pest intellectual who tried to keep up with events, hear all the gossips and know the power relations and personal ties.

            I didn’t know Aczél personally and never exchanged a word or shook hands with him. When I got my Attila József Prize, Aczél was as careful to avoid me. I also tried to keep myself well away from him because I knew he was a master of promises, and I didn’t want to give him a chance to do that and expose myself.  Still, I was very pleased with my Attila József Prize. I think my prize reflected the momentary power relations between the Writers’ Union and the government, or rather the party headquarters.

            There was an obvious attempt at the 1986 general meeting to break the Writers’ Union up: the party leadership was trying to split it. But it didn’t succeed. The attempt to divide the Union had foundered. But in the longer run, it had two consequences. This was when the popular opposition within the Writers’ Union stepped beyond its bounds, and became a national political factor, i. e. when the MDF (Hungarian democratic Forum) was imperceptibly born. And this saved the Writers’ Union from breaking up, and let it develop into an interest-representing body.

            I was elected president of the Writers’ Union in 1989. Csoóri and I received equal votes. Csoóri moved out of the Writers’ Union and onto the political arena, and I was besieged by requests to accept the presidency. I said I’d do it if I had everyone’s backing. Then I was elected unanimously by the board. There were some who tried later to prevent me being president, but they didn’t succeed.

            Literature in Hungary has great importance. It expresses the country’s identity, as music does in Austria or theatre in Poland. The utterances of the literary society have had moral weight for 200 years. So as president of the Writers’ Union, I saw it as my job to ensure this identity-expressing literature had the conditions and protection it required. Interests can be protected in various ways. The highest level is the protection of values, which the Writers’ Union has to do, while ensuring the prestige of the profession. The union itself has to be protected because if its structure is demolished, it leaves atomized writers exposed to publishers and market pressures that lead to a false hierarchy of values.

            1986 saw the 30th anniversary of the 1956 Revolution. We buried Feri Donáth that summer. Despite the press campaign, young people and society seemed slow to be inspired by the memory of ’56 or realize that nationwide amnesia was ending. The utterance of half-truths and quarter-truths elicited general snorts of rage in society, while unspoken truths had self-inductive force. I’d date the revival of the Bibó renaissance to that year. Once a legal Hungarian edition had appeared, with exemplary editing and production, it was possible to ground the policy, moral stance and model behaviour that Bibó exemplifies to this day.

            1985, 1986 and 1987 were my most fruitful years. I spent a lot of time in the provinces. In 1985–6, I wrote Scales with help from a Soros scholarship. I think in terms of its message it’s my most important work so far, as it serves to explore the Jewish/populist antagonism and what lies beneath it. I also wrote Pessimistic Comedy in the summer of ’86, in a burst of concentrated effort over two or three weeks. I’d be curious to know whether it sounds too serious now. I wonder if the irony still comes over. In 1987 and the summer of 1988 I wrote Persephone, which is apolitical and of a personal nature. Right now this stands closest to me, as a rebirth of my philosophy in life, and, a summary of life and death.

            Meanwhile I translated loads. Thanks to an eight or ten-month scholarship from the Soros Foundation, I wrote three plays. I was a member of the Arts Foundation, which gave me the freedom and chance to work.

            In early 1988 TIB (Historical Justice Committee) was founded. I couldn’t have stayed out of it even if I had wanted to. We felt a moral obligation to do it, and we felt the time was ripe. A joint decision was made to draw up the founding document or statement, which I still feel is very important. To this day we haven’t formulated accurately enough our goals or frames, but that doesn’t matter: really good movements develop organically, not through declarations of intent. We aren’t a political party; we haven’t pocketed millions; we haven’t sullied our reputation. Nonetheless, the effect of tib can only be gauged after studying the capillary attraction of society—how far its members and officers have influenced society and political movements.

            The hardest months of my life was the period we spent in preparing for the reburial of Imre Nagy on 16^th June 1989. Especially at the end, when I had to finish translating the Bush book Looking Forward  by George Bush and Victor Gold two days before the funeral. The publication of the Hungarian translation coincided with the first ever visit to Hungary by an American president, by the elder Bush on July 11–13, 1989.  I had sleepless nights for a month. The process exceeded my expectations. While I was translating Bush, I was trying to keep out of everything. There was a tremendous burden on my mind until I managed, with the aid of Mari Borbás, to complete the translation of the book.

                        During the reburial ceremony, I understood the power of the spoken word. I saw several hundred thousand faceless people in front of me. When the list of those executed was read out, every name was like a hammer stroke on one’s heart and on history. It was stupefying. I had never felt such a psychological pressure on me. And responsibility. I felt that something of enormous importance was taking place, as if this really was the final, cathartic moment in Hungarian political development—this was the breakthrough in its silent force and amazing discipline.

            Before the funeral, we had paid a visit to Prime Minister Miklós Németh and interim head of state Mátyás Szűrös. I thought reconciliation and the relief of tension were rightful demands. My position at the time was that we should be reconciled, but reconciliation cannot be unilateral, the basic conditions for reconciliation should be met. I had in my mind a Hungary free from tension, which would be a Hungary where I would feel at home.

            When I signed my first reprieve as president, there was a lot of protest at the reprieve, apparently. But I accepted full responsibility, because I said in advance there would not be executions in Hungary while I was in office. I accepted political as well as emotional responsibility for the agreement with the wing of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party that sought to promote peaceful transition. Agreement, not conciliation! There is a basic difference between the two.

 I remember when Miklós Németh returned from the coffin of Imre Nagy during the reburial ceremony, I went up to him and shook his hand. He put his hand out but I saw that his eyes were elsewhere. He was clenching his teeth so hard that his cheekbones were white, and his forehead covered in sweat. That was the first time I saw what going to Canossa is like; how clear it was to this man that he had burnt his bridges, settled his accounts, and just taken the most important step in his life: he broke with the past. The Németh government was able - for three or four months - to be a national government. It stood its ground respectably in unspeakably difficult conditions. My impression ever since is that Miklós Németh was seeking a modus vivendi.

            I can’t say now who was the first person to come up with the idea of the Network of Free Initiatives (Szabad Kezdeményezések Hálózata) formed on May 1, 1988, which was the precursor of the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), a liberal political party founded on November 13, 1988. Anyway, I was one of the initiators in May 1988, and a founder member of the SZDSZ. Initially, I was also on the executive board and attended its meetings, but only for want of information. I never really felt part of the decision-making process. So at a delegates’ meeting in the Gólyavár I voluntarily withdrew my nomination and essentially became an outsider again. My instincts worked well again, for as I said—and my wife often recalls this—if  you want to do a historically important service later on, you have to step back at a point.

            Anyway, the Writers’ Union came in handy as an existing body above political parties providing a position of moral power that almost amounted in Hungary to being a public dignitary. The Writers’ Union presidency almost automatically provided the basis for my later election as president of the republic.

At first, it seemed during the process of choosing the presidential candidates that I would be pushed into the background. It was clear where I belonged, that I stood remote from daily politics, and that I would be  be able in a complicated situation to stand my ground. No one understood why I stood back when the political situation heightened. I think that my sense of political timing and my political instincts worked more accurately.

            There was still resentment in the SZDSZ against the clique spirit in the party leadership, which I can’t call unjustified, as the clique kept in office a leadership that had set up the party and thought of it as its own. While it would have to find room for the provinces and new members if it wanted to be a national party, I’m far from sure it would have remained so liberal if it did. Anyway, I was glad the SZDSZ had lent such weight in Hungary to a very congenial, equitable liberalism.

            SZDSZ put me at the top of its Budapest list so that they could nominate me for president of the republic if it won or gained similar strength to the MDF. I was told this in advance, and I agreed. When the party fell far short in the elections, it was clear that the question depended on the victorious MDF.

            I knew exactly what it was about when Antall rang me in the final days of April and said he wanted a word. Antall had it down on a separate slip of paper how he wanted to arrange things constitutionally: I’d be elected speaker of the House and the speakership of the House would invest me with interim presidential functions. He, on the other hand, would have a chance to form his government.

 On the evening of the 28th, it looked as if they weren’t getting anywhere. Next day they sat down again and it was clear that they wanted to reach an agreement. A draft agreement had been prepared. This agreement between the two big parties after the change of system, the MDF and the SZDSZ, was later known generally as the MDF and the SZDSZ Pact drawn up by Péter Tölgyessy. It was signed by the two parties, and I was nominated for president. I myself did not take part in the negotiations, in fact I made it clear beforehand that the important thing was to reach an agreement— whether I was going to be the president or not was a secondary matter. Both sides agreed that I would be the right choice.

            I’d had long political relations with József Antall, first through his father and our common background in the Independent Smallholders Party, and then through my part in re-establishing the Smallholders Party, where I acted more as a brake than an accelerator.

            I had a few friends in the MDF and many more I greatly respected, such as Csaba Gy. Kiss and Sándor Lezsák. I rated very highly Antall’s political and tactical abilities, and, above all, his absolute intellectual superiority and skills as a debater. Yet I sensed in the MDF from the outset a kind of national demagogy that I couldn’t accept. On the pretext of wanting to help the Hungarian communities in neighbouring countries, they managed to stir up feelings which did to those communities more harm than good.

            To this group came Antall with his intellectual superiority—a conservative, Christian, democratic politician, German in education, following German models, and speaking German, so the MDF base clearly developed a “CDU” core, which formed the government. Antall and I had worked together once or twice and often swapped ideas as well, so that he probably thought I was useful. The agreement also gave backing to his reputation, outside backing against his own party, so that he didn’t have to fear anything dishonest or violent from above. That I think was his motive. And let me say I think the choice was quite logical for Antall. He knew I was able and willing to cooperate, though I stressed time and again that my position differed from that of the MDF. But I personally can act as a balance in the present political situation within the scope the constitution grants me. Whether that will really work I don’t know.

            After my election, I travelled to the United States, as president in response to an earlier invitation. I became an honorary doctor of Indiana University and delivered a ceremonial address there.

 Hungary was receiving a very bad press in America at the time, mainly due to the second round of the elections, when some anti-Semitic notes had been struck. I knew Hungary would suffer losses in billions of dollars if this didn’t stop. So as president and a person of credibility arriving in America, I met the leaders of the World Jewish Congress and other bodies. I also had a long talk with the editor of the Washington Post and his board. This series of talks dispelled suspicions. I never denied for a moment there were incidents of this kind in Hungary, but I tried to explain who lay behind them and make it clear that only a tiny minority was involved. These American gentlemen accepted my arguments mainly because I didn’t deny the presence of latent anti-Semitism. What I did deny was the possibility of organized, violent anti-Semitism. Our common opinion on the latent anti-Semitism was that it existed worldwide. Nobody could be forced to love the Jews, but massacring or discrimination against them must be stopped. Jewish over-sensitivity existed as well, but this would not have arisen if their sensitivities hadn’t been aroused. The sensitivity of someone whose father and/or mother was murdered was understandable. If your loved ones were exterminated, you’re afraid. And the Hungarian holocaust was not only inhuman in taking people’s lives, it also took homes and loved ones and communities away from people whose ancestors had lived in the country for generations. This heightened the sensitivity further. The holocaust found Hungarian Jewry at a stage when 85–90 per cent of them were not only integrated, but assimilated, and they went to the gas chambers robbed not only of their religious beliefs, but of their belief in the nation, their affiliation.

            I also spoke to bankers in America and met the Kennedy family: I was invited to a family dinner by Ethel Kennedy, widow of Robert Kennedy. And I met Tom Lantos, with several other prominent people in Washington, and I met members of the Hungarian Community as well.

            The climax of the trip was a talk with President Bush lasting three quarters of an hour. The American president asked me, before his summit meeting with Gorbachev, what my view was of Gorbachev’s future, what aid could be given to the Soviet Union, what the East and Central European reactions to the processes there were, and what centres of crisis might develop. I told that I saw the historic role Gorbachev had played and how he’d shaped history, but Gorbachev too was a product of historical processes. The process begun in Eastern Europe was a natural one that would reach fruition; conditions in Hungary had started to stabilize. I said we had an interest in Soviet domestic stability, so the troop withdrawals would not stall. I also said democracy was almost certainly irreversible in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The danger was more of an economic nature. But the troops were still there and the danger of remaining was greater than that of a new invasion. An intelligence report that came back to me said Bush thought he had met with a new type of leader. Whatever the case, a 15-minute drop-in visit lasted 45.

            Before I left for the US, I’d performed my first protocol duty when the Prince of Wales arrived just after my inauguration. I was deeply moved as I walked down before the guard of honour for the first time in my life, turned to face the flag and listened to the national anthem. The sun shone on the flag, held by a young man with a fine moustache, who stood motionless with his eyes closed. I felt that was symbolic in some way. I wept, Zsuzsa sobbed, and Princess Diana squeezed her hand.

            I had a memorable meeting with the papal nuncio, whose predecessor had been banished by the Russian authorities in early 1945. It therefore amounted to a resumption of diplomatic relations with the Vatican when the new apostolic nuncio to Hungary, Archbishop Angelo Acerbi, presented his credentials on June 21, 1990. I found him a pleasant, cultivated man, and I told him that I too take Christianity seriously, that I’m a Catholic, but if I had to place myself somewhere within it, I would say I was Waldensian. The Waldenses were a missionary body founded by Peter Waldo of Lyons in about 1176. Though excommunicated in the late 1180s, they spread across Italy in and into the Holy Roman Empire, and as far as Hungary in the 14th century.

 The story of The Sandled Ones is about a medieval trial of Waldenses for heresy. The nuncio replied that the Middle Ages were not a period of darkness, despite rumours to the contrary, but one of the most enlightened periods. He was an open-minded man, who could immediately put my observations on the Waldenses into context, and draw from them all the conclusions.

            I also visited Moscow as president, attended a Warsaw Pact summit along with Prime Minister Antall, the defence minister and commanders of the army, pushing for the dissolution of the Warsaw pact at the summit. The first Warsaw Pact summit after the fall of the East European communist regimes was held on June 7, 1990 in Moscow. Hungary was the only member-country to propose that the Warsaw Treaty Organization be dissolved. This was agreed on February 25, 1991 at a Budapest meeting of defence and foreign ministers and officially implemented at a summit in Prague on July 1, 1991.

 The mood at the meeting was interesting. I think it differed fundamentally from previous ones because at the previous ones Honecker and Ceausescu were present. My personal meeting with Gorbachev was an experience: he was full of life, energy, smiles, accepting the sudden change of system in Hungary with superior self-confidence as something he fully agreed with. He gave me the impression of being an extremely receptive, flexible man, capable of negotiating and an extremely quick thinker, with a good measure of human warmth and empathy as well.

            The main lesson to be learnt from these two months is that indirect approaches make no sense. I also came to realize that if Antall and I appear together, we probably don’t, despite all the goodwill, reinforce each other’s influence, but rather weaken it, or even get in each other’s way. Against his solemn background, I appear to be a clown, and against mine he appears to be a funeral director. Our negotiating approach, lifestyle, behaviour and relation to power are fundamentally different. My style goes against the formal elements of the diplomatic game and negotiating protocol. I developed my own technique, learning how to make contact in 30–35 minutes, if I want to leave a lasting impression. If I have the strength and I’m not too tired, I can keep six or eight people in hand. I think the main thing is to see the eyes of the persons facing me. If you see he/she is not trying to avoid your eyes, and has a sense of humour, the contact is made.

            I saw the same negotiating style in Václav Havel. He could be incredibly flexible at the negotiating table, remarkably quick, and all his approaches were positive. He was clearly not looking for hidden meanings in what we said. I have never with anyone else reached agreement so easily on serious matters. When I tried to outline the situation in Hungary for him, he had everything in place right away. He has a charismatic personality and the presidential position there gives him far greater scope than mine does. On the other hand, he improvises quite a lot. This must come from his artistic side and from the fact that he’s never been a professional politician. I had met him personally earlier, incidentally. I sat in a presidential Mercedes for the first time when Miklós Vásárhelyi, an interpreter and I took Havel out to see the graves of Imre Nagy and his associates in the cemetery. He then made a classic remark. I said that the fact we were going out together felt almost as he’d written the scenario. “I didn’t write it,” he replied, “I was just an assistant to the director. It was written up there.” And he pointed to the sky.

            I have a strange, let’s say subjective relationship with Fidesz. Founded in 1988, the Alliance of Young Democrats was a liberal, anti-communist party. The membership age limit of 35 was lifted in 1993. Disappointing results in the 1994 elections would prompt a shift to conservatism and a name change to Alliance of Young Democrats—Hungarian Civic Union (Fidesz–Magyar Polgári Szövetség). I knew Viktor Orbán and László Kövér from meetings of the Network, where they’d been outside and in at the same time. They hadn’t decided where they belonged. Time in Parliament is on Fidesz’s side. First, they’re uncommitted: there is no agreement or anything else to tie them down; they have a right to say what no one else has a chance to say, in a mercilessly accurate and forthright way. I think their popularity index has risen by at least 15 percentage points. They perform very well. The only thing I’d quarrel with is the merciless way they pursue their direct party interests, as if they were incapable of placing public or national interests before party ones. Viktor says no even if he doesn’t think no later. And he is petrified that they’ll be considered as the child of the SZDSZ, although there’s no reason to do so, of course, for they form a separate entity in terms of preparedness, expertise and popularity. Their stance and behaviour in Parliament is very useful—they are the real voice of non-communist opposition. And when SZDSZ is pushed into a position of being responsible for the future and has to share responsibility for the stability of the political scene, it is sometimes squeezed into a position where its image becomes blurred, but not so Fidesz. I would be interested to know whether they’d take up a position of principle if fate placed them in such a situation, or whether they’d still be guided by their own interests.

            The urge to listen to my instincts is decisive as regards my behaviour towards the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP). I’d thought the MSZP would play the part of a constructive opposition, representing the left wing that is absent from Hungary at the moment, a leftism that goes beyond liberalism and embraces the left wing of social democracy, clearly worker-oriented, and consistently and strongly expressive of welfare criteria. That is not what happened. Instead the MSZP became a party guided by emotions, a hysterical party, internally divided, quite uncertain of itself and on the verge of splitting in two, so that I can’t find a trace of coherence in its political work. It seems unable to throw off the disease of communism.

            Oddly enough, I found political leftism in Italy, when I was a guest for three days at the Unita Festa in Milan last year. The Italian Festa dell’ Unita is held each year in several cities over a month or two, under the auspices of Unita, organ of the Partito Democratico (successor to the Italian Communist Party, with concerts, literary events and so on, and domestic and foreign politicians present. My guide was a retired chauffeur—he and his wife also did valuable voluntary work for the trade union. He gave me a most erudite tour of Milan, displaying great knowledge of church history, art new and old, and technical matters. Everyone knew him. We went all through the Festa, where there were still hundreds of thousands milling about after midnight. It was a popular festival involving several inns and bookshops at once, with bearded volunteer intellectuals serving the blue-collar workers. The whole thing was cultured, communal and highly interesting, a grassroots cooperative movement that penetrated the whole of society. The Italian Communist Party was intent on shedding communism, in a most critical and difficult period, and they managed to save a smiling communal spirit. This is just what is lacking from the unsmiling, extremely individualized and power-centred movements of Eastern Europe. I can’t say how this hybrid ideology of communism turned social democracy or socialism will turn out in Italy, but anyway, I’ve never seen anywhere such mass communal effort, worker-centred, preserving tradition, and weaving through life as a whole. But it’s given me a pleasant illusion that leftism might be done differently.

            National independence and a multi-party parliamentary system are ’56 demands that history has fulfilled. This was triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union, not by us. Though the downfall of the Soviet system began with the Hungarian Revolution, it’s quite hard historically to trace a direct causal connection. Yet there’s a question mark over one of the most congenial ’56 demands: neutrality. Neutrality can nowadays be expressed at best within a pan-European security system, as Hungary is too small to be a buffer. 1848 lived a hundred years, and rose from the dead in 1956. I don’t want ’56 to rise again under 1848 conditions, as yet another revolution ripe for defeat after an underground existence of some kind.

 Early in our prison years we felt victorious, when we were released we witnessed Kádárite consolidation and associated national amnesia. The memory of ’56 revived for the 25th anniversary, but the 30th enhanced society’s forgetfulness to an unbearable extent. Yet June 16, 1989 brought staggering evidence that the memory was still alive.

            When I was elected president of the republic at a ceremonial session of the Parliament, with a very small number of votes against, as a fifty-sixer I had strange, complex feelings inside me. One was vanity. To some extent my feeling was of fulfilment on one plane of my life, the political plane. I didn’t think and couldn’t have seen myself as a suitable prime minister. I had no inclination for office, not even a ministry. I felt I was suited by what I’d gathered so far in my life for this position. No more and no less. It was certainly less than a premiership, because the powers are fewer. Yet there is a chance of psychological influence, which I felt capable of exerting. But I’m not so prejudiced as not to examine myself in relation to all the things I might run up against in the four or five years to come: ranging from a situation calling for suicide to exile or a peaceful old age. I’ll be 72 or 73 when my term ends. Of course, I gave up the prospect of an undisturbed old age. If the task calls for all my energies, I shall be quite exhausted. But I also felt this would bring a period full of experiences. On the other hand, it filled me with fears that the parameters of my life might change fundamentally. Zsuzsa was worried how her parents would survive the change. And I also wondered how my children would react to the whole thing. My son, for instance, said he’d had a father so far, now he was going to have a head of state. The little ones, my grandchildren, were stricken by elemental snobbery. I imagine the basis for this was mainly the Mercedes, the executive car. My daughter-in-law took it very well, but my son-in-law in America was distraught. Panni took note of it in her usual practical way. Kinga was overcome with joy as she’d always argued that success goes with a good personality, there is no good personality without success, that being the test of it.

            I expected a structural change among my friends. Many of them would fall away, not wanting to rub shoulders with me, while hundreds of close friends would approach me with petty requests. What I found hard to bear was not being able to move about freely as I did in the past. I used to wear a check shirt for 30 years, and I possessed one tie for funerals and one for weddings. Now, I have to dress up.

 It was a huge delight to find that Zsuzsa realized she didn’t have to worry about her parents. She changed her priorities now to give me far more solidarity than ever before. She clearly sees in her own modest, unassuming way that she has become somebody. She plays her part in an elegant, charming and human way. So, our relationship is now deeper and tighter than ever before. Nor has my relationship with my children been damaged. It has become more superficial only in the sense that we discuss political subjects much more often than we did. But I don’t know how my health will be affected. I’m in my 69th year.

This article is a shortened and abridged version of the original interviews made in January–February 1985 and July 1990 by András B. Hegedűs, edited by Mária Makai Tóth and translated by Brian McLean.