Nameless Hungarian

I stand here before you deeply moved, and a little embarrassed: I am not sure that I am your right choice, the one truly deserving this honour. Perhaps, those who chose me did not find someone better, a more suitable to receive this honour.

The reason I nevertheless accepted this honour with clear conscience is that I managed to convince myself that in my person you are honouring the nameless Hungarian who has embarked on the path of democracy in Central Europe, or more to the point, in my homeland, Hungary; or to circle down even further, the Hungarian as such who has managed to remain a man through all the shocks and historical adversities for more than seven decades, and managed to survive - albeit almost dying in the shock of a series of terrible operations: the end of the First World War, the trauma of the Treaty of Versailles, which by mocking the principle of national self-determination, forced more than a third of Hungarians under foreign rule; the Second World War, Nazism and the Holocaust, the subsequent post-war "mass migration", the deportations, population exchanges; the terrible loss of blood in the Stalinist forced labour camps, and the bitterness of total helplessness and disenfranchisement - the deprivation of faith and soul; the pillage of a nation.

I am talking of the Hungarian who, despite all this, had the strength to be the first in East-Central Europe to get back on his feet, and to fight the victorious revolution in 1956, which was finally suppressed in blood, and which was followed by unprecedented harsh reprisals and mass flight. The Hungarian who, in a year and a half, has now once again been the first among the peoples of Central Europe to succeed, with tremendous effort, silently, peacefully and without bloodshed, in dismantling the Stalinist party-state, without taking revenge on anyone for his pointless and unjust sufferings, and who, just two months ago, freely elected his MPs for the first time in forty-three years, and he did so. He was mature and wise: voting simultaneously for the preservation of national traditions and for Europe, for the values of the twentieth century: the full and complete prevalence of human rights for all individuals, ethnic, religious and ideological communities filtering out of the new Hungarian Parliament both right-wing and left-wing extremism, chauvinism, racism and Stalinism, but not closing the political playing field to the reform communists who had taken part in the reckoning with the recent past.

How can we recognise this "nameless" Hungarian who – being of my age – is in his 60’s? Let's try to draw his portrait the way the police draw the identikit of an unidentified suspect based on the descriptions of witnesses. Each of these Hungarians lost six years of their lives, and they bear the marks on their faces in the two deep wrinkles at the corner of their lips, and this is so even if they were lucky, and not scraped dead in the frozen grounds of Ukraine, but marched instead in thin-soled boots, with frozen feet, for a thousand and two hundred miles incessantly fighting without being captured, and, then returned home, where their mothers, wives and children were waiting for them provided they were still alive and waiting at all.

Then, in less than four years, their lands were confiscated, their houses, workshops nationalized, they were evicted from their homes and deported. Or else these nameless Hungarians fled, leaving their villages, and, either they denied their faith, political beliefs, homeland, or found themselves in a forced labour camp, or in prison. When --- or if at all --- they were released and could start all over again, they nurtured their"souls" in internal, domestic emigration. Even without having been a prisoner of war, it took them

five or six years of misery, prison and a fresh start.  

In the meantime, if this nameless Hungarian did not give in, did not surrender, he learned how to lie fluently. Just for self-defence. Then Stalin died. And then - gradually - the gloom began to lift, and in 1956 the people rose up, a revolution broke out, which in the soul of the nameless Hungarian was inextricably linked to the memory of 1848, when his great-grandfathers fought, gun in hand, against the Austrian Emperor for the independence of his country, and laid the foundations for the first democratic Hungarian republic.

Trampled by the Tsarist Russian army in 1848, the second attempt was trampled by Khrushchev's Red Army in 1956. The nameless Hungarian then - if he had not been killed in fighting in the streets like ten thousand other Hungarians, or if he had not fled the country like two-hundred thousand other nameless people, or if he was not imprisoned or interned with another eight thousand fellow Hungarians, or hanged with the four hundred other victims – he went into internal exile again, and remained silent – solely out of self-defence.

Some drank themselves into stupor, committed suicide, had a heart attack, wore themselves out, and died prematurely. Then, towards the end of the seventies, the gloom began to lift again. Most people could no longer believe their eyes, but some of the nameless ones began circulating samizdats, and saw their homes searched, or were beaten by truncheons. The long, bloodless but bitter struggle began, which has only now ended, with the election, and, let us hope for good, and, let us believe that this is the victory of freedom and not of misery. The nameless Hungarian bears the mark of this struggle on his face as a special distinctive mark. It is easy to recognise him.

Does the above image fit me? My mother is Hungarian -- her birthplace is now in Romania. My father is Hungarian -- his birthplace is now in Yugoslavia. My wife's father is Hungarian - his birthplace is now in Czechoslovakia. They were all refugees. For me, it was easy - I knew too much about inhumanity not to recognise my place in the world when I was a student - studying law. My best friend's parents were transported to Auschwitz in a closed cattle car, and he - the only saint I ever met - was a conscript, facing death, but he refused to escape, even though he could have done so: he chose to share fate of his fellow prisoners, and had nothing but good words for his murderers until the day he died. Unlike me.

I am not a saint: I was drafted, I escaped, I fought the Nazis with gun in hand I was wounded, and this marked my place in the newly built Hungarian democracy after the war, which did not live to see its fourth birthday. Stalin and the Cold War killed it in its infancy and with it -- it seemed -- my future, like the future of so many other - nameless - Hungarians. He who has once put his life on the line for democracy is suspected of putting it on the line a second time, too. So I started my life all over again: I was a labourer, a welder, a metal worker. Then I was a farm manager. And after law school, I started studies at the University of Agriculture. My studies were curtailed by the revolution. This time, I was lucky again, I had witnessed too much inhumanity – so that after the revolution was crushed, I did not give up, and - together with my friends – we were seeking some kind of political way out, some kind of sober compromise, some kind of modus vivendi with the Soviet Union, so as not to repeat the terrible eight years that preceded 1956. Our attempt did not succeed. And then came my six years, which I thought at the time I owed to the devil. I was sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiracy and treason in a closed and secret trial, in a fast-track trial, without the possibility of appeal, along with István Bibó, Imre Nagy, the communist martyr Prime Minister, and fifty-six other political heroes. In prison, I learned English - not very well - but today I feel that this alone was worth having myself locked up. For one thing, it gave me the opportunity to get to know this wonderful country, which has given me so much, and, which I feel has no idea how wonderful it is. Because, after I was released after six years - which is how long a life sentence usually lasts in Eastern Europe - I made a living for more than twenty years translating the works of American writers - Faulkner, Hemingway, Styron, Doctorow, Updike, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, etc. - into Hungarian., which America reciprocated with the Wheatland Prize. After some welcome professional zigzags, I became a writer. I was fifty-two when my first work appeared in print. And after a few more political zigzags, I am now President of the Hungarian Writers' Union. Which only proves – whether I am a good writer or not - that while the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, but the road to Heaven is paved with bad intentions as well. Surely, this cobblestone road led me to the Parliament of the Third Hungarian Republic.

         My life, as you can see, is somewhat grotesque and surreal, which is commonplace in Central European countries, as the example of Vaclav Havel, the playwright President of Czechoslovakia indicates. Of course, some may now say that a man from afar can say whatever he likes. But the fact is thanks to God, and, my fate, I have learned to laugh at myself. After all, this whole thing, the fact that I am standing here before you now, is so improbable that I honestly do not know whether I should laugh or cry. Perhaps a happy smile would be most in place. After all, if I look around me, and believe, because I have to believe, that I am here among you and that this prestigeous univerity has bestowed an honorary doctorate on me.

And so, I have to admit that my journey no matter how meandering it was, it led me to the right place, which, in Central Europe is something that seldom happens  - three times in a lifetime.

Speech delivered by Árpád Göncz on the occasion of his honorary doctorate at Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana State, USA, May 1990