George
Faludy died at 95 on the first of last September.
He wrote a classic, now nearly forgotten in the
West, account of his early life under first fascist
and then communist tyranny, My Happy Days in
Hell. Since childhood, when I had met at my
parish families and clergy who– alongside
200,000 of their ten million compatriots–
had fled the defeat of the Hungarian uprising
in 1956, my imagination was taken by their dramatic
escapes. Faludy fled with them, but he had earlier
chosen in 1946 to return to his native land from
American refuge. He never shirked a challenge.
In his memoir, he notes that he, like his professorial
father, preferred to live outside of Hungary even
as he longed for his homeland. Too restrictive
for dreamers and idealists, Hungary, with its
extraordinarily complicated language and its ethnic
distinction from the Slavic and Germanic peoples
who surround its great plains, after WWI lost
half of its homeland. Isolated in the center of
Europe by terrain and language, it sits between
East and West, an Asian people who have endured
over a millennium at the continental center. This
nation commanded Faludy’s loyalty yet chafed
his cosmopolitan intellect and inquisitive nature.
He faced fourteen years in prison for an anti-Hitler
poem. He had fled, after its fascist Horthy regime
had drafted him in November 1938 into its army,
allied with the Nazis. In his late twenties, Faludy
was already an acclaimed poet, best known for
his translations of another jailbird rascal, the
medieval balladeer François Villon.
His obituary revealed his later life to be as
exciting as the period, from 1938 to 1953, described
in Happy Days. More about this afterlife
later. Reminding myself I had always meant to
read his autobiography, I hunted down a dog-eared
and spine-slanted library copy, the only one in
my vast city. The large volume, over 450 small-type
pages, showed, at least a few decades ago after
its English-language translation (rare from Hungarian
in that Kathleen Szasz’s 1962 rendering counters
sinuously the often jarring transfer from this
native language into English; many books from
Hungarian flop about like dying fish in their
clumsy anglicised gasps), that many readers had
preceded me in their journey through the fifteen
years that Faludy narrates. It took me a few weeks
on and off to finish it. Now, I only wish its
sequel published in 2000 was translated.
For readers of The Blanket, Faludy’s
experiences remind us of how most of us choose
to survive oppression. Perhaps flight lacks the
glamour of rebellion, but those who flee live
to fight on another day, as the cliché
goes. Chapter one opens as he recalls a dinner
party given for a British MP in the wake of Munich
and appeasement. Faced with the fact that the
West would let Hitler do as he pleased, the guests
in Budapest lamented their fate. One Catholic
poet fervently vows that he will stand up to the
Nazis, ‘even if he had to give his life for
Christianity, for social justice and for Hungary’s
independence.’ (11) The MP responds sadly
that when Hitler marched in, their heroic poses
would accomplish nothing but their arrests and
hangings– in secret so as to discourage martyrs.
He urges them all to flee. ‘After the war,
however, we could return and serve the ideals
for which, today, we would sacrifice ourselves
in vain.’ (12) The folks at the party, mostly
young, ignore the MP; they merely vent and rant
against Chamberlain. Two months later, all but
the Catholic poet had left Hungary, many for America
or England.
Supporting his poetic practice with his work as
a left-wing journalist, Faludy provoked the fascist
Arrow Cross. Briefly jailed, refusing to continue
to fight in its militia, Faludy escapes to France,
where however the Germans conquer and divide that
country next. Trapped in Marseilles, he and thousands
of refugees seek asylum.He boards a ship. But,
spooked, he then disembarks with his first wife.
The next day, that ship sinks, blown up by a mine.
Along with a colourfully drawn assortment of flim-flam
men and women of easy virtue. Faludy seeks asylum
in North Africa. The vagaries of diplomatic sovereignty
in French and Spanish territories there manage
to, as will be dramatised in the film Casablanca
a couple of years later, keep Faludy sporadically
secure. His limbo allows him excursions amidst
the Berber tribesmen. He describes their customs,
brutality, and grace through elegantly rendered
vignettes. His powers of recall, which appear
unbelievable at this stage of his tale-telling,
gain credence later when he tells us how in prison
he memorised poems he created in his mind–
his only way of recording them– and recalled
them daily. Incrementally, he added to his retentive
storehouse with verse, anecdote, and witness for
years on end. His ability to retreat into his
intellectual and artistic mnemonics allowed him
the chance to endure within himself. There he
cultivated the fortitude to survive the slow starvation,
of a less than a thousand calories a day, inflicted
upon him and his fellow prisoners left in the
open, under communist hard labour, sixteen or
even twenty hours a day.
Years prior to this fate, he does keep notebooks.
Space here prevents me from sharing details of
this African stint, but his impromptu vacations
liberate him from his European confinement, erotically,
ideologically, and practically. Through the intervention
of FDR from abroad and briberies in Morocco, he
reaches America. His time there is only summarised,
perhaps for security reasons I suspect, but he
serves in the U.S. Army and as secretary-general
of the Free Hungary Movement. Yet the dazzling
States cannot quench his longing to return to
Hungary.
Faludy, although no idealist, cannot rest abroad
while his motherland seeks guidance. He offers
his social-democratic convictions to help heal
his nation. A ‘radical liberalist,’
to borrow a term translated from an Hungarian
entry about him, Faludy suspects the broad front
that the Hungarian Communists have constructed
to hide behind. Before they seized total control,
communists had avoided even calling themselves
‘socialists’; they allowed Faludy’s
social-democrats the term, the better to mask
the ‘salami tactics’ of party leader
Rákosi, who kept in touch by direct radio
contact, hidden in his villa, with Stalin himself.
‘Stalin’s best pupil’, Rákosi
boasted he sliced off his opponents like chunks
of salami. (In November 1945 free voting, a bourgeois-peasant
Smallholder majority won 57%, social-democrats
17.4%, and communists 17%.) The Party favours
returned exiles from Moscow; Hungarian cadres
had fled well before Hitler’s forces had
seized direct control of Hungary away from the
outflanked Horthy regime in 1944. Newly promoted
functionaries, often within the police and petty
bureaucracy, carry familiar faces. Many had served
Horthy and the Arrow Cross. They changed allegiances
at the collapse of fascist-Nazi terror. Repeatedly,
prisoners recognise a guard or kapo who had beaten
them a few years earlier. The tormenter’s
uniform changed, not the man inside the tunic
and beneath the steel helmet.
The sections that follow, about halfway through
Faludy’s book, energise such testimony. While
extensive first-person attestation exists from
those who have survived gulags and prisons [note
1], we have to date less information on
how those on the outside managed to persist amidst
purges, show-trials and betrayals. The compromises
required for mundane survival under totalitarian
regimes lack the drama inherent within experiences
of the incarcerated. Although this portion of
his autobiography comprises only a small fraction,
Faludy unmasks the evasions and lies that those
under totalitarianism manufacture under the People’s
Democratic Republic that silences democratic opposition
in the name of the dictatorship of the proleteriat
by May 1949.
Emigrating into this repressive society, Faludy
wryly summarises its necessity for the daily lie.
Viewing a portrait of Stalin, black-haired at
65, Faludy thinks to himself: ‘this is socialist
realism.’ As his colleagues at the leftist
newspaper disappear into the maw of the AVO, the
secret police, Faludy and his Bolshevik-loving
girlfriend find themselves at odds with each other
and with their ability to act in any way approaching
truth. The shiny black beetles, the AVO cars,
follow them about, a Kafkaesque touch, and one
reminding us that when Orwell wrote 1984 at this
same time, he merely reversed the last two digits;
the time of Big Brother, he assured us, was now.
Faludy refuses to prostitute his talents to edit
an anthology of anti-clerical writings for the
regime. His old friends, including an avuncular
comrade in the Party dating back to the Red Terror
of the 1919 Béla Kun communist dictatorship
that had briefly taken control of Hungary, find
themselves made redundant and then eliminated
under the hand of those communists who had returned
from Moscow after 1945 and who edge out those
who had worked in the underground or had fled
to the West to work for the party during the fascist
years. No loyalty endures for the Party.
Here, no one is innocent. (Charles Rati in his
new study of Washington and Moscow diplomacy vis-a-vis
1956 Hungary notes that 7% of all Hungarians were
arrested 1950-53; 4% were imprisoned.) Winston
Smith would have recognised Budapest in 1948.
Without the constant renewal of enemies, class
war, and the crushing of artificially concocted
dissenters, the Party cannot justify its reign
on behalf of the People’s Democracy. The
peasants in whose name the intellectuals rule
are promoted by those under Moscow’s control.
This proletariat is elevated to power, but they
cannot run the factories or govern the bureaucrats.
Those capable who could have done so, communist
or otherwise, have already been purged.
Faludy enters this oppressive atmosphere, Faludy
muses, with typical erudition, of the Roman intellectuals
who speak out against the corrupt imperial power,
who then enjoy with self-conscious attention their
leisurely last feast before being compelled to
take to their bath and slit their wrists at the
Emperor’s behest. Waiting for the inevitable
black car, Faludy finds that when in 1950 it comes
to spirit him off to AVO headquarters at 60 Andrassy
street [note 2], it brings
him into– again reminding one of Kafka and
Orwell– ironic inner peace and welcome mental
liberation.
Classically trained, Faludy takes inspiration
in another gadfly imprisoned for his refusal to
kow-tow to thugs. Socrates taught him ‘that
man can identify himself with the laws of his
country and its official moral outlook only if
the daimon inhabiting him approves’.
(296) Faludy realises that his girlfriend, Suzy,
and those who await the coming of the Marxist
messiah have grown up ignorant of Christian ethics
or a liberal-arts education. The ersatz religion
of Marxist-Leninism has bestowed upon these faithful
a perfect secular substitute:
[S]eminars to take the place of religious
education and party meetings to take place of
mass, the rigorous fasts of the five-year plan-loan
and the shortage of food to take the place of
Lent, demonstration instead of procession, public
self-criticism instead of confession, and instead
of Abraham’s bosom the promise of an earthly
paradise, the constantly retreating mirage of
which was painted on the horizon before the
ragged armies marching across the desert. (296)
Yet, Faludy continues, the church is an ‘eternal
antithesis of the party,’ bound to disappoint
the believer who ‘unconsciously seeks the
church in the party’. Kant’s categorical
imperative drives Faludy towards the secular,
existential form of morality that sustains him.
He is not a believer per se, but a humanist. He
must act towards others in the same way that he
would want others to act towards him if the roles
were reversed and the rules were universalised.
The Socratic daimon must reject the sureties of
the church and state; ‘the more loyally
the faithful serve the ideals of communism, in
fact, the more inevitably do those ideals afflict
them with inner conflict and nervous disorder’.
(297) That longtime friend and Béla Kun-era
communist activist is imprisoned in a cell near
him; he is driven insane and just before his jaw
is shattered by a truncheon, he shouts out in
one last desperate attempt to win freedom–
again echoes of Winston Smith– that he loves
Stalin. This is a statement so forced that not
even his fellow prisoners, or their guards, bother
mouthing it. With his last utterance before madness
takes over and atrocity silences his voice forever,
he still tries to convince his torturers that
he is innocent. Faludy hears him. Any attempt
to change the minds of his AVO interrogators is
futile. He gives in eventually, after the customary
months of mind-games, threats, and beatings. Faludy
signs the ridiculous trumped-up charges that he’s
a Titoist-Yank spy. If not, Suzy and his mother
would have been brought in to the cell next to
him; he would never see them again, of course,
but he would hear their screams.
Faludy reflects upon so many faithful Bolsheviks
he had known on the outside. After months of desperate
attempts to argue their innocence to their jailers,
who knew of their innocence, all of these Party
faithful had capitulated. Two months of torture
silenced them. Faludy justifies his own decision
to sign the farcical allegations of his espionage
for the capitalists (his stint in the U.S. damning
him prima facie) with the fact that his acquiescence
will save him from, under further torture, accidently
revealing the names of other innocents who in
turn will be dragged in by the black cars to this
same cellar. Faludy had been jailed in part due
to the diary kept by a harmless, rather simple-minded,
devotedly Bolshevik acquaintance with an unrequited
crush on Faludy; she could not stop naming names
and imagining plots up to the night of her own
arrest.
The hypocrisy of the People’s Republic: this
Faludy damns. He understands that his stalwart
communist friend thought that after a polite chat
the AVO would confess their error and let him
go, with apologies. Another prisoner, arrested
in mix-up with another of the same name, is tortured
for months. The error acknowledged, the innocent
man, nevertheless, cannot be released. The State
would be caught admitting its mistake. The condition
of the prisoner would prove ineradicable evidence
of the State’s cruelty against the guiltless.
Instead, he was told, for the greater good of
the People’s Democracy he must remain incarcerated.
This topsy-turvy logic inspires Faludy with this
analogy. ‘But what happens to a believer
who discovers in prison that the priests of his
church are cynics, his inquisitors heretics, his
executioners pagans? He is faced with an appalling
alternative: either he relinquishes his faith,
or he sacrifices his sanity. Obviously the majority
will defend themselves against going mad and will
betray the faith that has betrayed them, so that
the false accusation of heresy finally becomes
true; not because the believer accepts the accusations
brought against him as true, but because he discovers
that his accusers know it to be false.’
(287) Truly an Orwellian Room 101. The forced
confession of his friend, in turn, goads his interrogators
further in forcing a confession out of Faludy,
implicated naturally in the desperate ravings
of a doomed man, a true believer, a communist
loyal to Stalin and his henchman Rákosi
until his last breath. An excerpt from Faludy’s
‘Ode for Stalin on his 70th Birthday’:
‘Your heroes you have hanged upon the
gallows / or pistoled in their prisons in disgrace;
/ you’ve spit upon the brave, whom courage
hallows, / and stamped with muddy jack-boots on
their face.’ Images of Ingsoc again,
Big Brother’s boot stamping on the face,
forever, the symbol of the eternally paranoid
regime.
Sentenced to death one afternoon, Faludy discovers
the next morning that since ‘as it is prescribed
by Soviet etiquette’ that his arms were not
broken before he is led to the gallows, that he
will be spared by a twenty-five year sentence.
Why? “‘Do you know why you have been
brought in here?’” he is asked. Faludy
shrugs. The captain explains: ‘It doesn’t
matter, he continued tolerantly. “It’s
enough if we know”.’ (275)
The rest of the book details his two jailings,
amidst social-democrat and communist comrades,
and then at a mountain camp for 1,300 intellectuals.
After a train ride that more than one of his fellow
prisoners recalls repeats what they had experienced
at Auschwitz and Dachau five years earlier, they
find themselves cargo dumped out under the guns
of the AVO– many of whom had worn other insignia
when they served the Gestapo on behalf of the
Arrow Cross. Thousands of prisoners are condemned
to deforest a primeval hillside. They build a
quarry for an ill-conceived public-works project
that stands for so many idiocies that destroyed
the ecology of Central and Eastern Europe in the
name of technological advancement and the triumph
of the mechanical gods of materialism. However,
anarchism among the intellectuals spreads soundlessly,
and the labour soon undermines, literally, like
the Bridge over the River Kwai, the foolish edifice.
If you have read Anne Appelbaum’s history
of the gulags, or accounts from Russian survivors,
the tales that Faludy tells will prove depressingly
familiar. What makes the final two hundred pages
engrossing and compulsively readable– more
than what has preceded them even– is the
wealth of detail Faludy offers, given his proven
skills of memory. He can be free in prison. Here
at last, confined in this microcosmic communist
dictatorship, he can think without fear of punishment.
He, already convicted, now enjoys ‘happy
days in hell’. He will sustain his beaten
and starving body through mental energy and soothing
daydreams. Facing inexorable starvation by slow
degrees over the next three years– chronology
understandably vague much of the time as they
are cut off from the outside world– he and
his fellow inmates conspire against tyranny ingeniously
and relentlessly. Fittingly, a collection of his
poems would later be titled ‘Learn This
Poem by Heart’, a task enjoined by Faludy
upon his fellow inmates to ensure that his poems
could perhaps survive his own death in prison.
Here is an example composed from this time in
a poem published in 1983.
Learn
by heart this poem of mine,
Books
only last a little time,
And
this one will be borrowed, scarred,
Burned
by Hungarian border guards,
Lost
by the library, broken-backed,
Its
paper dried up, crisped and cracked,
Worm-eaten,
crumbling into dust,
Or
slowly brown and self-combust,
When
climbing Fahrenheit has got
To
451, for that's how hot
it
will be when your town burns down.
Learn
by heart this poem of mine
Doomed men themselves ‘worm-eaten, crumbling
into dust’ they were ordered to build, but
they determined to doom the quarry. Faludy constructs
another analogy. The forced-labour camp represents
the triumph of communism. Talents from these intelligent
men wither. Violence rules. Sensible production
that would truly help the People’s Democracy
in the name of war-weakened men and women desperate
for better working conditions and tangible goods
of value: irrelevant. Only work that will weaken,
torment, and mentally degrade these prisoners
is commanded. Conditioning to communist ideals
happens with the mere offer of a handful of beans.
This is more practical and realistic. ‘Outside
they still tolerate family ties and separate apartments
and permit a man to have two suits of clothes.’
Inside the camp, no need for newspapers, books,
watches, or luxuries that detract from the common
good. Not even rumours can be shared. As with
Goldstein and O’Brien from Orwell’s
dystopia, ‘even subversive action has become
a state monopoly’. (429) The iron curtain
shrinks. Barbed wire fences suffice. Inside prison,
a perfect communist utopia: no culture allowed,
no science applied, no propaganda needed. Outside,
only with the global victory of communism will
equality, utter reduction to bare essentials,
arrive.
Furthermore, Faludy elaborates to his fellow inmates,
this psychological advancement towards the final
stage of communism proceeds. Inside the camp,
an ideal has been reached. Power controls the
incarcerated– by violence, cunning, threats,
and above all a constant scrutiny by informers.
‘But at the same time they have taught
us to think. Their moral effect is like nitric
acid separating the gold from the filth. Because
of it scoundrels become even worse scoundrels,
rotten to the core, but the gold of honour remains
unchanged, or rather, receives an added sheen.’
Inside prison, Faludy encourages his fellow
inmates by education– recalling Long Kesh
I might add and so many other ‘Universities
of Freedom’ in which humans must rely upon
only recall in the censorship of external media
and the reduction of social exchange– so
prisoners support each other by the tales they
tell, the dreams they enter, and the determination
they create to survive.
Near the moment of liberation, six months after
Stalin’s death and in the wake of the escape
of one prisoner to the West who tells Radio Free
Europe about the secret camp, Faludy’s condition
reminds me of the proverb that ‘a longtime
prisoner grows to love his cell’. He fears
losing his intellectual freedom. Inside the prison
he could be brave and honest; outside, he would
have to again withdraw within himself if only
to protect his family. Inside jail, he committed
his reminiscences to memory; outside, when he
wrote them down, his flat could be searched; ‘it
would be impossible to put down my experiences
on paper and my unwritten memories would weigh
on me like the fear of a new arrest’. (465)
(By the way, more than once Faludy hears of those
released from prison only to be rearrested by
the AVO on other trumped-up charges the moment
they walk free.) Inside, he has forged mental
refinement and philosophical ornament. Outside,
he fears the people’s democracy which has
stupified and desensitised its citizens.
‘Formerly,
in the people’s democracy, and here in prison
I had always felt like a researcher who had renounced
for a certain time the pleasures of life and had
descended in a steel globe to the bottom of the
sea to observe the life of the deep-water monsters,
who would one day report his scientific experiences
objectively and exactly, though without concealing
his horror of them.’ Facing his release,
he feels as if the bathyscope has broken away
from its anchoring chains and will never be lifted
up again from the ocean depths. ‘I would
have enough air and food to last me until I died
but I should never have the opportunity to report
my findings. I should have to live in the globe
until I died, observing the polyps, sharks and
algae about which I knew everything there was
to know, until I went mad with boredom and disgust’.
He had thought in prison that he would redeem
himself, whether he emerged alive or was dumped
into the lime-pit which had been prepared for
all the inmates, once their quarrying had ended.
‘But now I would have to exist, neither
dead nor alive, in an alien world.’
A few pages later, his tale ends as Faludy trudges
out of the camp. His obituary revealed that his
life continued, however, along labyrinthine paths.
Curiously, he never identifies himself as Jewish
in his book; he fled in 1938, the obituary explains,
in part due to this reason. A poem admits only
this much: 'My aunt cut her neck with a razor
blade. The rest died in the war in gas chambers.
My sister floats upon the icy Danube.' She had
been shot and thrown in the river, still alive,
by the Arrow Cross. In 1956 Faludy was a delegate
from the Writers’ Conferences to the workers’
councils who controlled the rebellion [note
3]. Another exile followed. France, Algeria,
Britain, Italy: he lived many places. He taught
in the 1960s and 70s at Columbia and in Toronto.
A Nobel nominee, he resided two decades in Canada
until 1989 allowed him to return to a free Hungary.
These are the mundane facts. Looking up more about
Faludy in Wikipedia, a few more surprises emerged.
Namely, after his second wife, and former girlfriend,
Suzy, died in the 60s. ‘In 1963 Eric Johnson
(26), a US ballet dancer and later a renowned
poet in contemporary Latin poetry, read the novel
[note 4] My Happy Days
in Hell, which captivated him, and he decided
to seek Faludy in Hungary. He started to learn
Hungarian and found Faludy three years later in
Malta. He became his secretary, driver, translator,
co-author and partner for the next 36 years. In
2002, Faludy married a 26 year old poet, Fanny
Kovács. Johnson left for Kathmandu, Nepal,
and died there in February 2004, at the age of
66. Faludy published poems written jointly with
his wife.’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Faludy
Another Wikipedian has amended this: ‘Eric
Johnson drove a motor vehicle only once in his
life. That was a very ill-fated adventure in Korea.
He did not drive George Faludy anywhere in their
37 years of association.’ This relationship
certainly proved Faludy’s powers over his
admirers. He found attraction to a beckoning soul
beneath its gendered shell. Hints of this bisexuality
surface throughout the memoir, whispered beneath
its 1962-era air of discretion. Johnson, who fell
in love with Faludy through only his words, travelled
in 1964 to Budapest and demanded to be allowed
to stay there to learn Hungarian! Three years
passed before Johnson would actually meet Faludy
face-to-face for the first time. His compatriot
George Jonas tells us more about Johnson and Faludy:
http://www.georgejonas.com/recent_writing.cfm?id=179
Faludy loved to tease. He appeared, nearly naked,
wild grey mane, piercingly dark eyes, and sixty
years older than his third wife, with her in the
Hungarian edition of Penthouse. An earlier
episode may remind Blanket readers about
a certain monument once on O’Connell St.
After his return in 1946 from America: ‘He
was among the unknown vandals [citation needed]
who destroyed the statue of Ottokár Prohászka,
a Hungarian bishop who is respected by many but
who is often considered antisemitic. [1] He only
confessed his participation forty years later.
He is condemned by Hungarian nationalists for
this even to the present days, considering it
an extremist attack on the strong Catholic traditions
of the country.’ (Wikipedia, footnote and
brackets in original citation.)
Faludy remained an iconoclast. He never capitulated
to the comfortable subterfuge. When the communists
fought for Hungary, he admired their courage;
when they attained power, he charged, ‘they
were just whores’. In a 6 June 2006 interview,
translated on hvg.hu, he predicted that literature
would not survive this century. True to form,
he taught us from his classical mentors.‘In
the US, people read 35 to 40 per cent fewer books
now than 20 years ago. And the numbers continue
to fall. Of course, we've seen this before. Around
350 AD, people stopped reading. At the time of
Marcus Aurelius, there were 88 libraries in Rome.
Under Constantine the Great there was only one.
I think we stand before a great crisis, which
is consuming literature.’
However, with a renewed interest of Faludy’s
works in his native land, he proved that a prophet
could be honoured where he was born. He deserves
acclaim outside Hungary as well. He reminds us
that what’s become a cliché of ‘speaking
truth to power’ still expresses a resolution
we must follow. I close my essay in the hope that
you will now seek out more about this courageous,
cantankerous, memorable man— and belie his
own dark predictions for the future of literature.
1.
See From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal
Accounts of Political Violence and Repression
in Communist States. Paul Hollander, ed. Wilmington,
Delaware: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2006.
Table of Contents: http://www.isi.org/books/content/384toc.pdf
Hollander also fled Hungary in 1956. The fact
that a conservative think-tank publishes this
anthology does not diminish the importance that
such an anthology, the first of its kind, establishes
in helping to redress the imbalance between vast
scholarship that investigates Nazi-era accounts
but which, until the opening of Soviet archives
and declassification of Cold War files, has been
largely lacking on the other side of the century’s
blackened totalitarian ledger.
2. 60 Andrassy street is now the Museum of Terror,
a memorial in the building that housed first the
Nazi- fascist torturers and then the AVO secret
police’s dungeons. When I visited Budapest
in 2003, my itinerary did not allow me a chance
to visit the museum, but my hosts informed me
that the ‘socialist’ politicians then
in power were lobbying to close the museum. It
had only been open a short time, but already as
in many formerly totalitarian nations, the ghosts
it raised of a morally corrupted past of compromise,
pain, and betrayal have haunted the guilty still
living.
http://www.museum.hu/search/permanent_en.asp?IDP=1807&ID=952
3. An acclaimed account has just been published
for the fiftieth anniversary of the uprising.
Victor Sebestyen. Twelve Days. London: Weidenfeld
& Nicholson; New York: Pantheon, 2006.
4. The contributors in Wikipedia label this an
‘autobiographical novel’. Comparing
Irish WWII counterparts Black List Section H,
Francis Stuart, and Nine Rivers to Jordan, Denis
Johnston, perhaps this is an appropriate label.
A sequel, After My Days in Hell, appeared, to
date only in Hungarian, in 2000. The Kossuth Prize,
the leading literary award in Hungary, was awarded
him in 1994. He was fêted there, where he
continued to play the Socratic gadfly to the new
regime
