My Happy Days In Hell by György Faludy

Author:György Faludy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141959603
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-03-22T16:00:00+00:00

My wish was fulfilled earlier than I had hoped. A few weeks after Rajk had been executed, Julien Benda came for a visit to Budapest. The author of The Treason of Writers, whom I knew from Paris, telephoned saying that he would like to see me and would gladly agree to an interview. We met in the hall of the Hotel Bristol, a hotel reserved mostly for foreign guests. He had aged a great deal since I had last seen him in Paris ten years before, but he seemed very happy and self-assured. An insignificant journalist sat next to him, and two men whom Benda believed to be interpreters – correct, in so far as they both spoke French, but they were also agents of the secret police. Benda told us what he had seen in town and then began to talk about the real purpose of his visit: the Rajk trial. He gave a pretty exact summary of what he had heard in France concerning Rajk’s alleged innocence and said that he hadn’t been quite sure what to believe. Then he went on to tell us that he had been talking to writers, lawyers, criminologists and politicians in Budapest, among whom there was not a single communist.

These men had openly admitted that on many questions they disagreed with the party. They went on to explain to him in great detail exactly what Rajk had done, and how conspiracy, espionage and treason had been proved beyond a shadow of doubt. On the basis of what he had heard he could, at last, make up his mind. The verdict passed upon Rajk was just; it was the duty of every state to protect itself against such criminals. He expressed his gratitude to the Hungarian government for having invited him. Returning to Paris, he would now write a book about it all to open the eyes of Western public opinion concerning the Rajk affair, and unmask those fascists who were spreading vile slander against the Hungarian people’s democracy.

While he was talking he brought down his heavy stick again and again on the thick grey carpet under our feet as if to give added emphasis to his words. Several times I was sorely tempted to interrupt and tell him a few facts. For instance, that all the people he had talked with were professional non-party members, as we used to call them, and that before meeting him they had been briefed by the party’s press department. I wanted to tell him that Professor Gyula Szekfü, whom he had seen, and who was the greatest living historian of the country, was blackmailed into obedience by the party. Should he disobey, they would deprive him of the expensive medicine with the help of which he prolonged his life from one day to the next. I wanted to beg him to write, not about Rajk but about us, who would sooner or later suffer the same monstrous fate, and who were being literally fried alive by

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