Books: Voices of Silence

On Sunday morning, Nov. 4, 1956, Budapest’s Radio Kossuth broadcast a message ending with the words: “To every writer in the world … to the intelligentsia of the world! We ask all of you for help and support . . .SOS!” Then, silence. The Hungarian revolt was being crushed, the writer-intellectuals of Hungary had spoken their last free words.

Inside Hungary, they have been silent ever since. Some were done to death. On the Soviet execution list (TIME, June 30), alongside Imre Nagy, stood the name of Miklos Gimes, ex-Stalinist journalist who became one of Hungary’s leading anti-Reds. Countless others are in prison, notably Hungary’s top novelist, Tibor Dery, 64; his latest book, Niki, the Story of a Dog, which is really a quiet indictment of the police state, will be published in the U.S. this fall. What has irked the puppet Kadar regime more and more in recent months is the “silent strike” of Hungary’s unjailed writers, who refuse to raise a pen in salute to the government. Kadar’s literary commissar is a hack essayist aptly named George Boloni, who is vainly trying to woo or to coerce the silent strikers. To preserve the illusion of literary activity, the regime reprints old books. Scoffs Journalist Paul Tabori, a longtime exile in Britain: “If they can find a poet of a hundred years ago who wrote ‘The dawn is red,’ he’s now hailed as a true Communist progressive.”

The voices that speak for the silent are some 200 Hungarian writers who streamed over the border to exile and freedom; they are currently busy enough to suggest a minor cultural renaissance. In London no fewer than a dozen books on this year’s publishing lists are by Hungarians (the most promising: a satire titled How to Be a Communist in 12 Lessons).

As notable as the exiles’ books—and as much of a tribute to man’s will to survive—are their accounts of their own and their friends’ experiences in Red and Nazi jails. In an article in the London Spectator, Journalist Tabori reported some of the strategems they used in order to stay sane:

¶ Poet George Faludi confessed to the Russians that he had been recruited as an American spy by General Edgar Allan Poe, Colonel Walt Whitman and Captain Henry Thoreau. Thrown into solitary, he composed a whole sequence of poems in his mind. Later he smuggled these poems out of prison by having released prisoners memorize twelve lines at a time and then recite them on a visit to his wife.

¶ Journalist George Paloczi-Horvath spent five years in a Communist prison; his teeth were knocked out, a rib broken and his face scarred with lighted cigarettes. He and his cellmates organized a miniature university, lecturing to each other on history, literature, geography, etc. One man knew two dozen operas by heart, sang all parts and reproduced the orchestral interludes.

¶ In the prison of Vac near Budapest, prisoners formed a remarkable literary cooperative. For writing paper, they stole toilet paper. They fashioned pens out of metal fragments and mixed blood and coffee grounds for ink. By pooling their memories, they produced portions of Ovid, Catullus, Vergil, Shakespeare and Whitman in the original Latin and English, then translated them into Hungarian. In the end, the Vac prisoners produced a handwritten, hand-bound, four-volume anthology of prose and verse.