Orbán, György: 'The reprisals were personalized and never stopped'

I remember very clearly them taking my father away in January 1957. I remember it was evening, we were having dinner, there was a rap at the door, and men in quilted jackets appeared with machine guns. There were a lot of them, about six or eight. The machine guns were very big and very real. I remember they searched the house, pulling the drawers out and emptying them. My mother has a story about this, so it's not what I remember: Granny was lying in the little bedroom and a great big what's-his-name went in there too. So she asked, 'Are you Russian?' The man was completely taken aback, I suppose, because he could see Granny wasn't afraid, and he just answered, 'No, no!' 'Well, you should be ashamed of your cheek then!' said Granny and wouldn't say anything more to him. My mother nearly had a heart attack. I remember my genuine amazement that my father didn't sort them out. A living legend had grown up around him-he was the great strong man, the champion-and instead of dealing with them, he put on his coat and went off as they bid. So that's how the arrest took place. There was a car like a jeep waiting outside. I remember the headlights and the men in quilted jackets. All the equipment was so Russian-looking.

What did your mother tell you children then?

She said he'd been taken to prison because of the revolution. It was perfectly clear to me that it had been a revolution. And that he'd been the national-guard commander in Nagykanizsa during the revolution and striven to keep order in the city. He warned the people and tried to keep order. Not a shot was fired whilst he was there, and no one was hurt in any way. Not even any secret police; that's really the way it was.

As a child, did you know what secret police were?

Yes, of course. We hated the secret police more than the Russians. The Russians had the excuse that they weren't personally responsible. We were told how many young kids there were among them, poor things brought such a long way from home and they were miserable. We knew how they were treated and what their lives were like. Whereas a secret policeman knew what he was doing. These things were natural; they didn't cause me a problem. I knew exactly and the knowledge is still valid today, that the great majority of people don't become traitors voluntarily. If they can, they remain within a normal, reasonable, morally acceptable framework. At most, people are afraid or nervous of the Russians, but a secret policeman is a traitor, who knows what he's doing and that's a very big difference. It's a general rule that one isn't obliged to be a traitor. That's why I consider it dangerous that the '56 tradition is being idealized at the moment, if I'm assessing correctly what's happening around me. I feel like a dinosaur in my environment, because people don't realize: the only tradition is that you don't have to like the secret police. You don't necessarily have to hate them, that's not what I'm saying, but you have to make a distinction. There are warders and there are prisoners. They aren't the same. There isn't just one memorial plaque.

How did your mother cope after the arrest?

She was beside herself for months. For a start, she didn't even know where my father was. She rushed around trying to find out where they'd taken him or whether he was alive at all. People thought all kinds of things at the time, for instance that he'd be taken straight off to Siberia. After great efforts, she somehow found out he was in Nagykanizsa. Then when they announced the sentence in the lower court, my father got the longest term-15 years. The other wives were sobbing, but my mother acted as if she was relieved. When they asked her why, she said, 'Because they didn't hang him!' So for the whole time she'd been terrified-I suppose with reason-that my father might be hanged. Afterwards, she told me she thought my father wouldn't have to serve the 15 years. In the end, the 15 became six and a half.

Who could you count on for help?

My grandmother was the biggest help. Although she was sick, she got out of bed because there was a problem. Her daughter had been left to fend for herself and they had to cope. She did all the cooking, the kitchen was hers. Help also came from my father's younger sister, who lived in Budapest. I've just received from the Historical Office one of the petitions for a pardon for my father that my aunt wrote in 1962, without my mother's knowledge even. It wasn't granted, but it shows that his side of the family made an effort as well. The third one who helped was Frigyes Hegedűs, a friend of my father's, who'd been an officer under his command in the war and later became a lawyer. He'd been a pentathlete too and he was president of the pentathlon association in the 1960s. He helped as much as he could. The greatest help we received came through him. At some point, perhaps in 1960, a party delegate from Kaposvár turned up unexpectedly with the chairman of the local council and said my mother had no right to live in the flat. "We'll send them out to the Cser," they said. Cser meant a place outside Somogyfajsz-3 km or so down a dirt road-where there was an "abode" of about 30 sq. m next to a sheep pen, consisting of a kitchen and a room separated off for the shepherd. Of course it had an earth floor. I don't know if it had electricity or not. I think this was the most dangerous attack made directly against the family. It makes you wonder why it was considered so important in Kaposvár that someone should come over specially to sort it out? By that time, my mother had enough sense to phone Frici Hegedűs at once from the post office, and then he found out that the mansion we were living in no longer belonged to the Somogysárd stud farm, but to the village council. So the apartment was no longer a tied residence, but a council flat, coming under different legal regulations, and so we could stay there. This attack on the family didn't come from the village. The chairman of the cooperative farm, a peasant farmer, came to my mother afterwards and excused himself, saying it wasn't his idea, he didn't want things like that, but well, what could he do? It was an evil attack. I suppose they looked round and wondered who there was in the county that they could ruin a bit more and stamp further into the ground, if possible.

Another, similar case happened when the younger of my two elder brothers finished elementary school. There was a new council chairman in the village, who was, shall we say, a communist. This always meant he wouldn't be a local man. This council chairman thought he'd cut off all our chances. My mother, on the other hand, figured out how to solve the secondary-school problem. She knew Sándor Kovács from Kecskemét, who'd been parish priest there before becoming Bishop of Szombathely. She went and asked if he could help, as her son hadn't been accepted at the state school, although he was a good student, so what would become of him? So Bishop Kovács recommended him for the Benedictine school in Győr. My brother started there in 1962 and so did I in 1965. The council chairman was quite shocked to find there was such a crafty, roundabout way for the lads to go to secondary school after all. They couldn't see how such a thing could be possible. To go on and study further, you needed a recommendation from your elementary school. I remember we often amused ourselves wondering which would be better for us at the Benedictine school: to be praised or to have them write as a punishment, shall we say, that we belonged to some clerical reactionary who knows what. So from then on, the school's opinion didn't really matter. It was clear to all of us that of all the strategies for a child of a family like ours, study came first. If someone's prevented from doing that, then his opportunities in life are adversely affected. By sorting out the Benedictine school for us, our mother had actually saved us from the greatest danger, as we were able to complete the eighth elementary-school class without a hitch and afterwards get into one of the best secondary schools in the country.

How did the people in your village behave towards a family that got into a situation like yours?

There's an important story that illustrates the situation well. I was in the sixth year of school, when a particularly pretty young untrained female teacher came. In the September when she arrived, we all had to recite our personal details, as we did every year: where our fathers and mothers were and so on. Everyone in the school knew all that was necessary about me, but not she. She asked me where my father was. Surprised she didn't even know that, I answered nonchalantly that he was in prison. I could see she was shocked so I added "for political reasons", to calm her down. I could also see she didn't understand and I knew I was "older" than she was in this respect. This was something I knew more about. We were on very good terms after that.

Everyone in the village grew their own food. We didn't have my father or his earnings-my grandmother's pension as the widow of a judge was our only income- but I can't remember ever going hungry. In fact, we ate goose in the autumn. It wasn't expensive there, we bought it for a few pence. I also remember, mainly at the beginning, that there'd be a knock on the door and when we opened it, there was no one there, just a basket of eggs or potatoes or vegetables. They knew ours was a family that had to be helped. I also remember times when a few market women would arrive from Nagykanizsa with baskets packed full of all sorts of things. These were wives of soldiers who'd served under my father. These women with big skirts would just unpack what they'd brought and leave. I am not even sure if my mother knew them personally. I lived like a prince-no exaggeration-that everyone guards, protects and loves. The fact that my father was in prison gave me status. I grew up with the idea that I didn't have to be ashamed of this; in fact, I was proud of it. I received full emotional and other support from the village. The first time a crack appeared in that world was when a craftsman, a stranger, was working at the mansion. I hung around him and the subject of where my father was came up. I answered with my usual confidence that he was in prison. At that, he made the brief comment, "What happened? Spat in their glass, did he?" I thought this was rude. Then I realized there were people who only saw the whole situation from outside.

I must say I remember a peaceful, well-balanced family, where I was extremely happy-just because the village was like it was and because my mother had calmed down. I think she set herself the goal of maintaining and protecting the family. She was very suited to this. We didn't sell anything-we didn't have to hock things. And we'd have had things to sell; we had Meissen porcelain and silver at home and I don't know what, though of course it was only a fraction of what we'd had at one time. It was part of life to run around outside barefoot in dungarees. (From May onwards, we'd go to school barefoot, the other children too, although not because we didn't have any shoes.) Then to go home, and there in the mansion were the fine, original oak parquet floors, beautiful carpets, period furniture, good pictures on the wall, and bookcases with good books. My mother said that I once took down an English book and read from it fluently according to the spelling. Not many of the children in that village faced the danger of reading English. It was as if I were constantly going through a sluice, back and forth. If I shut the door behind me, I took down a book and read. My grandmother read too, as did my mother; that was the atmosphere around us. There was a radio, which provided a great sense of success, as I had such a fine touch and plenty of patience for tuning into Radio Free Europe. It was difficult, as it was always being jammed. It was an old, long-range receiver with a green cat's eye and a blinking light. We listened to the radio in the evenings and everyone read.

So were you able to keep up your family values at home?

Before his arrest, my father had worked away from home for long periods, but at the same time, the feeling of family unity was very strong. It always seemed important that there should be a lot of us brothers and sisters: one girl and four boys. We also received confirmation of this from outside. We were taught at home that it was an asset for there to be so many of us together, and that was great. So it was a good thing to be an Orbán. I can remember dinner times lasting for hours. If the electric lights were out, say, we'd sit in the dark and tell stories. My mother told stories and so did I. Everyone did. We were treated very liberally. No one was expected to be any different from the way they wanted to be. We were allowed to say something different or think differently; there was no compulsory, standard world view. I never sensed there were separate adult subjects and children's subjects. There was one table, we'd spend a long time over lunch or dinner, and everyone had something to say. Of course, the children talked of their own concerns, but we could comment on everything. Poverty and defencelessness were at one end of the scale, but there were all kinds of values at the other. And that was the way I lived though all this. I learnt that such values could be very robust if applied to a situation. You couldn't give up, you had to carry on. Money could run out very quickly, but money didn't mean too much as such, just a momentary situation, not necessarily a long-term advantage. Of course they had to say that or instil it into us if they wanted us to survive.

There was a strange sort of penury at home in Somogyfajsz, a funny mixture of poverty and prosperity. One thing's for sure, there was no money in the house. My great ambition to buy two forints' worth of sweets at the shop was unattainable. The first time I earned wages was in the summer after my fifth year at school, when I went with other kids to work on the cooperative farm. We had to pull the sheaves together into a row behind the harvester, so they could be thrown up with a pitchfork when the cart came. I remember I received a wage of 72 forints for a week. I handed it into the family kitty and I was proud of being able to contribute. I hardly remember having new clothes. As there were a lot of us children, clothes were handed down. Then once we received a parcel from abroad. That's an interesting story. Once upon a time, the bathroom window of our flat in Nagykanizsa had overlooked a courtyard that had been made into a ghetto. That window was the last means of sending a message or throwing something down to those shut up in the ghetto. Links and some kind of assistance passed through my mother's bathroom window. One man called Szegő had come home from Auschwitz and then been resettled on the Hortobágy. He emigrated to Canada with his family in 1956. He found out from somewhere what had happened to us and sent us a parcel once a year. It was also important to have people watching out for us somewhere outside. So we weren't so completely abandoned that we had a feeling there was no one looking out for us. We got some really good, useful things. For instance, I got an anorak and boots with a zip-no one in the district had ever seen anything like them. That was also part of the strange, mixed-up situation-we were actually the ones with no wage earner, the poorest or almost the poorest. But at the same time, I had clothes that nobody else had and they couldn't have had them even if they'd wanted, because you couldn't buy them, only get given them. So there were lots of things money couldn't buy. The reason why the cakes were better in our house wasn't because we had more money, but because Granny was a good cook.

Did you ever think as a child that your father must have committed a crime after all, if he'd been sent to prison?

I have no vivid memories of anything like that. We definitely knew that he was in prison, and we knew the communists had taken him away. They picked out the best people, such as him, and took them away. A nice contribution to the difference between fantasy and reality came one time when I was visiting him. When we arrived, we were taken into a long hall, where we had to wait. From time to time, a guard would come in and read out who was to go in with the next group. When it was our turn, we were led into a high, rectangular room, like a corridor, which was divided down the middle by wire netting. We were arranged in a line in front of the wire netting, according to a list. There was nothing on the other side. And then on my left, on the far side, a door opened and the prisoners came in led by a guard, and passed by in front of us. I was shaken most of all by the fact that they wore striped clothes like convicts. Striped clothes were clothes for bad men, real prisoners. Somehow, that made it clear that they just did what they wanted with them. It hurt me. Then I could see he didn't recognize me. I also remember realizing very quickly that I had to do something, so that my father wouldn't get into trouble with my mother. I knew my mother; I knew she'd be cross. After all, she'd brought his children along. This was the present, the production-she wanted to show him, "I'm doing my bit whilst you're inside. You stick it out, because I'm sticking it out too. Here are the children!" But what was my father looking at, like a man dazzled? At my mother! I could see that my mother was starting to notice. But all this took place in a fraction of a second and I quickly started talking. 'I do the woodcutting,' I said. 'I've just been cutting a whole lot now.' I said that so he'd notice who I was. It worked, he understood, and accepted the help. And I was satisfied with myself that I'd sorted things out. Then they talked, but I wasn't very interested any more. I was watching the guard. I remember he was standing very close; it was awful. We couldn't even touch my father. We had to stand a certain distance away from the screen, and we couldn't see his face properly because of the wire mesh.

How long was the visiting time?

Very short. Fifteen minutes, I think.' I was looking forward to it immensely, so it was a big event, but it was soon over. The expectations, on the other hand, lasted a long time. We came up to Budapest, took the train to Vác, and from there went out to Márianosztra by bus. My mother had met some people she knew on the train, but it was an almost homogenous group that got on the Márianosztra bus. The adults talked about who'd come, who hadn't, and who hadn't come last time either, so they wouldn't be coming again. This must have been a very important side of the conversation because even I noticed it. When I think about the situation now, it was obviously about who could cope and for how long, how long people could hold on. The other recurring subject was the financial situation of the family. So to what extent were wives capable of maintaining the family whilst the husband was in prison? I understood that it was all about how long the families could hold together, in unity, outside. For people who could cope, life continued in the children, and if they couldn't cope and fell apart, the other side had won. The front line ran somewhere there-that's how I understood it at the time, and I think I understood accurately. As we got ready for the visit, I was worrying about whether I'd recognize him.

And did you?

Straight away. It was obviously him. I was so relieved that I knew it was him. At first I was afraid, then I was relieved that I'd picked him out, no matter how many people there were. But I'd gone into training at home. I'd deliberately looked at photographs, to see that he looked like in this place and that. There were rather a lot of photographs of him, lovely pictures from the films where he was stunt man for Ferenc Zenthe. Dressed as a Kuruts in Gábor the Student and Rákóczi's Lieutenant. There were no little chats together-come on son, let's look at your father-it never came up, my mother having anything to do with us not forgetting him. Letters would quite often come from the prison and we'd read those. And we could send parcels, but there were more restrictions on that.

Your father was released in the great amnesty. Did you know beforehand that he was coming home, or did he arrive without warning?

I've just received some of the documents from Zala County Archives, and it turns out that my father applied for a pardon twice while he was in prison, but the applications were swiftly rejected. So was the attempt my aunt made in 1962. So there wasn't any question of a fair procedure of any kind. There was still no sign of any turnaround even a year before the great amnesty. I remember well how they announced this particular 1963 amnesty; we found out about it from the radio. Everyone at home went into raptures. But there was terrible anxiety as well, as we didn't receive any notification for a long time. Somehow my father must have been among the last to be let out, about Easter time. And there was no official paper to let us know that either; we found out when my aunt's family phoned to tell us my father was at their house in Pest. There was a nice symbolic side to that. My grandfather, my father's father, was ninety-one years old and he lived to see his son come out of prison. They met, and he died six months later. He'd been waiting for his son.

I remember I was at school and my mother came into the lesson. She didn't even look at the teacher, just at me, and said excitedly, "Your father's been released," and then left. This happened right after the phone call. Interestingly, I didn't stand up and leave the class, I stayed in and the others looked at me to see what would happen. At the end of the lesson, the teacher said, "You can go home now." By the time I got home, there was a car there, Frici Hegedűs's-he'd brought my father home. We hadn't got a phone, we had to go to the post office, and by the time we got the news, my father was home already. He was just walking in the door. I looked at him and saw that he was a strange, pale colour. Like a sick person coming home from hospital. Of course, it was not all about me at that point.

What was it like being together again?

Everything changed all at once when he came home. The mythical image of him disappeared and someone suddenly moved in on us. It was very strange and not necessarily good. Everything became different. All at once, he didn't like something that had previously been quite natural, so he'd suddenly say no to it. We had to get used to a stranger and it was difficult. Actually, from then on, the rather idyllic, ordered family life we'd had became constantly riven with conflict. Up to then, my mother had acted alone-obviously with a woman's logic and a woman's ideas-but from then on, my father always wanted something that did not necessarily line up with what my mother wanted. So the family atmosphere became full of conflict and tension.

I think, basically, they came together again in a situation where it was very difficult to get used to each other again. Then they lived together in a great deal of conflict. I definitely think one source of it was that my father after his return didn't manage to continue in one normal constant job or career. The real source of the conflicts lay externally. It's hard, almost intolerable to bear people constantly interfering in a family's life from the outside, in a rough, mean way. By the time he got out, my father's nerves were pretty well worn out. I am pretty amazed he coped at all. They'd probably built up a very deep relationship with each other before, to be able to stick to each other then so heroically. It must have been very difficult. Of course, things were also affected for a time when my mother became ill. She had Grave's disease and even had an operation, perhaps after the birth of the youngest of my elder brothers. She always had a relapse when there was a conflict situation. This complaint has mental, psychological causes and involves depression, resulting in a sickness that's very hard to bear. They later had to move up to Budapest for this reason, as she was in a very bad state. My father can't have had an easy time with her either. So they coped under difficult circumstances all the way along, right to the end.

Did the reprisals against your father stop with his release, or was he restricted afterwards to?

He was immediately placed under police supervision. That meant he couldn't go to church or to public places at all. They took him back at Somogysárd. He just worked, then came home, and that was all. The police guard-house was in the next village, and he had to go and report in every weekend for 18 months, or something like that. For quite a long time. This had further significance because he'd sometimes ride home from work on a horse, and then on Sunday morning, he'd dress up nicely, mount the horse, and ride all through the village to go and report to the police. This produced quite the opposite effect, of a very gallant-looking gentleman riding through the village. The policeman would come at the crack of dawn and knocked on the window to see if he was at home. He must have been an eager beaver to do that, keen to deal with a class alien properly. It was strange, because nothing of the kind had happened to us all the six-and-a-half years he'd been in prison.

In 1964, the Somogysárd stud farm opened a summer riding school in Siófok and my father was allowed to be manager of it. He was very happy to do it and committed every effort to the task. That was in the initial period after prison, which were still filled with incredible hopes and everyone was infinitely happy. He could speak German and Italian, he'd learnt English to some extent in prison, and he taught foreigners to ride. He acquired a huge number of fans-they wrote letters to him from abroad and from everywhere-because he did his work excellently, and he was also a phenomenon, a strange figure from the remote past, of a kind that hadn't really existed till then in this country. His life in Siófok was sheer happiness. Frici Hegedűs took the pentathlon team down there before the Tokyo Olympics, and so he led the final equestrian training session. He was amazingly happy. He took part in an old boys' competition, there was a newspaper article about him, and there was a poster depicting a flourishing Uncle Náci. This lasted for two summers. Then it turned out things couldn't go on like this any more. It was like a bucket of cold water poured over my father and the family too, when it turned out there could be no question of reconciliation. I found out later from my mother that the Interior Ministry people from Kaposvár kept on at the farm's business director so long that he couldn't keep my father on any more. The director wasn't a malicious man; as far as I know. He tried to keep him on, but he couldn't. They let him stay in one place for two to two-and-a-half years. In 1966-I remember, I was in Győr too at that time-he was helped by acquaintances to get into the Győr Civil Engineering Enterprise as a labourer. The job was just a blind. He really taught fencing and shooting to the enterprise pentathlon team. He lived in the workers' hostel and got rather a modest wage, but he was doing what he liked and he was very happy. Hardly six months went by before they called him in and told him, "You've got 24 hours, pack your things and get out!" Just like that.

I know from my mother that [the secret service] "tried him out" to see if he'd cooperate, but by then he wasn't even willing to go to meetings at all, or keep up appearances. He said he'd been in prison, he knew what it was like, and there was nothing they could do to him-he wouldn't be a nark. Then with much difficulty he got back to Somogyfajsz, to the state farm, mucking out the stables and working on some poultry farm. Finally, he went to the Balatonboglár state farm as a vineyard labourer. His working life wasn't over. He had to carry on working to get a pension at all. I remember another story that was just typical. The Boglár farm wanted to do a business deal with some Italians and there was no interpreter. So the vineyard labourer dressed up nicely in an Esterházy check jacket and did the interpreting. He arranged what was necessary in Italian, then the next day he fell in line with his hoe again. All this back and forth must have been really miserable, I don't know how he stood it. Well, badly. It's no wonder his nerves were bad and he was stressed, and he had all kinds of problems, because the situation was absurd and there was no solution. And besides that, he had the pressure of not knowing whether he was causing trouble for those who were kind enough to offer him help or stand by him. In terms of finances and subsistence, he and his family were ruined. I think one reason why I or my elder brother got away with it was that we were already at secondary school by that time and not so totally dependent on the family. The situation for my younger brother was much more difficult as he was still at middle school, and he should have gone on to secondary school. I think his whole life was blighted by the tense, stressed, hopeless situation we were in.

Was your father angry or out for revenge?

I've never heard of direct, overt revenge, or any talk of it in my whole life. Not from my mother either. At home, of course, they made no secret of the fact that they deeply disagreed with the system. It was perfectly clear to us it was a hostile, foreign system that was ruining the country and ruining the people. We certainly received a double education, that's certain. And I'm very sorry for those who didn't, because I think it was harder for them during the later developments to understand why things had been that way. It was quite obvious my parents did not like those things, but at the same time, they were happy about everything that was a little bit better than it had been, that was improving.

Did your father tell stories at home about his arrest, his trial, and the years he spent in prison?

He told stories all the time. Not about the arrest or the trial, but about prison. They were positive stories, the main point usually being how people had behaved. I never heard from him, for instance, who the traitors were. Maybe it was mentioned that there were narks, but it was as if they were just part of the crowd. There were positive heroes mentioned as well, people he'd thought a lot of. For instance, the priests had been heroic and behaved very well. There were legendary figures, including my favourite, Bandi Atzél. For instance, when they were taken past the dark cells, he managed to push a piece of bread through the window somehow, then he went and stood right away by the door of the next cell, because he knew that would be the consequence of his action. My father always spoke of Bandi Atzél as a participant in the Olympics, a champion in humane behaviour and solidarity.

Did he keep in touch with his old fellow ex-prisoners?

I believe relations between them changed a lot after their release. When he came out, he'd memorized some seventy-something names and addresses, maybe a hundred, I can't remember exactly, and brought messages for them from the ones who were still inside. He'd learnt them, so he could take out as many messages as possible. There was enough room in his head for them all, although he could never repeat the whole list again later. Here on the outside, people were afraid; they were wary of each other, as they didn't know if they would cause people trouble by looking them up. So their contacts were very limited. There was no real way to keep in steady contact either, as he lived down in Somogyfajsz. I know he wrote loads of letters, to people in this country and abroad. Then in the midst of utter hopelessness, around 1978, they suddenly got a flat on Rózsadomb. It was an old acquaintance from Nagykanizsa, a Jewish lady, who'd found out what a state they were in down in the ruined mansion and offered to let them a flat of hers on Rózsadomb, in the basement of a villa, with one room, a kitchen and a bathroom. It was a hundred or so forints a month, some nominal sum anyway, just to help them. This story has a little more to it though. I think the woman's father had been a banker in Nagykanizsa. The family was deported to Auschwitz and this woman was the only one who made it home. After the war, she became a massive communist, just like some others who'd suffered a similar fate, but she was also a good friend of my father and mother and very kind to them-they were perhaps the only Christians she was on such terms with. She obviously remembered that my parents had once helped the people living in the ghetto. We'd left Nagykanizsa later and so had she. She lived in Budapest, and perhaps they knew something about each other, but they weren't in direct contact. And it's almost certain this woman did what she did to repay them. So all at once, we got away from Somogyfajsz, away from that owl-infested ruin, with no doctor in the vicinity, no water, and nothing else either, and came here. Of course, my father brightened up. He had a telephone, he had a pension by then, he invited his friends round, he really enjoyed being in Budapest. He got himself taken on, I think, as trainer for the Industry Ministry shooting team. He wrote a training plan. I later took my son shooting, and as it turned out, it was to the same shooting range where they said they were still using the training plan he'd written. He wrote it for moving-target shooting, which he'd never done in his life, but he knew all about that as well. He did it for a short while, then the Interior Ministry guys turned up again and they kicked him out. So once again he thought he was doing something meaningful, he could do something he was good at, and even in 1978 there was the apparatus in place to prevent him. After that he was a curator at the National Gallery. He died on his birthday, on February 10, 1981, aged 71. In his case, it can be shown that his documents were constantly in sight until the final moment and constantly being worked on. With due respect to the authorities, they didn't lose sight of him for a minute. Not even a minute. What did he do to deserve that? I don't know if it was the same for others. You obviously tend to think he is an exception. I have no one to compare him to, but the one thing I know is what happened to him. So from 1963 until his death, he was the target of constant reprisals.

I have to say there's a history subsequent to 1956 and that's the strand we know least about. The public certainly doesn't know that the reprisals were personalized and never stopped. Of course the methods changed, they could be said to have used soft dictatorial methods, although that isn't quite true. These are the things that not even those affected could really discuss among themselves, because it was all isolated incidents. But the ones who did it, in an organized way, they sat in an office, there was everyone's file, and they were never closed. It was a shameful period, and my father obviously found it hard to cope with being so defenceless. Whatever he tried to turn his hand to, nothing worked. I don't know how he could stand it. Badly. The end was the worst part of his story, worse than prison. He was an ambitious man with big aims and plans. He had the talent for it, and the references: Hungarian championships and a 5th place in the Olympics. He had something to measure his life against, all the things he could have done. If they really work up the history of 1956, one of the saddest chapters will be about these long, drawn-out reprisals, right up to death, never well known, but real enough, carried out with the pettiest bureaucratic techniques, with no place for appeals or lapses. As for me, out of all the documentation they dug out for me last year at the Historical Office, the paper that shook me most was just a chit: six lines to the effect that he still constitutes a danger to society and his file will be kept open under such and such a number, official gobbledygook from June 1963. If someone had refrained from writing that piece of paper, my father could have become something. He could have had a life.

Interviewer: Adrienne Molnár. Date: 1997.
Editor: Adrienne Molnár.
Translator: Adrian Bury.