594
PARTISAN REVIEW
The poet Endre Havas also failed as a useful object . He had fought in
the French resistance movement and the Hungarian People 's Republic , in
gratitude, appointed him cultural attache in its Paris embassy. He was re–
called to Budapest in 1949, arrested and tortured until he lost his mind.
They locked him up without trial, in the cell next
to
mine in Vic prison.
Day after day I heard the guards making fun of him; they howled with
laughter when he was taken
to
his weekly shower and screamed: "Comrade
Stalin, help deliver me from the hands of the Fascists!" Whenever they
found his cell dirty they kicked him. One day they gave him one kick too
many and he died on the floor.
It is probable that Mikl6s Szi.ics suffered the same fate. He had original–
ly been slated for trial with the' 'English group" because he spent his war
time exile in London. After the German defeat he became London corres–
pondent for the Hungarian Communist Party daily , "Szabad Nep."
His
arrest caused a sensation because his brother, Erno, was the number two
man in the AVH, after Gabor Peter.
He was treated most gingerly and the "English group" had long since
been disposed of when his turn came. He was used
to
unmask his brother
as an imperialist agent. Mikl6s died from beatings given him by his brother's
colleagues, and Erno put a bullet through his head. (Why the all-powerful
Lieutenant-Colonel fell into disgrace is not known . Perhaps he knew too
much; he had been in charge of the most important of the accused in the
Rajk trial, from the period of their torture and the giving of false promises
to them, to their eventual hanging.)
It is still not known how many communists were murdered in connec–
tion with the Rajk affair. I know of at least eighteen and there must have
been many more. They all died innocent, faithful
to
the Party and to Mos–
cow. Szonyi's deputy, Andras Szalai, whom the Horthy police had once
almost beaten to death, was to die at the hands of the communists as a
police informer; Endre Szebenyi and Colonel Endre Villanyi, both "parti–
sans," were hanged because, as non-Muscovites, they had occupied leading
positions in the police department and the economic police. The same
applied to Major General Bela Korondy, one of the few Hungarian resistance
fighters in the army of Horthy, who was accused of fomenting a military
revolt; Police Colonel Laszl6 Marschall, who had fought in Spain and in the
French Resistance movement and who was hanged as an imperialist spy. In
the interrogation prison in Mark6 Street I was still eating out of a tin plate
on which he had scratched the words, "Long live the Party."
With the exception of Rajk and some of the high ranking military, all
the murdered and jailed were Jews-in the big public trial the prosecution
made a careful point to stress their former Jewish names. The ratio was even
