GEORGE HOODS
585
The "Swiss Group" to which I had belonged consisted of Hungarian
students who had been trapped in Switzerland at the beginning of the
Second World War while at the universities of Zurich and Geneva. There
were perhaps a dozen of us , young, idealistic, the children of good bourgeois
families . The black and white world was very clear and transparent to us,
thanks to the Marxist theory we had absorbed . We were absolutely certain
that after Hitler's downfall the paradise of a classless, Socialist society would
rise on the ruins of fascist Hungary and we were happy that we were part of
this struggle in the secure haven of free, neutral Switzerland .
It was probably the most unworldly group in the entire international
communist movement in exile. With the exception of our leader, Dr. Tibor
Szonyi, a psychiatrist and a veteran communist, hardly any of us had ever
seen, face-to-face, a member of the proletariat to whose interests we were
dedicating ourselves. To us Stalin was the kindly father, kissing children and
patting heads, the personification of humanism, the guarantor of a just
future for the whole of mankind.
With the outbreak of the war, we began to organize the Hungarians
residing in Switzerland, informed them about conditions in what was now
our German occupied homeland. We waited for the great day when , as the
warriors of the Party, we could return to Hungary and build Socialism, ready
and willing to sacrifice our own lives in the cause. We did not know that that
was exactly what the Party would demand of us within a few short years.
The arrests of the " Swiss Group " began shortly after the conclusion of
what the Party called the "Year of Change." In 1948 the Hungarian com–
munists destroyed the peasant and bourgeois parties and organizations,
throwing their leaders into prison or driving them into exile. Finally they
even took on the Social Democrats; there was no opposition left in Hungary.
I did not mourn them, one cannot make an omelette without breaking
eggs, as the cliche has it, and the eggshells, the landowners, the clergy, the
opposition leaders who were compromised and corrupted by their alliances
with Horthy, the Hungarian fascist leader and with Hitler, belonged , I well
knew, on the dung heap of an evil past.
The Soviet communists announced in Moscow that their party had been
infiltrated by Trotskyite spies, traitors and saboteurs. Consequently it would
seem reasonable that the same had happened in the parties of Eastern
Europe . Ten years after securing his personal leadership in the Soviet Union
by his purges in the ' 30s , Stalin started to search for enemies within the
parties of the satellite countries in order to cement his hold there .
Thus Traicho Kostov, Secretary of the Central Committee , was hanged
in Bulgaria because he did not comprehend the necessity that his country be
exploited by the Soviet Union in the name of socialism. Tito of Yugoslavia,