Miklós Gimes: fighter for truth

IN signing the Open Letter to members of the Communist Party, I want to add my own vehement protest against the execution of Imre Nagy and his companions.

About Imre Nagy and Pal Maléter I do not need to say much, as their names are well known over here.

But I can testify from personal experience to the vast popularity of Nagy, from the time of his first premiership in 1953 throughout his period of enforced retirement and disgrace at the hands of Rakosi, culminating in the genuine and nationwide demand which brought him back in 1956.

To anyone living in the country the idea that he should need to plot for this end would have been absurd.

All that was needed was to stand for a sane economic policy and an end to deportations and illegal arrests, and to remain true to this policy in spite of condemnation, threats and browbeatings. Maléter’s courage during the uprising is also well known.

Demanded Rajk’s rehabilitation Fewer people here heard of .Miklés Gimes before the news of the executions was published. I knew him personally, and used to visit him for supper and discussions on the political situation in Hungary.

He was one of the top-ranking journalists in Hungary, and had been sacked from his job and expelled from the party because he had the courage to demand that Laszlo Rajk, executed in 1949 on a framed charge of complicity in a plot with Tito, should be cleared and publicly rehabilitated.

This was in 1955, after Bulganin and Khrushchev had paid their memorable visit to Belgrade and assured ‘comrade’ Tito that the charges against him had been based on forgery.

It followed inescapably that Rajk was innocent of the crime for which he had been hanged, but Rakosi, who had been responsible for this judicial murder, was stubbornly refusing to admit it, The whole country knew the situation, but few people had the courage io put the demand into words.

Speeches over their grave By the beginning of October, 1956, the flood of public opinion had risen so high that the party had to give way.

Rakosi had resigned, and the party and government leaders caused the bodies of Rajk and his three companions to be brought from the prison graveyard and reinterred in Budapest cemetery near the graves of the greatest national heroes. One after another they mounted the rostrum to make fulsome speeches about ‘our martyrs’, swearing that such things would never be done in Hungary again.

Tronically, it was among that vast crowd trampling the grass of the Kerepesi Cemetery that I last met Gimes. It was October 6. ;

I met him quite by chance, and asked him what he thought of ihe whole fantastic show.

He said: ‘The party had to do it. There was nothing else they could do; but people are saying that it is the same men who killed Rajk who are now making speeches over his grave.’

Taken back into party After being sacked from the party daily, Szabad Nép, Gimes had been given a job in Corvina, the foreign languages publishing house. It was a job far below his capacity.

There were in Budapest a number of cultural institutions which became a kind of dumping ground for people whom the party found it too awkward to have ‘in political or public life, and Corvina was one of them.

During the ‘Great Thaw’ of 1956 he was taken back into the party. This was a process which always took months.

When I asked him if he was back in the party yet he would say: ‘I am on my way.’ By October his return to Szabad Ne was also under consideration. Ultimately he got his pan 3 card back.

Another irony of the fate of this man was that he took. ; stand against the practice of conducting secret trials.

Public trial for Farkas In 1956 Mihaly Farkas, the former chief of security poh= who had been responsible for countless tortures and execution had been removed and discredited and it was known that & might be brought to trial.

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I heard that the trial might be secret. My immediate reacom was that this would be a calamity.

A fresh wind was blowing in Hungary. We were at te gefting rid of the foulness and injustice of the past. Wa mlm = = must do everything honestly and openly. No more hole-amé corner trials and executions.

When I saw Gimes he said: ‘This is the important things the Farkas trial must be public.’

At this time our party committee in the Radio put forwzn ® nine-point resolution, and one of the points was for a pubic trial for Farkas. :

Evidence implicated Soviet Union P I naturally supported this. But the whole: thing was quashet when our ‘political responsible’ (there is no English translarx 4 of this word) told us, at an information meeting, officicin 4 and quite candidly, that a public trial could not be alloxe: 4