Johanna Granville

Insult to Injury: The Children of 1956

Zsuzsanna Körösi and Adrienne Molnár: Carrying a Secret in My Heart: Children of the Victims of the Reprisals after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. An Oral History.
Budapest: Central European University Press. 2003. 195 pp. Illustrations and bibliography.

 

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Chapter Four ("Stigmatisation") is one of the most moving. Here the reader grasps the profound and lasting effect of the social stigmatisation the children endured: low self-esteem. "The consequences of 1956, and the situation it landed us in, left its mark on everything," György Fenyőfalvi told Zsuzsanna Körösi.

We were not allowed to do this, we were not eligible for that. When something was being handed out, I couldn't reach for it first. I had to wait until all the others had got theirs first. This feeling of always having to stand at the end of every line was also manifested in not being thought capable of a certain level of performance. That is, I came from a context in which no more could be expected (p. 60-1).

This stigmatisation at school could to some degree be offset at home if the mother instilled a strong sense of self-worth in the child and communicated openly with him or her, the authors explain. Unfortunately, many mothers were too harried trying to put food on the table that they often lacked the time and energy to provide emotional sustenance for their children. Growing up in poverty can have a devastating effect on a child's self-esteem as his parent(s) come to see him as just one more mouth to feed. Struggling themselves to withstand the stigmatisation, some mothers turned to alcohol to numb the pain, thus further hampering their ability to provide proper parenting for their children. Others became ill and needed frequent hospitalisation. A few even put their children into state institutions. László Földes was put under state care for five years (from age four to nine).

It was real suffering. It was really, really bad. I am not saying that we were beaten, although there was the occasional smacking.
I simply felt miserable all the time and I couldn't wait to be allowed home (p. 77).
Körösi and Molnár show how the child's ability to cope with the discrimination and ostracism in the wider community was a direct function of the degree of openness within the family. Children from families of the intelligentsia where the revolution was freely discussed and the father's presence kept alive tended to have a sturdier self-concept. These include Katalin Litván, daughter of the 1956 Institute's director and founder György Litván, Kinga Göncz (daughter of former Hungarian president Árpád Göncz), László Donáth (son of Ferenc Donáth, a close supporter of Imre Nagy who was deported to Romania), and László Tihanyi (son of Árpád Tihanyi, a teacher of Hungarian literature in Győr).
Unfortunately, many of the interviewees from working class families were forbidden from talking about their fathers and the Revolution. The topic became taboo, either because it was too painful for the mother, or because she felt guilty about perhaps causing her husband's arrest when she was interrogated about him, or because she herself didn't fully understand why her husband had been imprisoned or killed. This made it harder for children to grasp why they were being treated in school as if they were inferior. Lack of information tended to increase the sense of helplessness and fear. This censorship, imposed from without, soon metamorphosed into permanent self-censorship, as the children learned to "carry a secret" in their hearts.

We didn't like talking about this to anyone. It was like having an inferiority complex. It was as if we had been branded. We didn't even like hearing about it,

Erzsébet Pekó recalls (p. 63). Körösi and Molnár report that fourteen percent of those they contacted refused to be interviewed, stating that such an interview would "reopen old wounds and seriously disturb them emotionally" (p. 7).
Yet the passage of time, by itself, does not heal wounds. Psychotherapists encourage their patients to allow traumatic events from childhood to rise to conscious awareness where they can be discussed and analysed freely with adult intelligence, and "defused" - like a bomb squad does to a bomb. How sad that even now, more than a decade after the collapse of the communist regime, these second generation victims as adults in their forties and fifties, have never come to terms with their fears and articulated them!
Prison visits revealed the degree of openness in the family. Some mothers insisted that their children come along and talk with their father. Other mothers forbade them to come, believing it would upset the children, or lied, saying that children were not allowed at the prison.
In some cases the father had too much pride and refused to let his children see him in striped clothes like a common criminal (p. 32).
This is selfish, short-term thinking. Körösi and Molnár generally opine that more openness is healthier for a child's psyche. Just as a nation needs to preserve its history, so children need to preserve memories of their parents for the molding of identity. As adults, they inevitably pose questions: Did my father love me? Why did he leave me? Visiting their fathers in prison, as well as writing letters and sending parcels, provided validation that would prove invaluable, especially for those children whose fathers never returned home alive. Körösi and Molnár provide interesting details about the regulations concerning letters: length was restricted to 32 lines and nothing about politics or prison conditions was permitted. Each letter had to contain the censor's stamp of approval ("Ellenőrizve"). Consequently, the convicts wrote in Aesopian language in microscopic-sized letters. Occasionally convicts could smuggle longer, revealing letters via released prisoners or lenient prison guards. In one case a convict, facing his own execution, managed to sew a long letter into the seams of his sheepskin jacket, which was returned to his loved ones after he was dead (p. 33). Families showed great ingenuity as well. One interviewee, Zsuzsa Mérei, reminisces that her father and the other convicts were making a radio in the prison. Her grandmother helped by baking tiny radio parts (diodes) into a fruitcake that would be sent to the prison in a parcel (p. 37).
In Chapter Seven ("Together Again"), Körösi and Molnár illustrate the difficulties families had in adjusting to the fathers' release from prison. In many cases the children - some now teenagers - had not had adequate time to prepare for the shock. Often they did not recognize their fathers physically, who were thin and balding, with poor eyesight. The change in lifestyle was sudden. They had to get used to having a disciplinarian around; they lost some of their freedom. They also needed to adjust to the shifts in their fathers' personalities. Before they had looked up to their fathers as protectors. Upon release from prison, however, many convicts were spiritually broken and desperately needed validation from their wives and children. Since the latter had themselves suffered so deeply, they missed the stronger man they had once known. Regrettably some children lost respect for their fathers who were now so psychologically needy. Moreover, some wives felt uncomfortable sharing power, and divorce after the convicts' release was not uncommon. Readjustment was swifter, however, in families where communication had remained open throughout the years of
imprisonment.
One will never know how many brilliant inventors, writers, poets, musicians, industrialists, and entrepreneurs Hungary lost due to the inane decision to bar innocent children from higher education and intellectually challenging jobs. Moreover, the repression of the families of the victims of the 1956 Revolution was a fatuous policy because it kept the Revolution alive. Chapter Eight ("The Turnaround") recounts the public exoneration of the victims. At a memorial service in Heroes' Square on June 16, 1989, coinciding with the thirty-fourth anniversary of Imre Nagy's execution, hundreds of thousands of people, including emigres, came to Budapest to pay tribute to the 229 indi-viduals who had been unjustly executed (pp. 1, 121). The interviewees reported a tremendous feeling of "closure," but also much pain. "I was so moved and happy, and at the same time bitter, be-cause the old memories had come to the surface," Mária Tomasovszky told psychologist Gertrud Hoffmann. "Healthwise I found it hard to bear the whole thing. I even had a mild heart attack afterwards" (p. 123). Permission to exhume the victims' bodies, which the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party declared on November 23, 1988, formed part of the public exoneration campaign. The chapter "Turnaround" shows the interviewees' differing reactions. Some petitioned to have their fathers' skeletons exhumed from plot 301 of the Rákoskeresztúr public cemetery and fondled the skull and bones with not a trace of repulsion, finding it soothing. Others preferred to allow their fathers' bodies to rest in peace in the public plot, deeming it disrespectful to relocate them. They also feared that exhumation might yield a skeleton that was not their fathers' or - worse - no skeleton. They chose not to risk discovery that the earth they had secretly tended and graced with flowers all their lives was only an empty plot (p. 124-5).
An act was also passed in 1989 grant-ing one million forints to the families of all convicts who were granted annulment of their sentences (p. 126). Kőrösi and Molnár investigated the families' reactions. While grateful, the consensus is summed up by László Kolozsy: "One million forints can never compensate for a man's life, for so much suffering." One cannot turn back the clock, undo the years lived in shame. József Andi said

For me, peace of mind will only come when I die. The whole thing lives in me. It is like something sitting on your soul. I wake up with it in the morning and go to sleep with it at night. I think of it every day, but there are no words to express it (p. 127).

At the same time, most interviewees told the authors (discussed in Chapter Nine, "The Legacy") that they had no desire for revenge. Even if they could cross certain moral boundaries, whom exactly would they avenge? The hangman and other people carrying out the repression? First, they were only following orders; second, they are old men now; and third, revenge would merely breed counter-revenge. "I must keep my anger to myself," József Andi said (p. 139).
The chapter also explores the interviewees' attitudes toward politics. Many recall injunctions from their fathers to shun politics and most reported a revulsion toward politics. Initially some became involved in the new parties formed after the collapse of communism, such as the Alliance of Free Democrats, but soon discovered that politics is a "forum for individual interests," less about ideals and integrity and more about backslapping and backstabbing (p. 132). Most interviewees aspire only to bring their own children up with a sense of pride, not shame.

 

Johanna Granville
is the author of The First Domino: International Decision Making in the Hungarian Crisis of 1956. She is currently a Hoover Institution Fellow at Stanford University.