Political Prisoner
1959
UNCLE PAUL, as he asked Clarissa and me to call him, had inherited the pseudonym Ignotus from his father, who was a journalist as well-known in Hungary as himself. Uncle Paul’s manner, his whole demeanor, was wonderfully old-fashioned, not to say courtly. He might come to kitchen supper, or we would have a drink in the bleak flat in Prince of Wales Drive where he lived, a lonely widower and very much an exile. He had no money, but survived somehow. It was rumored that his old friend Arthur Koestler took care of the financial side of things, even though – or perhaps, because – he is on record ascribing to Uncle Paul “the gullibility of a naïve liberal.”
60 Andrassy Street in Budapest was the headquarters of the AVH, the secret police of the Communist era. Now a public monument, this building still retains a row of cells, below ground level and therefore windowless and claustrophobic. Attached to the walls of each cell are photographs of those once arrested, detained, interrogated and tortured here. Taken long before I knew him, the photograph of Uncle Paul shows a thoughtful and gentle young man. Twenty-four hours in one of these sinister cells, one could suppose, might have been a death sentence for him.
Political Prisoner is Uncle Paul’s testimony. The book will always be a shock because the inhumanity it depicts is so ordinary; just a tale of cruelty and wickedness that has no point. Uncle Paul is speaking for himself, a very credible representative of the millions of men and women whose lives were similarly wrecked as though Communism had been some natural disaster against which nothing could be done, any more than against bad weather. Sentenced on trumped-up charges to fifteen years of forced labor, he took the chance to escape from Hungary in the revolution of 1956. The flight was so stressful that the child his wife had been expecting was stillborn. The book’s final sentence reads, “That little creature who had never seen the sun paid with her life for ours.” I have a letter from him dated November 12, 1973, a fortnight after Clarissa had given birth to Adam. The spirit and the grammar of this invocation to Adam are his: “Welcome in this bloody world! Don’t be despaired anyway; with parents such as yours even this world can be quite sweet.”