Bakos Katalin - Manicka Anna szerk.: Párbeszéd fekete-fehérben, Lengyel és magyar grafika 1918–1939 (MNG, Warszawa–Budapest, 2009)
I. PÁRBESZÉD FEKETE-FEHÉRBEN - Bakos Katalin, Anna Manicka: Valami történik közöttünk. Szubjektív előszó a Párbeszéd fekete-fehérben. Lengyel és magyar grafika
such as István Kovács' film Cold Days (1963) which is about the Hungarian army's retaliations against the Yugoslav partisans in southern Bácska re-annexed to Hungary in 1942. The TV documentaries in which witnesses related the terrible vicissitudes and perishing of corps of the Hungarian army shocked the whole country in the 1980s. Much was said about the sins of Hungarian politicians, the facts of the war earlier, too, but it was not allowed to mourn. From among the Polish films, Landscape after Battle (1970) is most memorable for me. One of the most popular Hungarian films is The Corporal and the Others (1965) interpreting the war without pathos at last, with irony, from the vantage point of an Everyman, a Hungarian Svejk who just wanted to survive. A fundamental experience of all of us was Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds, but we had to wait until the political change for "Katyń" to become widely known. The chapters in Central European history are symbolized by names like Trianon and Katyń. Outside Katyń the Red Army massacred the officers of the Polish liberating army. AM: I read Imre Kertész but, to be frank, not before he had been awarded the Nobel Prize. "Concentration camp literature", cf. our Szmaglewska, Borowski, and Nałkowska, is what we have in common... The only thing featuring the post-war period that I remember is Wojciech Zukrowski's Kamienne tablice [Stone Tablets] dealing with the 1956 events. The novel came out ten years later and, so they say, it could only be bought as an "undercover transaction"... Can you imagine that it was published by the MON?. 3 I know from Krisztina [Jerger] that it was later translated into Hungarian. Superbly written, the book has limitations peculiar to the times in which it was written, especially as regards the emigration issue. There is a terrible sentence there, "What's going to become of us after the unfortunate rising? The fact is that we have risen against those who, in order to liberate us, had to conquer us." 4 Liberation through conquest... He certainly means World War II and the later "brotherly" intervention in Hungary. Despite the question asked further in the book ("On whose behalf has he, himself a Hungarian [Kádár], summoned Soviet tanks against the Hungarians? What did he want to salvage?" 5 , Zukrowski is generally convinced that it had to be so, that there was no other way. Moreover, the protagonist goes back home and back to his wife (the novel is set in India), giving up the lucrative opportunity of settling in Australia and marrying the only daughter of rich parents, at that an ophthalmologist. Another motif in the Stone Tablets is that of poetry and language as such. István Terey is a poet. Talking to his mistress, he says that "he could certainly write in English but it would always be a translation from the Hungarian. He is sentenced to the language in which he has learnt to call the grass under his feet and the stars above his head. He knows that, though his own, it is a small nation's language and shuts him off from the world. Sensitive to all its vibrations he can express everything in it." 6 A sore point with all this is that back in 1981 Zukrowski gave public support to General Jaruzelski. Though not doing what Kádár had, which was summoning the aid of "brotherly armies", Jaruzelski did treat us to martial law. In its irony, fate had decreed that two years later a film was made of the Stone Tablets (in an altered version, with the Poles instead of Hungarians and the whole connected with the 1956 in Poznań, Poland). KB: The events of 1956 are also a link in the history of the two countries. The Hungarians revolting against the Soviet invasion, dictatorship, personal cult, and the intolerable living conditions knew about the events of the Poznań uprising and the demonstrators also recited the rhyme: Poland show up the example, Let's follow the Hungarian course. Uncle Bern's and Kossuth's people Let's march hand in hand.
