Tárogató, 1949-1950 (12. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1949-07-01 / 1-2. szám
]4 TÁROGATÓ arrest he spent in the illfamed building at 60 Andrássy Street in Budapest. This building was used by the Nazis to torture their prisoners, and the communists took it over for the same purpose. We have evidence in abundance about the brutalities which were and still are committed by the communist executioners. The evidence comes not only from victims who were fortunate enough to be released after their torture and were successful in escaping from the country, but also from the government’s own employees who got so disgusted and horrified that they escaped from Hungary. This is a very sad chapter in the life of Hungary, but it seems to be the usual way of dealing with political prisoners wherever a totalitarian regime succeeds in oppressing the people. We do not need to go into it, our only question is: What did they do with the Cardinal? They must have done something, because the man who was taken to prison as the Cardinal of Hungary and the man who stood before the People’s Court were certainly not the same. According to communist legal procedure, the accused signs his guilt before he appears before the Court. Cardinal Mindszenty also gave a handwritten statement of his “guilty actions”. How did this happen? “A certain Mrs. Ladislaus Sulner, nee Hanna Fischoff, a graphologist, was employed as a sworn writing expert of the Court in Hungary. She escaped from Hungary to Vienna where she told that she was ordered to forge some of the written confessions of the Cardinal. In order to prove her statements, she brought along the first microfilm used in the process of falsification. (I quote here the March 25th issue of a very reliable paper, Nyugati Hírnök, Western Herald, edited in France, in Hungarian, by Imre Mikes.) This microfilm was developed and evaluated by the proper authorities in Salzburg. The film shows all the phases of the forging procedure, among others the first statement in writing of the arrested Cardinal, which starts with the following words: T do not confess to anything’. This is followed by strata of several forging phases: on top, an old, genuine manuscript by the Cardinal, below this the text of the confession which was handed over for forgery, below this the first forgeries on the basis of the genuine Mindszenty handwriting, finally, the accepted falsification and the finished ‘admission’, which — when the drugs of Dr. Kaftanov were already effective — were followed by the admissions of the Cardinal in his actual handwriting.” We may safely accept this substantiated explanation of the genealogy of the Cardinal’s confession “in his own handwriting”, because the substance of the “confession” is such that it refutes itself. This becomes clearer if we take into consideration the charges laid against him at his trial, because the “correct” formulation of the charges is of primary importance in communist juridical proceedings and the confessions and admissions are constructed to suit the charges at the trial. This is proved by the famous trials in Moscow and other communist countries (Bulgaria and Romania), and there is no reason at all to suppose that it should happen differently in Hungary, or, as a matter of fact, in any communist-dominated country. What sort of charges were laid against the Cardinal? Logically, with reference to his activities and the government’s activities in the past against him, there could have been only one charge: Since the Cardinal defended God and the validity of God’s Commandments, and since the communists regarded his homogeneous efforts and activities as being opposed to communism and as threatening the very foundations of communistic totalitarianism, then the Cardinal, by being a man of God in thought and action, is guilty of being a enemy of the communistic Hungarian government. We need not suspect the leaders of communism in Hungary of not formulating for themselves the charge against the Cardinal in this way; but they coulc not do so for the people at home anc particularly not for the world outside the Iron Curtain. Therefore, for publie use they had to concoct other charges which were not THE charges, whicl
