Fraternity-Testvériség, 1957 (35. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1957-05-01 / 5. szám
FRATERNITY 3 HUNGARY — LEST WE FORGET! EDITORIAL IN "LIFE" MAGAZINE “Budapest is no longer merely the name of a city; henceforth it is a new and shining symbol of man’s yearning to be free.” So President Eisenhower called it, and so it remains. Budapest is the symbol that freedom, no matter how cruelly slain or deeply buried, will rise again. But in the languorous air of a belated spring, amid talk of baseball and trout fishing, it is easy to forget almost anything, particularly a painful thing. Few things are more painful to free men than the memory of Budapest, where men who were willing to die for freedom were allowed to go unaided to their doom. It is painful because their blood watered the tree of our liberties, because we can never fully repay this sacrifice — the martyrdom of a whole nation, a whole people. “If we cannot repay it”, we were saying a few months ago, “at least we will never forget.” On the hills of Budapest this spring the mass graves are still raw wounds, not yet green with grass. The boots of the conqueror still thud above them, and traitors defile the land the martyrs briefly liberated. Yet the world shows signs of forgetting them already. Only a few months ago the halls of the U. N. were ringing with the horror and anger of an aroused mankind. With a unanimity seldom achieved on anything before, this organized conscience of the world cried for an end to the infamy, ordered an investigation on the scene, demanded Soviet withdrawal and called for free elections in Hungary. None of this took place. All of it has been ignored. The anger has subsided. Nothing is being planned, nothing is being done. Many Americans blame the United Nations for this inaction. But Americans will not have the right to blame the U. S. until they do everything in their own power to help the Hungarians. A few months ago, when a nationwide surge of sympathy went out to the refugees, President Eisenhower responded to it. He punched enough escape holes in the McCarran-Walter Act’s red tape to bring 32,000 Hungarians here by plane-load and ship-load — 26,000 of them outside the legal quotas. Authorizing their entry as temporary “parolees”, he promised measures to give them regular status later — sure that he spoke the nation’s will. So far Congress has failed to fulfill that promise. Moreover, although 38,000 stranded Hungarian refugees are still languishing in Austria and 16,000 more in Yugoslavia, in mounting hopelessness and desperation, the pressure grows in Congress to halt the movement entirely. Thus there is an attempt to sweep the bitter memory of Hungary beneath the rug and to have the U. S. abandon the strongest weapon it has — short of real weapons — to help all those who are willing to fight for liberation: the promise of safe haven. Here, then, is the immediate job Americans can do: inform their congressmen that these Hungarians must not be abandoned, that we must
