The Hungarian Student, 1957 (1. évfolyam, 2-8. szám)
1957 / 4. szám
Budapest is no longer only the name of a city . . . A Greeting To Our Fellow Students Everywhere We greet you, our brothers, all over the world. With all the warmth of our hearts wo greet you, whom we are getting to know only now and from whom we have been separated until recently by barbed wire and mine fields. Please accept our greetings in the name of our dead, such as the fifty-one students buried in the garden of the Medical University of Budapest and the seventeen executed Technical University students. We also greet you in the name of our fellow students condemned to bitter silence at home, the 20,000 deported to Siberia and China and the 500 university and 1,600 high school students in Yugoslav camps. The greeting from your new Hungarian fellow students is accompanied by the greetings of those who still await the chance to resume their studies. Seven hundreds are awaiting for a new and better opportunity in Austria; there are eighty in Italy, three hundred in England, five hundred in Canada, and six hundred in the United States who have not yet been able to continue their university studies. We have learned to know you as happy and free young people. Your backbone has not been weakened by constant coercion; your hearts have not been pierced by terrible fears; you have not been struck with rubber truncheons; you were not forced to kiss the still bloody hands of your own executioners. We were driven by the desire to live as you do, to have your way of life. Although our hands were used to wielding pens, this desperate desire drove us to take up arms. We regret that some of you consider yourselves only spectators of our struggle. Some of you do not feel the nearness of the assassin strongly enough to realize that our fate is your fate. We pray that you will never have to suffer our fate and be forced to defend your life and liberty by force of arms. Believe us when we say that our lot is not easy. Our hearts bleed for those who remained at home. It is hard to live separated from your loved ones and friends. But it gives us strength to have learned that in you—fellow students—we have found new friends. We ask that you accept us with friendliness when we come to share your classrooms. Please help us in our studies, since we have to study not only for ourselves, but also for those who remained at home. Please accept us as brothers, we who refuse forever to withdraw our brotherly hands from yours.
