Verhovayak Lapja, 1944 (27. évfolyam, 1-52. szám)

1944 / Verhovay Journal

pase 5__________________________ Verhovay Journal

A Sergeant Sees Rome ...

September 28, 1944

Truths Versus Half-Truths

Beware of false prophets from Central Europe who pervert facts to their own secret ends

By STEPHEN HUZIANYI

An astounding lot of misleading information is being dished out to us Americans concerning the Danubian Basin. More of it is bound to be presented, in quarterly and bi-monthly publications, after the cessation of hostilities, when the peoples of Central Europe are liberated from Nazidom, and before the peace treaties are actually signed.

We will have an Allied Military Government installed for the purpose of restoring order and carrying on business. But we have already certain self-annointed prophets and agents of what was the Little Entente (Czecho-Slovakia, Yugoslavia and Rumania), who will back up the claims of these states, of their provisionary governments in exile, every claim to their territories as they were created by intrigue and artifice in 1919. Some will have a little more to say, will want a little more to grab, and these political greeds will be couched in terms carefully distorted from the truth, painstakingly edited and selected from facts so as to give only a misleading part of the entire confusing Central Europe and the Balkan panorama in language that to unsuspecting Americans will seem impartial and disinterested.

It is just such half-truths that will make us feel we should be constantly on our guard, lest another pack of lies are delivered at the future peace tables by the same group of international rascals who so cleverly manipulated the strings of European boundaries at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and bred future hates and discords.

Articles by the score will appear in various dignified, not to say stuffy, periodicals with highfalutin names and pretensions that will deal out falsehoods endeavoring to direct and influence the thoughts of the men who may sit in at the next peace conference.

I have reviewed recent magazines that deal with such articles. Many of these authors have just recently come to our shores. Their “line” serves as an example of falsehoods and silky, sly half-truths.

They don’t speak for the 14 million Hungarian citizens, for we doubt whether they talked with any representative group. The authors appear to carry an air of impartiality, at a superficial glance at their articles, yet please do not be fooled. They will make damaging statements about the Magyars and neglect to fill out the whole truth and give, say, the Czechs and their Slav brethren their just due and share of guilt. They are obviously protagonists of a powerful Slav group. Thus, they depreciate Magyar rule and in the same breath their wholly false implications lead one to believe that the states and peoples surrounding Hungary are democracies, or that they were inherently such before the arrival of the Magyars into the Danubian Basin, over 1000 years ago!

These writers are obviously backed by a group that subordinates the life of 1000 year-old Hungary, to their own 20 year

old plan that would make Czecho-Slovakia the spearhead of pan- Slavism in Central and Western Europe. Therefore, the Czech “state” must be presented in ostensibly “dispassionate” and “scholarly” treaties and propagandized as a paragon of democratic virtue, and conversely the Magyars must necessarily play the role of the deep-dyed villain.

Propaganda is most deadly in its more subtle forms. You meet it in your daily papers; you find it in magazines and periodicals, always in the guise of facts and truth. To help combat that propaganda that may harm our long range national welfare and integrity, I intend to continue this series of articles to show that the articles by these authors, many who just arrived here, are an example of pious baloney.

Installment II in next issue.

(A beautiful letter is before me. It was written by SGT JOHNNIE PHILLIPS, son of Mr and Mrs. John Phillips of Pitts burgh, Pa. It awakens sweet anc strange memories in my heart. Memories of a trip to Rome, some twenty years ago. As I read the letter, all those memories come back to me... You know, Rome is unforgettable. Johnnie too tell you that. You can feel from his letter the effect of the awesome vastness and breath-taking beauty of the Holy City the very walls of which are a monument to the memories of twenty centuries. Holy memories, exalted religious feelings are attached to every stone. And our soldiers who walk through those stones... are filled by some mystic sense of the closeness of the Divine. This is not a smiling, gently kidding Johnnie writing a letter... it is The American Soldier... humbly adoring the creation of great men who have been inspired by a spirit higher than human... With the same humble emotions that have inspired John Phillips in writing this letter, I give it to you. Leaving out the personal references to “Dearest Mom and Dad” the story of his visit to Rome reads as follows:)

“The people there at Rome are much more different from the local citizenry. They are polite, kind, refined, civilized and look like people who walk down the Main Street of any American city. They are not crude, vulgar, resentful of soldiers like people in some parts. Many of the shopkeepers know a little English, no doubt from pre-war days when there were many American tourists.

They are proud of their city and seem to be the only people who really appreciate what the Allies are doing and appreciate the soldiers themselves. They do not resent us sitting in their parks and cafes and associating with their daughters. There are no children constantly begging for candies and cigarettes. They love American cigarettes like people I’ve seen in Algiers, Tunis, Constantine, Casablanca, but unlike them they do not beg for them or hint that their own are inferior and would very much like some. Some do offer to buy them and are willing to pay fifty cents for a pack.

Some of the places I’ve visited with my six friends and guided by a lovely, refined and educated woman: the various statues of Castor and Pollux about the city. The two gods patterned after the twins who founded the city, Romulus and Remus, who were the mythical guards of the city. The Fontana di Trevi, a half a block long fountain with statues of Neptune and some lesser gods and two fountains representing the Tigris and Euphrates. The Piazza di Quatro fontaine, four fountains, one at each corner of an intersection dedicated to Neptune. Many Egyptian obelisks hauled across the Mediterranean in barges. The “circo agonale”, the circus where the chariot races were held. There are ruins of these in the cellars of all the houses in the neighborhood. The temple of Neptune built in the Greek style in the first or second century. The temple of Vesta where the Vestal virgins officiated. The palace of Justice, the Ponte St. Angelo. The tremendous flashing monument of Victor Emmanuel, the famous balcony

from which Mussolini bellowed The palace of the king. The amous Appian way which stil s a fine thoroughfare. The Arc of Titus and Constantine. The Aurelian wall built by Marcus Aurelius and initiated in 276 AD All cities in those times were thus fortified and the wall stili stands with its various gates throughout the modem city. I say modern because the old city is within the modern city limits. The Colisseum which baffles everyone who looks at it because of the gigantic size of the stone supports and pillars. It is an amazing piece of architectural ingenuity with a system of stairways that enabled tremendous crowds to vacate it in a very short time. A defiance to the cumbersome system our modern stadiums have today.

Capitoline Hill and the old Roman Forum of which there are many pictures and not enough of it left to give any kind of picture of what it really looked like. Several beautiful parks full of statuary and busts and one in particular that had an enormous statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the great liberator who died in poverty and was and still is endeared to the hearts of Italians, something like George Washington to the Americans. The Castel St. Angelo known in ancient times as Mola Adrianae, a fort with a moat on top which is a bronze statue of St. Michael, the Archangel.

The Pantheon built by Marcus Agrippa, a trusted aide of Augustus. It still stands intact and is a beautiful example of Roman architecture. It was rebulit in 200 AD and has a large circular hole in the roof through which light came and the rain poured down, whenever it rained. Incidentally the rain even to this day has not harmed the marble floor one bit. There are small holes in the floor thru’ which the rain-water drains. There are four Italian kings buried there now. The bronze doors are very large and heavy. A rough estimate would put them at about twentyfive feet high and at least eight feet wide.

There were many others but I would like to get on to the BASILICA OF ST. PETER AND THE VATICAN. Naturally the greatest event of the trip was seeing the Pope. We went into the Vatican and up a few flights of stairs into the reception hall. The Holy Father was carried down the center aisle on a chair and reached out and touched religious articles in the hands of those who stood near enough. He sat on his throne and gave a little speech in English and French. He welcomed us in Rome and praised us for our work as liberators. One of the men with me had four flash bulbs with him but was too timid to get a couple of pictures of His Holiness, so I got them for him.” (Johnnie, why, oh why didn’t you send one along with your letter? We would have published it...! Ed.) ‘ He spoke to some of the closer ones after his little speech and the Papal blessing he gave. He mingled right in with the crowd and the pages and Swiss guards in the picturesque uniforms. He seemed to like the Americans particularly.

The Sistine Chapel the four walls and ceiling of which was painted by Michelangelo, is something that should be looked at for hours at a time instead

of hurrying through in an hour or so. I saw one English Officer aying on a bench just studying the ceiling and wished I had the nerve to do likewise. The ceiling in nine panels depicts the creation of the world, of Adam and Eve, their temptation, their expulsion from the Paradise, the sacrifice of Noah, Flood and the drunkenness of Noah. The end wall is covered with a single picture, called Judgement Day, and you could study that for days. There are five unreligious paintings in the chapel: The Cu•mean, Delphic, Persina, Erythrean and Libian Sybills. There is the painting of Judith beheading Holofernes, of David lopping off the noggin of Goliath, the main prophets and the punishment of Haman.

Next to seeing the Pope I guess the next greatest event was spending two hours in the Basilica of St. Peter. It is the largest cathedral in the world and was designed by Michelangelo. You get inside and marvel, at the vastness of it. The ceiling alone is an inspiration. It is covered with gold leaf. There are no pews in it as we know them in churches in the States.

The most famous of Michelaneglo’s sculptures is in the Basilica. His mosaics and those of Raphael are so breath-taking that the longer you look at them the. longer you want to stay and just keep looking. There is a statue of Christ at the foot of the cross laid in the arms of his mother, that is breath-taking. There is the high altar at which only the Pope may say Mass. It faces the people because only the Pope can say Mass facing the people. Around it are many bronze candlesticks with gold leaf. The relics of St. Peter are in the altar. The main altar is made of gold and melted bronze. There is the true seat of St. Peter and the statue of him in bronze with the feet worn away from people kissing them down through the ages, and that too is something to marvel at.

40,000 people can easily fit into the Basilica and on festive occasions almost double that number can be crowded into it. There is a balcony from which on certain holidays the larger relics are shown to the people, like the veil which Veronica used wiping the face of Jesus, and splinters from the Cross. There are hundreds of other beautiful and inspiring pieces .of art, too numerous to mention.

In a room off to the side of the Basilica proper are the Papal treasures. Millions of dollars are represented here in unimpressive glass cases and in small alcoves that are no larger than hallways. There is the cloak that Charlemagne wore when he as the ruler of the world presented it to the Pope for Spiritual rule. Startingly beautiful chalices made by Benvenuto Cellini, in the 15th century, and the largest topaz in the world. There is a chalice with hundreds of diamonds on it, presented to the Holy Father by the Cardinal of York. An emerald cross that must be worth a tremendous amount. A crystal monstrance that is so pure and simple that it takes your breath away. One of the most precious items is an amber rose emerald and an emerald stone crucifix. Treasures that collectively could not be evaluated and that coupled with the Basilica and the rest of the

Vatican make_ it the richest by far of any other section in the world. (Editor’s remark: Thousands of those precious articles seen by Sgt. Phillips have been sent to the Vatican and the Pope from people from all over the world in gratitude for prayers heard and miraculous healings. They are kept there not so much because of their monetary value as for the faith and gratitude towards God their senders have tried to express by them. As such they are testimonies of faith and for that reason they are treasured.)

I visited the Catacombs and besides the tremendous job of digging them there is another kind of art. It is the art of poor, persecuted people who were interested not so much in beauty as in portraying ideas of religion. There are supposed to be forty miles of tunnels not yet explored (14 miles of them have been), and they go as far as 200

feet underground. There are family vaults that are intact. Altars and paintings and marble slabs and two glasstopped coffins in which lie mummified corpses. They were built in the second or third century. Well, there are many more items to mention but already this is too long... Yet I hope it will give you an idea of the tremendous amount of things there are to see. I almost cried when I had to leave the Basilica. There were so many beautiful things that required hours of admiring ...”

With that we close Johnnie’s letter. Somehow it makes us feel happier to know that at least some of our brave soldiers have not only suffered privations in this terrible war but have been privileged to see the greatest beauties of the world. May God bring you back home safely, Johnnie, and may you cherish these memories for many-many years to come!