Cardinal Mindszenty: The Story of a Modern Martyr

This edition is published by Arcole Publishing – www.pp-publishing.com

To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – [email protected]

Or on Facebook

Text originally published in 1949 under the same title.

© Arcole Publishing 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

CARDINAL MINDSZENTY

THE STORY OF A MODERN MARTYR

BY

BELA FABIAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

AUTHOR’S PREFACE 5

I—The Child 10

II—The Student 15

III—The Young Priest 19

IV—The Scourge of Bela Kun 22

V—After the Commune 29

VI—The Pope of Zala 32

VII—This Man Fears Only God 41

VIII—A Bull Is Sold 45

IX—Arrow-Cross and Swastika 50

X—The Prisoner of Sopron-Kohida 57

XI—Hammer and Sickle 61

XII—The Symbolism of a Blood-Red Hat 64

XIII—The Tightening of the Net 74

XIV—Now Men Are Needed 83

XV—Time Runs Out 90

XVI—The Iron Hand in the Rubber Glove 96

XVII—The Trial 101

XVIII—The Picture 112

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 115

DEDICATION

I dedicate my book to all those heroic men and women who through their courage and self-sacrifice saved the lives of the Jews of Budapest.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

THIS is a book about Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty, Prince Primate of Hungary, a modern Christian martyr in the fight against barbarism. It has been my wish from the beginning of its preparation to emphasize the story of his life, his fight against the dark forces which have overwhelmed Hungary and much of Europe, and the significance of his story to a world faced with the greatest crisis in human history. I have no desire to write about myself. Anything which I say in this preface or later in the book, I say only to make his story more fully understandable to the English-speaking reader.

Yet only by telling some of the facts concerning my own life can I explain fully how I came to understand the greatness of the man, and on what sound bases my sympathy and admiration for Mindszenty stand.

I was born in 1889, in the community of Tallya, a center of the famous Tokay wine-growing district of Hungary. My parents were God-fearing, religious Jews and, true to my heritage and early religious training, I have always remained a member of the Jewish congregation. My undying admiration for Joseph Mindszenty is not a product of Catholic partisanship. That partisanship which we have always shared is not affected by any details of theological or ritualistic differences. It is based solidly upon the love of human freedom and honesty which we have both held throughout our lives. It is rooted deeply in our common fight against the forces of reaction and darkness, which, in wave after wave, have assailed our sorrowing country during these years in which we both have lived. Regardless of the fact that Mindszenty is a Prince Primate of the Catholic Church and I am a Jew, whose life has been spent in politics, we have always worshipped the same God.

After I received my L.L.D, degree I became a law clerk in the office of Dr. William Vazsony, an outstanding legal authority, leader of the Democratic Party of Hungary, and later Minister of Justice.

But my law work was early interrupted by the First World War As an officer in the Hungarian army I was taken prisoner by the Russians in the spring of 1915 and confined in a camp at Tashkent. There I learned the Russian language and, though I was well treated as an officer, first became acquainted with the brutality of which Russian prison camp officials were capable. I shuddered at their treatment of common, rank-and-file war prisoners who were driven almost beyond bearing as slave laborers while being fed on starvation diets. I made my first protests to Russian authorities at this time and as a result was transferred to a punitive camp at Krasnaya Ryechka in eastern Siberia, four hundred miles north of Vladivostok.

Most prisoners of war in Russia looked forward to the Russian Revolution as a great democratic victory which would at last bring the huge eastern empire into harmony and co-operation with Western democratic civilization. Soon we learned what the Communist victory really meant and saw growing before our eyes a power which was the exact antithesis of democracy.

Early in 1918, I escaped from Krasnaya Ryechka, and, constantly in hiding, struggled through five thousand miles torn by civil war, mass brutality and destruction, to Leningrad. While the treaty of peace was under discussion at Brest-Litovsk, Leningrad was in the grip of a cruel fratricidal war launched by the Communists against the followers of all political movements other than Communism, chief among whom were the democrats and progressives. Since non-Communist news sources were soon suppressed, the only way to gain accurate information was through observation and personal contact. This I managed by edging my way into the galleries of Soviet meetings and other public assemblies and listening in cafes to democratic journalists who functioned as living newspapers.

Finally reaching Hungary I returned to Budapest appalled by the significance of Russian Communism to the free world. I was further frightened when I found that in Hungary, as elsewhere in the world at that time, many of the most progressive men of good will believed that the Bolshevik victory represented a most encouraging step forward in the organic evolution of democracy. Convinced that the exact opposite was the truth, I tried to disillusion them through lectures and public articles, telling them what Russian Communism was really like, and through three books, Russia’s Decay Under Bolshevik Rule, Russian Inferno, and Petrograd. These publications met with cold incredulity on the part of middle-class intellectuals and made me the target of venomous attacks from the extreme left. As a result I was one of the first to be arrested and placed in solitary confinement at the personal order of Bela Kun, when in 1919 the supreme power in Hungary was seized by this earliest representative of Communist expansion.

After the collapse of this short-lived dictatorship, the other extreme, the white terror regime, for a little while held the upper hand in Hungary. It took vengeance on many of the guilty, and subjected thousands of innocent victims as well to suffering, and not a few to death. Since my fight up to now had not been merely anti-Communist but had been directed against all forms of totalitarianism I opposed this regime as uncompromisingly as I had that of Bela Kun. Seeing in this kind of counter-revolution as great a danger as that which existed in Communist dictatorship, I published three further books, The Russian Pattern, Methods, Devices and Consequences of Bolshevik World Propaganda, and The History of the Russian Counter-Revolution. This fight made me the target of the same kind of hatred which had been directed against me by the Communists and, following an anachronistic, and perhaps deplorable, Hungarian custom, I was forced to fight over a score of duels with swords and pistols in defense of my principles.

As a result of this democratic record I was elected executive member of the Budapest Municipal Council in 1920, and in 1922 was sent to the Hungarian Parliament by the Budapest suburban district on the Independent Democratic ticket. For seventeen consecutive years I represented my party thus and, in 1928, I was made president of it.

Throughout the period which ended with the engulfment of Europe by Nazism I continued my fight in and out of Parliament against both huge centers of totalitarian aggression, Germany and Russia. In the beginning my warnings about the menace of Nazism were received with the same mocking incredulity as had been my earlier prophecies about the Bolshevik danger. But the Nazis themselves took me more seriously. When the German hordes invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia one of the magazines in Budapest published on its front page a caricature in which I was represented as a dwarf battling a tornado. Under it was the legend Little Man What Now?

When the Germans invaded Hungary in 1944, all Hungarian democratic politicians were immediately arrested. I was the only one who was not deported to Mauthausen, Austria. At the special request of my greatest political enemy, the Hungarian Nazi Under-secretary of Home Affairs, I was sent to Auschwitz with its mass-devouring gas chambers.

By what still seems to me to be a miracle I was not one of the thousands of gas victims, and as a prisoner, became part of a group which organized secret radio listening posts within the prison camp. One of the tasks at which we were made to work was the dismantling and reprocessing of parts of American planes which had been shot down by the Germans. Secreting radio parts, bit by bit, from these, the prisoners constructed several secret radios and set up concealed listening posts at which we received news from the BBC and the Voice of America. In order to keep up the spirits of the rest of the prisoners a grape-vine news-service repeated throughout the camp what was heard at the listening posts.

Occasionally the Germans would discover one of these radios and promptly hang those who worked at the secret station or spread the news received. In Auschwitz life was cheap, but the hunger for news was so persistent that though on one day a radio team would be hanged, the very next day a new radio would be working.

Later I was transferred, first to Oranienburg, then to Sachsenhausen, and then to Ohrdruf, From Ohrdruf I escaped in March 1945 with three comrades, hid for ten days in the forest of Thuringia and finally succeeded in creeping through the German lines to find refuge with Patton’s American Army. I was given wonderful care and interviewed by American newspapermen to whom I gave the first eyewitness accounts of what was really happening in German concentration camps.

Thus I know at first hand the evils against which Mindszenty fought.

I first met him when he was Joseph Pehm, the Abbe of Zalaegerszeg, leading the fight against Nazism in western Hungary. It was near the end of the thirties when the Arrow-Cross Party, supported by Germany, was exercising strong pressure on the political life of Hungary, and the Hungarian Nazi press was openly announcing that the Arrow-Cross would soon take over power. Their persecution of the Jews was already underway. There were frequent references in their publications to Regent Horthy’s wife whom they nicknamed Rebecca in abuse of her Jewish origin.

In view of my own stand against Nazism and anti-Semitism and my position in Parliament, I was constantly being asked for help by those who were persecuted. There were frequent complaints about Bela Teleki, the pro-Nazi prefect of Zala County, Mindszenty’s county. Having heard a great deal about the Abbe, knowing his stand against anti-Semitism, and his growing influence, I wanted to ask his help along with that of a near relative of the prefect, Joseph Teleki. I talked to them together. Mindszenty at once told me that he had already tried several times to change the Prefect’s anti-Jewish attitude but without result.

Yet one must never give up hope, he said. Here one of the most deadly dangers threatens the country. The persecution of Jews recalls the early persecution of Christians. Those who threaten any religion threaten all religions.

I am absolutely of the same opinion, Count Teleki said. Today it is the Jews, tomorrow it will be you and me.

The Count who had also tried earlier to influence the Prefect, promised to speak to him again, though with little hope.

Good, Mindszenty said. It is now that we need men. Throughout the years that followed he was quoted over and over as using these words in times of crisis.

I heard them quoted again when, having escaped the German concentration camp, I was a lonely refugee in Paris, hoping against hope for the release of my wife, who lived for three months during the siege of Budapest in a cellar with our dearly loved dog. The Russians refused through long years to grant her permission to leave the country. (My hope was eventually realized, however, and both are with me today.)

At that time a bitter campaign of villainy against Mindszenty was beginning in Hungary. I read the attacks in Hungarian and foreign newspapers and I knew beyond doubt what his fate would be if he stayed in Hungary. I was sure that the Communist regime would be happy to get rid of him without, through liquidation, bringing the censure of the civilized world down on their heads, and that they would gladly help him to leave the country. Why then did he not go while there was still time? Was it merely that he did not want to abandon his people? Was it that he was unwilling to become the object of criticism? I even argued with him in my mind. Out here, I said, you could be free to help prepare for the resurrection of your country.

As I was thinking about this a political friend of mine, who had been very close to Cardinal Mindszenty in the fight against both the Nazis and the Russians, escaped from Hungary and came to Paris. With tears he told me that everything dear to him was in ruins. Before my face he wept with sorrow and longing for all that was irretrievably lost to him—his family, his house, his garden, the green woods of his beloved Hungary.

I had lost all of these things too. I understood his grief. I had no desire to argue with him. Rather I wanted to comfort him in his self accusation for having run away.

But you are fortunate to be here, I said. You’d be in prison if you were at home.

I know, he replied. I’d be at 60 Andrassy Street in the hands of the Secret Police.

Exactly, I answered, And before you were killed you would be forced to betray all of your friends. They would make you give them the names of everyone you love. No one can hold out against their methods of torture.

I know that, too, he answered. That was why I went away. I saw that the fight could not be continued. I was unwilling to join them and yet I was afraid of 60 Andrassy Street—afraid of death to be sure, but even more afraid that they would make me betray my friends

Then why do you reproach yourself? I asked. You had no choice. There was no other way.

I keep hearing the words of my advisor, he answered, urging me to stay.

And who was he?

"Cardinal Mindszenty. Before I left I asked him for an audience. He greeted me with the warmest friendliness. Then I told him that I considered my situation at home as hopeless and that I was going to try to escape across the frontier. Immediately he became icy. For a long time he was silent. Then he said