A MAN WITH MANY NAMES: INTERVIEW WITH LASZLO RAJK
Paetzke, Hans-Henning
The following interview with LASZLO RAJK was conducted by a German writer, HANS-HENNING PAETZKE. It has been slightly condensed for reasons of space. — Ens. HANS-HENNING PAETZKE: Mr. Rajk,...
...And a year and a half ago, the police brought this operation to an abrupt end...
...Julia Rajk had insisted that not only official party representatives should speak at the funeral, but one of her husband's fellow defendants as well—and for this service, she called upon me...
...There, Nagy, Losonczy, and Donáth were immediately separated from us...
...P: Weren't you informed of the real facts...
...Mother's name: Julianna FOldi...
...I was that child...
...I responded to the name of Pista, the diminutive of Istvan...
...She must have been quite hurt when I simply declared: "Good...
...At this point, however, I would like to ask: What happened to the son of an executed state official...
...That was Lici Rajk, who had been merely a baby, barely aware, when his father had been dragged to the gallows and his mother locked in prison...
...I know, after studying in Budapest and in Canada, you now are an architect and a stage designer...
...P: But you still want to continue your various kinds of work...
...I felt as if alarm sirens went off when I entered the studio—it was a difficult time...
...She wasn't about to lose me for a second time...
...When I was about one and a half years old, the register entry continued, another "Hungarianization" of my name took place...
...Two years later, when I returned to Hungary, I possessed a very peculiar sort of education indeed...
...There were subjects about which I knew a fantastically great deal, and others about which I didn't have the faintest notion...
...Poor uncle Sanyi always told my mother to remarry.' Why she never did, I don't know...
...325 P: You have been described by various sides as being the only member of the Hungarian opposition whose job has not been taken away, as someone who has no problems with the authorities, is something of a "sacred cow...
...The lawyer told her that, if she pursued this matter, he didn't know what could happen, he was only a lawyer and not a politician...
...He was executed on October 15, 1949 and buried in an unmarked grave...
...It read: "Lasz16 Rajk...
...One thing is certain—Imre Nagy was doublecrossed and disappeared and the rest of us with him...
...0 P: What became of a child with such a past...
...R: My deepest and most formative experience to this day remains our stay in Roumania...
...P: Rasa Sziligyi would later die...
...They insisted that a child could not be raised responsibly away from his home...
...Rumors were circulating in Hungary that placed us in Sochi or in the Crimea, so my relatives once more began the same old routine of visiting government offices, writing letters, and making phone calls—just as they had done while my mother 324 was in prison...
...The story is typically Middle European...
...Our parents were scared to death because we were always standing by the windows to watch the tanks and the soldiers...
...For a year I was allowed to work under supervision, with a front man...
...R: This stems from my adult experience...
...She made no protest over his return...
...Not knowing whether my mother was dead or alive and having received no news from her, my aunt adopted me...
...During the years 198183, you maintained the so-called Rajk Boutique in your own apartment, selling illegally printed material—newsletters, journals, books —right under the eyes of the police...
...His case was reviewed and he was granted amnesty in 1960...
...The results are well known...
...R: There's another interesting story about this time...
...Soon after this agreement came the inevitable black car with its dark drawn curtains . . . the car we had seen so many times...
...she brought the case to the lowest court—to make sure that the whole business would ascend through normal bureaucratic channels, so that everyone would hear about it...
...It was crushed by Soviet force on November 4. What is less well known is that together with Imre Nagy, Julianna Rajk and her seven-year-old son Lasz16 were given asylum in the Yugoslav embassy...
...She went at the appointed time, and a black Pobeda with the usual dark drawn curtains came to a stop and let out a child...
...I'll never know why she chose her role and stuck to it for 30 years, I'll never know why she chose to illuminate the darkness surrounding my father...
...She demanded that workers be allowed to take off from work to attend, and that the government arrange their transportation to the funeral...
...Considering your childhood experiences, wouldn't fear be a more appropriate reaction...
...I think that my mother played an important role in this respect...
...Your father, after whom you are named, was minister of the interior and later foreign minister in the postWorld War II regime of the Stalinist Mat* Rakosi...
...P: Even if your mother's life was dedicated to the sole aim of upholding your father's reputation, it seems that she possessed a rather moral understanding of politics...
...I believe that those who were charged with settling this matter with my mother were greatly relieved that nature had lent them a helping hand...
...Rajk, you were born on January 26, 1949...
...It finally came out that he was ashamed to stand there before me because he had come by his job after his predecessor refused to forge the first entry of my name...
...You were four months old when your father was arrested by the Hungarian secret police, the AVH...
...Besides, the adoption wasn't merely an administrative procedure...
...In 1956, when a tugofwar developed over my father's funeral, she surely was aware of what was happening...
...This is every citizen's normal right...
...P: It is said that Giza Losonczy died under mysterious circumstances...
...Father's name: Lasz16 Rajk...
...There was actually one part of our family that did know where we were...
...P: Were you allowed any contact with the outside world...
...Later we found out that Uncle Imre hadn't sent this message...
...And since the strengthening in 1979 of Hungary's democratic opposition, you have become widely known as one of its most important representatives...
...Citing this sentence, my mother accused Rakosi of murder...
...We were on the ground floor and the incident happened at the window on the top floor overlooking Heroes' Square...
...The business hours of your Boutique were even published openly in Western emigre journals and over Radio Free Europe...
...Of course, they found a legal way to do this...
...On November 25 we were put on a plane that took off into the great unknown...
...she didn't go and appeal to the party...
...I then became Laszlo Kovacs, again "at my own request...
...But the battle between my mother and the state had become so intense that she refused to attend the funeral unless it was declared to be a public ceremony...
...Bela Szasz wrote: "Although many district party secretaries and industrial functionaries bowed to orders from above, they could not persuade their flocks in the factories and offices to stay away from the funeral...
...And that was the end of our stay in Roumania...
...At the embassy I met a lot of children...
...322 R: The demonstration was quite spontaneous...
...Yet others, such as the philosopher Agnes Heller, consider it to be the first purely political revolution in the world...
...I was abducted, simply gone...
...Now, getting back to the Yugoslav embassy, I think that one could say that nobody, including the Yugoslays, was very comfortable with the situation...
...Strange as it may seem, for me it was no tragedy but a great adventure...
...Everyone was convinced we were being flown to the Soviet Union...
...We were then driven to Matyásföld, where we were put up in state security barracks...
...Are you also limited in these artistic activities...
...To this day, of course, the Hungarian CP still officially regards it as a "counterrevolution...
...They don't speak about 1956...
...but I believe this incident was trumped up...
...Those on the outside knew nothing about those on the inside, in the prisons...
...Born on January 26, 1949...
...In the children's home where I spent my first years, I went under the names of Istvan Kovacs and Lasz16 Kovacs...
...That was our little home...
...It is, I think, the sort of schizophrenic condition that people the world over are living with today...
...After that, my name went through two more changes...
...R: What took place after that is extremely unclear...
...A quarter of a million people turned up...
...a legal way can always be found for everything...
...Father's name: LaszIO Kovacs...
...I still feel this way, and it's still a joy to hear someone calling me Pista...
...I have not obliged...
...P: Bela Szasz, subjected to five years in prison as a result of the Rajk trial and rehabilitated in 1954, wrote the following in his book Volunteer for the Gallows: "After Gerii's return,' Rajk's funeral was arranged for October 6. The Hungarian party chiefs had not only continued to postpone the date but were openly haggling [about the arrangements] with Mrs...
...To this day it remains uncertain what sort of agreement was reached between Nagy, Yugoslavia, and the Kaddr government...
...It was a situation straight out of the war...
...Months passed during which I ran to my aunt instead of my mother when I wanted comforting...
...Sandor Haraszti—born in 1897, was a Communist since his earliest youth...
...She knew that no low-level prosecutor would dare to take the responsibility of squelching the case, and that it would simply continue, proceeding from one level to the next...
...There is a paragraph in the Hungarian legal code through which a person can be brought to court for a former action if there is public knowledge of it...
...After Stalin's death in 1953, I was returned in a way befitting my abduction...
...It was through this contact that my aunt in Transylvania found out where we were...
...none of the adults were trained teachers, or at least not elementary schoolteachers...
...I don't imagine it's easy to tell an adopted child the facts...
...P: A pact was concluded between the Yugoslays and the Kidar government whereby the refugees were to be given safe conduct to their homes, where they were to remain under provisional house arrest...
...The others, we later found out, were quartered in small villas not far from us...
...Our parents organized a school, and we were given formal lessons every morning...
...My aunt received news that she should go to the corner of Bulcsu utca and Lehl at eight o'clock in the morning...
...It was full of children whose parents had been put in prison...
...R: Yes...
...From now on I'll call you 'mama,' and I'll keep calling mother 'mother.' " The whole business was settled for me, and to this day I still call my aunt "mother...
...Jailed in 1951 with Janos Kadar, he received a long sentence...
...Even one of my father's death certificates is issued under a false name...
...Instead, she sought out a hack lawyer to whom she could present the facts of this scandalous affair, and asked that he try to find some paragraph with which to nail Rakosi...
...The registrar, an old man, was shifting his weight from one leg to the 320 other...
...Strangely enough, each move brought us closer to the Hungarian border...
...We were led into a bus...
...This was one of the most modern children's homes in Hungary, a good place...
...Mother's name: Julianna FOldi...
...We were quartered in the reception hall of the embassy...
...She went to the only safe place she had, her sister's apartment—not knowing I was there...
...What happened next...
...The woman who brought my father's sister in Szekelyudvarhely her daily milk had a sister who was the maid in the house of a functionary in Bucharest...
...We received mail for the first time in 1958...
...What I tried to do with the so-called Rajk Boutique was, I believe, a step in the direction of an independent culture in Hungary...
...During the train ride to Lake Balaton, she told me who she was...
...Muteness reigns...
...Nonetheless, it seemed absurd that I had so many birth certificates...
...We were under house arrest, in a house with a garden...
...Concerning his party work, she was completely unaware and uninformed...
...She accepted it on the condition that I would live with her sister— that is, my adopted mother...
...From then on, my mother agitated for the return of the children to Hungary...
...Yet, luckily or unluckily, Rakosi died early in 1971...
...My mother and I lived under the piano...
...Time passed and our lodgings were changed frequently—each time for the worse...
...There we lived under tables, on top of tables, on mattresses, on the floor, and under a piano...
...P: I still don't understand why your aunt couldn't find the courage to tell you the truth...
...But now I was standing in the registry office...
...Practically every government exerts pressure to control the politics of building...
...I was looking for half-truths, for truths—some way to understand how it was really possible to love a man so ardently and only know half of his life...
...P: You are also known in Hungary as a good stage designer...
...My mother's name wasn't changed...
...To our surprise the plane landed in Roumania...
...R: At daybreak on November 4, someone came to our apartment to tell my mother that her name was on the list of persons selected by the Yugoslav government to receive asylum...
...He had said that a name was something holy, something a man couldn't tamper with, and he was fired...
...326...
...He was rehabilitated in 1954...
...The fact that mother had received a five-and-ahalfyear sentence was published nowhere...
...In this context, it's irrelevant whether the housing industry is state controlled, as in Eastern Europe, or indirectly controlled, as in the West...
...Rather than penalizing me, those who wanted to offer me work were penalized or threatened with a penalty...
...It is well known that my father was certain he would be arrested...
...R: During that time I grew up in our family believing that my aunt was my mother and my uncle my father...
...P: Why is it that you have chosen to take part in the opposition...
...Uncle Imre had an extra room...
...R: We went on vacation together—just the 321 two of us...
...Russian soldiers entered the buses and threw out the Hungarian driver and guards...
...I don't experience this as really schizophrenic...
...R: Yes...
...If Antigone is an archetype, then my mother was a sort of 20th-century Antigone...
...R: He was executed...
...Again, my grandmother and my aunt were not informed of our whereabouts...
...But being strong-willed, they hacked at the party bureaucracy, demanding my return—which in those days was a rather dangerous thing to do...
...After his rehabilitation, the government made her an offer—to bury my father in a proper cemetery, with only the immediate family attending...
...And I say this in a very general sense—just as I would say that our elders have lied to us...
...Blacklisted and forced to live on various marginal jobs, they kept their distance from politics...
...First, my mother and my grandmother were put under house arrest...
...I believe that this muteness will only stop if we form a truly independent culture...
...My adoptive parents may have decided that, for my own protection, it was better not to tell me the truth...
...My adoptive parents were registered as Lajos GyOrk and wife...
...We were taken to a government resort near Bucharest...
...This remained the case until my mother's release from prison in 1954...
...My mother simply did the following...
...R: Yes, I'm a colorful topic of conversation...
...My mother refused the government's offer, insisting that if her husband's death had resulted from a show trial, then this entitled him to nothing less than a show funeral...
...R: Suicide or murder—nobody knows for certain...
...P: You mean to say that as an infant you had applied for the "Hungarianization" of your name...
...0 P: But then on October 23, 1956, two weeks after the ceremonial funeral of Lasz16 Rajk, the revolution broke out in Budapest...
...How do you interpret her staunch fidelity to your father, beyond the grave...
...Before her death, I tried to question her about this matter but her illness interfered...
...I was 16 years old...
...No one could come or go...
...I was sure, quite simply, that my aunt and my uncle were my parents...
...He was to be the first "imperialist agent and traitor" condemned to death in Hungary's first Stalinist show trial...
...R: No...
...How did you develop the courage to practice civil disobedience...
...When it became known that Rakosi was returning to Hungary from the Soviet Union, only one person dared to file legal proceedings against him—my mother [for having been instrumental in arranging the show trial...
...Another document in the birth registry attests to the fact that Lasz16 Kovacs was adopted by such and such a family, becoming Istvan GyOrk...
...Because of his activities on behalf of the Imre Nagy government, he was thereafter jailed again...
...323 czy's daughter, MiklOs Vásárhelyi's three children, and three of JOzsef Sziligyi's children...
...P: Can you remember when your mother told you who she really was...
...And so, in my work, I am confronted quite directly with a lot of the social and cultural injustices that exist not only in Hungary but throughout the world...
...The party made a desperate attempt to prevent a mass demonstration at the funeral...
...And you should know that Istvan Kovacs is one of the most common Hungarian names, much like the German Milner or Schmidt...
...They argued that it was tactically unwise to provoke the Soviets...
...R: As there's a tug-of-war between what's being officially printed and what my name stands for, I can no longer openly work in the theater and in films...
...R: I believe that at first she honestly didn't know whether my mother was alive or dead...
...But . . . the fact is that my flat in the city, the one in which I ran the Boutique, was taken away from me...
...On October 6, 1956, after his posthumous rehabilitation, he was given a new burial, with honor, at which some 250,000 people showed up...
...She turned down the offer...
...Hungary was rationing everything then...
...Toward the end of summer, many young intellectuals of Imre Nagy's camp and some of the older ones who had been released from the prisons implored my mother to give up the battle...
...I simply had vanished...
...That it could have been suicide or murder...
...Mother's name: Julianna FOldi...
...Istvan, because the GyOrk family already had a son named Lasz16...
...They don't speak about the Rajk trial...
...P: The atmosphere at the Rajk funeral must have been highly charged, foreshadowing the coming revolution...
...The car sped away...
...When I didn't respond to my name, my aunt and my grandmother began guessing—more or less the way you would guess how best to talk to a dog who has come to play with you...
...He was force-fed during his hunger strike in prison, and it was during this force feeding that the tube entered his lungs instead of his stomach...
...Today I possess a collection of documents that attest to the metamorphosis of my own names as well as those of my mother...
...I believe, and this is an important point, that I have learned to live and deal with this condition early enough to overcome it, remaining alive and sane...
...I still have my job, but attempts have been made in the last two years to create conditions under which I myself would decide to quit...
...On the day after we had taken refuge in the embassy, the building was surrounded by Soviet tanks...
...She didn't deliver the charge to the Politburo or the High Court...
...During the entire time I spent there, neither my mother, her mother, nor her sister had any idea of my whereabouts...
...We were now very close to Transylvania...
...On November 22, 1956, at 6:30 PM, Imre Nagy and the other refugees left the embassy...
...The registrar took a volume from the shelf and opened it to a page with a pasted-in postscript that folded out like an accordion...
...This functionary worked on our case...
...That's tight...
...This was the family of my father's sister, who lived in Transylvania...
...As we were talking, I sensed he wanted to tell me something...
...In any case, whatever is behind this story, I believe that what was done was well intended...
...At the age of 16, in order to obtain the usual identity papers, I had to go to the registry office to get my birth certificate...
...I found out the truth after my mother was released from prison in 1954...
...P: Do you have any recollection of the incident concerning an embassy secretary who allegedly looked like Imre Nagy and was shot by a Soviet sniper as he stood at a window...
...There were the two children of Ferenc Donath—the third was born later, in Roumania...
...For anyone who wasn't politically astute, the situation in Hungary didn't look as if much was changing...
...It was a good tactic...
...Ernfi Gerii replaced Rakosi as first secretary of the party in July 1956...
...And I don't necessarily see a parallel between my childhood and the developments of my adult life...
...In 1956, when my mother requested the return of the name Rajk, she had to obtain my birth certificates at the registry office...
...Father's name: LaszlO Kovacs...
...I have a peculiar occupation—I am an architect...
...The negotiations took months...
...She never tried to fill me with the terror of the past...
...P: In a novel, Magda Szab6 probes the reasons why your mother never remarried...
...Others widowed by a similar destiny had either remarried or had a steady friend...
...In the spring of 1957, all the men were arrested, leaving only the women and children behind...
...Even then we didn't get our names back immediately...
...No one paid any attention to the fact that the cemetery was crawling with cops...
...there were Imre Nagy's two grandchildren, Geza Loson' Imre Nagy—the Communist leader who broke from the Soviets and formed a coalition government in behalf of the '56 Hungarian revolution...
...He was executed by the Russians in 1958...
...Even the official party newspaper, Szabad Arêp ("Free People") reflected this in its report on October 7: "Workers had left their factories in their blue work clothes, carrying their tool boxes...
...R: I belong to a generation that was only indirectly touched by the murderous years that we've discussed here...
...0 P: Politically, the years 1953-54 brought the first thaw in Stalinist Hungary...
...And then, for May 1949, when I was four months old, there was another thin, glued-in strip that read: "The Hungarianization of LaszlO Rajk, at his own request...
...On one occasion, in a speech before some 10,000 people in the Budapest Sports Stadium, Rakosi had said: "I spent many a sleepless night figuring out the solution to the Rajk case...
...soldiers and civilians came, wearing black armbands . . . children came holding their mothers' hands—children strangely moved by the sight of a seven-yearoldboy standing beside his father's casket, also holding his mother's hand...
...That is how I became Istvan Kovacs...
...This led to heated discussions among the women, and my mother was the only one who argued that it was important for the children to grow up in the same environment as all the other children in Hungary, and not in complete isolation...
...And with the state bureaucracy's usual muddling, our electric bills continued to come addressed to this name until 1963, although everyone knew by then who we were and what was behind it all...
...Since then, many have come forward as witnesses to the fact that this was a deliberate "accident...
...For us children, this was the beginning of a particularly important way of life...
...Despite this, one of József Szilágyi's sons managed to flee in the trunk of an embassy car...
...It was probably really an accident...
...This was necessary in order to receive food coupons...
...but then I was put on ice...
...Yet, to my mother, it came as a complete surprise...
...I couldn't even keep my first name...
...I can only relate what she has told me, since I was only four months old at the time...
...They simply set her free—put her out the prison gate—and she made her way home to the tiny flat where my aunt and my uncle, their two sons, my grandmother, and I lived...
...At least we can try...
...Rajk as well...
...No one knew where I had been taken...
...P: Isn't that a rather schizophrenic situation...
...I was then trying to break through her usual anecdotes, the way she spoke about her life together with father and about her own life later on...
...The convoy consisted of three buses flanked by two armored cars...
...Strange things happen between heaven and earth...
...During my studies, I became involved with questions of housing distribution, housing policy, and the housing of industry itself...
...LASZLO RAJK: My mother was arrested two weeks after my father...
...R: No...
...Shortly thereafter this courier came a second time with the message that Uncle Imre [Imre Nagy] had requested that my mother go to the embassy.' She spoke at length with my grandmother, and then decided to accept the offer, taking me with her...
...The newspapers then reported that not only my father and three of his fellow sufferers who also had been buried in the woods but many others, too, were slated for reburial...
...I respond to this name as I do to the diminutive of my own, Laci...
...We could use the garden, but it was patrolled by guards and dogs...
...I can no longer put up with people lying—with "facts" that are lies...
...R: As an adult, I still wonder about it—why she had no man friend or lover...
...Whether it was a deliberate trick to save my mother's life, no one knows...
...Both had suffered bitterly as the result of what had happened to my father and mother...
...LaszlO Kovacs became Istvan Gyiirk and, finally, my own name, Lasz16 Rajk, was returned to me...
...I have classmates from elementary school who knew me as Istvan GyOrk and still call me Pista...
...As a result of this study, it became clear to me that housing policy, regardless of in which country, is merely a political weapon, and has nothing to do with equity and the people's welfare...
...In Canada I wrote my dissertation on the housing policies of the United Nations organization...
...This lawyer actually found something...
...For a long time to come, my mother's identity papers were issued under the name of Julianna GyOrk...
...Our lessons followed a rather incredible curriculum...
...I had won back my own first name...
...R: No...
...I intend to play out my role to its end...
...Finally, my mother received an offer allowing me to return home...
...They don't speak about anything...
...University students came with their briefcases, in groups of twos and threes...
...We children were well aware of the fact that an accident had taken place...
...My salary matches the lowest basic level in Hungary-4,600 forints...
...Yet, for us children in the embassy, it was all a marvelous game...
...R: My mother's grasp of politics was instinctual rather than intellectual—and her instincts worked unbelievably well...
...And then, after my mother was taken away, they "naturally" removed my grandmother too...
Vol. 33 • July 1986 • No. 3
