The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
Death in Budapest By Bela Fabian and Walter Nelson New Yorkers who were theatergoers back in 1911 may recall seeing Daniel Frohman's production of Seven Sisters, by Ferenc Herczeg. Ten years...
...When there was no more fuel available, the doctor took all of Herczeg's clothes out of the closet and covered the old man with them...
...Here are some excerpts from the letters: "On the morning of February 14, Herczeg went out for a stroll...
...on the contrary, it was too much so...
...The funeral was held on one of the coldest, gloomiest and most desolate days of the year...
...Ten years later, Lee Schubert produced Herczeg's Silver Fox...
...he bore his affliction with great stoicism...
...I had very little money, but even if I had had more, I couldn't have obtained the kind of flowers I wanted...
...It was not that the death of the 91-year-old writer was not newsworthy...
...Not more than 17 or 20 persons paid their last respects to the greatest Hungarian writer of the past generation...
...Many of his old friends, who had known and loved Herczeg for forty and fifty years, would have wanted to be at his grave...
...Ferenc Herczeg died on February 24, but Hungary's Communist rulers did not see fit to announce the fact until several days after the funeral...
...Most of the mourners were old...
...For a few days, Herczeg's doctor was able to find enough dry leaves for a fire to keep his room warm, and neighbors would bring soup so that he could have some hot food...
...I got to Herczeg's grave...
...The day before, we had had to stamp our feet and flap our arms, the way the coachmen used to do at their stands in the old days...
...After the burial, when we went away trembling in the bitter cold, there were no more than two wreaths and eight or ten withered bouquets on Ferenc Herczeg's freshly-filled grave...
...At noon on February 28, the weather in Budapest turned milder...
...And so the funeral was not announced and only a handful of mourners were present...
...As described in three letters to Radio Free Europe, the circumstances surrounding Herczeg's death and burial are symptomatic of the bizarre "Kultur" which is Hungary's lot under Kremlin rule...
...Those who remain remind one of the Magyars who were sent home as a warning, with their ears cut off, after the defeat at Augsburg in the year 955...
...It was bitterly cold, and in the evening he grew feverish and took to his bed...
...I looked for names, but not a single card or piece of paper identified the donors...
...The date is not absolutely certain, for no one was with him when he died...
...But then on the 28th, a sunbeam, a rare visitor, sneaked into our rooms and seemed to suggest that we go and place a flower on the grave...
...For Rakosi and the other literati who now rule the Magyars know that Ferenc Herczeg had been a moderate conservative, editor-in-chief of the now-defunct Budapest literary review Uj Idok, which was anything but Stalinist in tone and content...
...They did not say why they wanted the information, but one could readily imagine...
...Since the last deportation, however, most of them no longer live in Budapest...
...Throughout the last week of his life, he did not utter a word...
...All I had been able to find was some tired-looking carnations...
...It was 3 o'clock when the trolley let me off at the cemetery...
...He probably passed away during the night of the 24th...
...Some of us who wept at the grave found our tears freezing on our cheeks...
...But the little bouquets were tied with the white satin ribbons that one cannot find any more, the ribbons which those who loved Herczeg produced from their ancient attic chests...
...Demonstrations of solidarity and manifestations of the people's will" are fine if they are arranged in the offices of the Hungarian Worker's (Communist) party, but not if they eulogize a writer whom the Reds, while not daring to persecute openly, disapproved of in the strongest terms...
...The last Herczeg play to hit New York was Louis Anspacher's 1923 adaptation of Dagmar...
...But there were three young men, all dressed in black, who, during the ceremony, quietly asked the names and addresses of the mourners...
...A miracle had occurred: "The grave had disappeared beneath the heaps of bouquets with which it had been strewn since the previous day...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 20
