Two Jailed Writers

...But Spain cannot endure a new chain of revenge and counter-revenge...

...I felt myself responsible, for my own eyes had been opened too late...

...The official release described him as "the former propaganda chief...

...Dery went on to speak of the October uprising, calling it "the purest, the most just of our revolutions.1 We made an appointment for the next day...

...Hungary's Tibor Dery, a former Communist, and Spain's Dionisio Ridruejo, once a Falangist, have been imprisoned for their adherence to democracy TWO JAILED WRITERS By Francois Bondy On Easter Sunday, Hungary's leading novelist, Tibor Dery, was jailed in Budapest...

...I last saw Ridruejo in Madrid several weeks before his arrest...

...We were murderers on both sides," he said...

...But our history demands of us today that we change and that we conquer our past instead of blindly re-living it...

...for lie wanted to give me a copy of his best-selling novel, Niki: The Story of a Pop...

...Dionisio Ridruejo belongs to another generation and is a man of a different temperament...

...Yet, by 1941 he had been bitterly disappointed in his hopes for social justice and progress, and he joined the Spanish "Blue Division'" which was fighting beside the Germans in Russia...

...when the students of Madrid were organizing a "Congress of Young Writers' and rebelling against their official Falangist organization, the*' turned to Ridruejo with the plea that he voice their aspirations...

...For more than a decade, Ridruejo has been in no sense a mere disillusioned Falangist...

...The object of this was to create the impression abroad that Ridruejo was an embittered Falangist who resented the curtailment of the Falange's influence and the strengthening of the Catholic organization Opus Dei...

...Though watched constantly—his passport had been taken away and his mail was censored—Ridruejo stated his political credo several months ago to a correspondent of the distinguished Cuban magazine Bohemia, which is read throughout Latin America: and the interview represented a veritable manifesto of the democratic opposition in Spain...

...Until 1952, he shared with the poet Gyula Illyes the position of Communist Hungary's most celebrated writer...

...Nothing else counted for them any longer, and cautious silence is the last thing that they expect from their friends...

...He was arrested shortly afterward, though no announcement was made for nine days...

...Dery and Ridruejo felt that they were suffocating in the atmosphere of dictatorship, and they needed truth the way one needs oxygen...

...These two men, by stating the political issues simply and frankly, have forced the regimes to show their true colors...

...For years, the Spanish press has avoided any mention of his name...

...Dery was expelled from the Party...

...The one-time leading Falangist who broke with the entire ruling bureaucracy, although he could easily have remained Franco's favorite and close collaborator, inevitably reminds one of the Yugoslav Milovan Djilas...

...However, a special workers' meeting, called for the purpose of publicly condemning him, refused to do so...

...one does not think just of "tortured Hungary," but of a great-hearted human being and of a writer whose humor is at once delicate, sarcastic, and ironically directed at its creator...

...For years, he has no longer been a disillusioned Falangist, but a democrat for whom restoration of political freedom was the precondition for any progress...

...One had entered the Civil Guard and therefore been shot by the Republicans...

...in November 1955...

...His conflict with the Party leadership began when the second volume of his trilogy The Answer appeared, since he described the old illegal Party as he had known it and not in accordance with the official legend...

...Both are anything but conspirators, and nothing I say here on the basis of these meetings can hurt them...

...Over a period of ten years, however, this homeland was stolen from us piece by piece...

...I reproached myself for not having employed my words- -or my silence—so that all could understand...

...Dery faces an indefinite term in prison...

...Dery himself, thanks to his international prestige, enjoyed a few more months of freedom...

...This was the first public challenge to the power of dictator Matyas Rakosi, who shortly afterward stepped down...

...And it is no wonder that these three men have today become models for the youth of their countries, as they had never been when they still spoke in the name of the state and of a ruling ideology...

...The 44-year-old Ridruejo was one of the founders of the Spanish Falange...

...Tibor Dery, lean and thoughtful in appearance, seemed to me younger than his 63 years...

...Yet, Ridruej o is no pessimist...

...In the end...

...Djilas, too, made a frontal attack on Yugoslavia's ruling bureaucracy after he had been Tito's favorite and had won all the highest decorations, including the title "People's Hero," in the anti-Nazi partisan warfare...

...The book had long been barred from publication and circulated privately in various forms...

...We thought we were building socialism, while around us they were erecting the blood- and lie-stained walls of a prison...

...And both, Ridruejo as well as Djilas, proclaimed their political views openly in a foreign periodical after they had found that they could no longer express them in any manner in their own countries...

...After the clashes between students and Falangists in February 1956...

...One might carry the comparison a step further: Tito's Yugoslavia and Franco's Spain would both like to create the impression that they are restoring the basic freedoms...

...Thinking of Dery...

...All who know him see in him a moderate, responsible opposition leader, a true "European...

...the atmosphere had changed so greatlv in Spain even at that time that the noted Catholic politician Gil Robles...

...If men can thus repudiate the very quality of a man, the foundations of civilization itself are destroyed...

...Because he had translated Gide's critical book on the Soviet Union, which the police took for Communist propaganda...

...They were peasants, and they had wanted their two sons to become "something better...

...Sent home wounded and sick, he addressed a letter to the Caudillo, indicting his dictatorial regime...

...Three men who tested the new totalitarian reality just as critically as they had the old order and who showed the same courage in once more drawing all the necessary conclusions from their criticism...

...serving as defense counsel for the accused...

...he was arrested for a short time and a number of students were held for man) months...

...This Castillian conceives of politics in moral, but by no means oversimplified, terms...

...According to an official announcement, Ridruejo has been released, but there is reason to believe that he is actually still in jail...

...relatively mild penalties were imposed...

...In these two sons of one family, both shot as it were "impersonally," Ridruejo saw a symbol of the Civil War...

...The murders on our side are for the most part unatoned for...

...But both, on the basis of their personal observations and experiences, have broken with regimes which brought them only personal advantage and which Francois Bondy, a veteran Swiss journalist, is now editor of Preuves, monthly magazine of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris...

...The murders which they committed have for the most part been punished...

...Their most urgent desire was to tear down the walls of silence which surrounded the Hungarian and Spanish dictatorships...

...would gladly have transformed them into living monuments as "state poets...

...He employed all his prestige as Hungary's leading Communist writer in his open, uncompromising battle against the atmosphere of terror, intrigue and censorship...

...They asked nothing more than to say openly to all the world what they think and what they want...

...The other, an architect, had been shot by the Nationalists because he seemed a suspicious intellectual...

...Our defeated adversaries have cause indeed for resentment," he said...

...Dery was among those who under Kadar proclaimed a "strike of the pens," which virtually all of Hungary's leading authors and journalists have consistently observed in spite of all hardships and dangers...

...Derv would not want his "case" to be viewed separately by public opinion from that of other writers less well known abroad...

...He told me how once during the war, in a village near the front, he had met an aged couple...

...Djilas, Dery, Ridruejo . . . three men who plunged body and soul into the revolution and the fanatical ideologies of our time because the old society which they had known seemed to them rotten and ignoble...

...In 1945, I thought that the workers and peasants, who had hitherto been 'outsiders' in the nation, would find a new homeland...

...Dery showed me an essay which had appeared on the day of my visit—the last to bear his signature...

...But Dery, who reproached himself for having remained silent too long under Rakosi, was determined never again to assume this burden of guilt...

...Although politically linked to the Communists in Hungary, Dery was always an incorrigible individualist...

...One can say without exaggeration that Ridruejo is today the conscience of Spain, just as Dery is the conscience of Hungary...

...The facts should be made clear...

...Despite his twelve volumes of poetry and his still unpublished autobiography...

...Since the new Cabinet in Madrid seemed to be planning a certain liberalization of the regime, it was doubtless hoped that world opinion would believe that Ridruejo, like other Falangists, was opposing precisely this liberalization...

...The Spaniard takes pride in the fact that he never changes and never forgets...

...The regime probably tried to obtain some sort of statement from him and might even have been satisfied with a pledge to refrain from all political utterances, as in the case of the philosopher George Lukacs...

...In our conversation, which was carried on in French, he recalled his years in Paris and Berlin, mentioning Andre Gide among the writers who were his friends...

...The War" was for him the decisive experience of his life...

...The 63-year-old Dery was a militant Communist who had known the inside of one of Admiral Horthy's jails back in 1935...

...His last stories, which appeared in French magazines, all dealt with prison and with the life of those who never knew why they were arrested or why they were released...

...Reprimanded by Minister of Culture Josef Revai, he tried to absorb the esthetics of Andrei Zhdanov but could not...

...As punishment, he was confined for five years in the Catalonian village of La Ronda...

...The day before the final Russian attack on Budapest, I spoke to Tibor Dery for the last time at the headquarters of the Hungarian Writers' Union...

...He is a democrat who has been criticizing the very foundations of the totalitarian state and enjoys the esteem of all liberal groups in Spain as well as of all Spaniards in exile who are in touch with developments in their native land...

...Why had he been jailed under Horthy...

...It was he, in the Writers' Union and later in the Petofi Club, who look the lead in denouncing these conditions and the censorship which made it impossible to portray social reality...

...However, we writers can cite an extenuating circumstance: To be sure, we began the open struggle against tyranny very late, but, nevertheless, it is we who did give the signal...

...Dery's friend and contemporary, the dramatist Gyula Hay, and several other writers were soon arrested, and the Writers' Union was suspended...

...It said: "I am old—more than 62 years—and have taken part in two revolutions...

...He was convinced from the beginning that the "Congress" would not be permitted, and he was also resigned to his own arrest...

...In an age when not only the hangmen, but the victims as well, have often ceased to have individual features but are merely parts of a pulverizing collective fate, it is meaningful to look at these figures whose fate, whatever its course, was shaped by personal decision and sacrifice...

...which traces the spiritual path of an entire Spanish generation, one senses on meeting him more the fighter than the writer...

...Ten days earlier, in Madrid, the poet Dionisio Ridruejo was arrested in the street...

...Yet, as man and author he is too distinct a personality to serve merely as a symbol...

...Justice itself cries for revenge...

...A suffocating man smashes the window panes without worrying about whether he will cut his hands...

...What do the spirit and the fate of these two writers have in common...

...At the age of 25, he was propaganda chief of the Fascist regime...

...Dery and Ridruejo stood originally on opposite sides of the barricade...

...Ridruejo has broken not only with the regime to which he was originally so close but also with his own illusions...

...now that it had been published, one printing after another was being sold out...

...His friend Tibor Meray, who is now living in Paris and saw him for the last time late in November, reports that Dery aged years in the weeks after the Russian attack...

...When Generalissimo Franco marched into fallen Barcelona in 1939, the news photographs showed young Ridruej o at his side...

...w as able to indict the Franco dictatorship in court...

...An enemy was no longer a human being, but a thing, an obstacle, and his life did not count...

...He interviewed Tibor Dery in Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution last November, and met with Dionisio Ridruejo in Madrid a few weeks later during an extensive tour of Franco Spain...

...And he has absolute faith in Spanish youth...

...In our conversations, he constantly stressed that Spain can strive for a free future without suffering once more the horrors of civil war...

...He supported them, but without sharing their illusions...

...Meanwhile, Dery saw how the country was being transformed into one gigantic concentration camp and all contact with Western culture was being destroyed...

...Once it had happened...