Guest Column
FAST, HOWARD
GUEST COLUMN By Howard Fast An Open Letter To Soviet Writers For many years, we called each other friend and comrade, and during those years I won a measure of your affection and trust. I think...
...All of these sentences were imposed because the Hungarian writers concerned had taken part in a struggle for national liberation that the whole world sympathized with and admired...
...Yet this was the "crime" of these Hungarian writers, Tibor Dery and his comrades—and for this they must spend years of their lives in prison...
...And when my own government put me in prison for refusing to name those who supported Spanish Republican relief work, I called upon writers the world over to raise their voices against the unjust imprisonment of myself and my brave friends...
...We were harried and persecuted because we would not silence our voices in the face of what we considered to be injustice...
...You saw clearly then that a state which silences and imprisons writers cannot claim humanism and democracy...
...When a writer's people are in travail, when his land is violated by an invader, is there any place for him but with his own people, fighting at their side...
...And rightly so, for the cause of a man imprisoned unjustly, the cause of a writer whose brave voice is silenced, is one of the best causes that mankind knows...
...tantamount to life imprisonment...
...Tibor Dery, 63 years old, so long a loyal member of the Communist party, received a nine-year sentence, Howard Fast, author of Citizen Tom Paine and Freedom Road, broadcast this appeal over Radio Liberation...
...I recall to you that when Feffer and Bergelson and Kvitko and so many others were tortured and then murdered by your own government, your voices were silent...
...I left the Communist party because I could no longer be part of an organization which throttled the conscience of men with fear and with threats, but I had hoped that my own resignation and the resignations of thousands of Communist intellectuals in every land would underline the fact that socialism without individual freedom is a fraud and a mockery...
...Could one have anything but contempt for such a writer...
...Zoltan Zelk received a three-year sentence and Tibor Tardos a year and a half...
...Yet the bleak and awful silence of Communist intellectuals toward all injustice perpetrated by their own rulers makes men of good will everywhere wonder whether anything has changed at all...
...Those were difficult years for left-wing writers in America...
...for no voices were more articulate than those of yourselves, my Soviet colleagues...
...You yourselves, my Russian colleagues, would have despised a writer in Russia who held himself apart when the Nazi invader crossed the Soviet border...
...Gyula Hay, 56 years old, was sentenced to six years imprisonment...
...We honor your scientific achievements...
...But if on this issue—and all the many like it—you retreat into a cavern of silence and cowardice, then all the scientific achievements in the world will not entitle you to the decent respect of mankind...
...We pay eager tribute to the Soviet contribution to the conquest of space...
...Today, you claim that you did not know the facts...
...How eloquent the response was, I need not remind you...
...you claim that these barbarous practices toward writers have ceased...
...And from your land, from every Communist land, there is not even a whisper of the anger and the indignation of writers...
...You do know the facts...
...How can this be—unless all voices have been silenced by fear...
...Even the New York Daily Worker supported this struggle and declared that the cause of the Hungarian Revolution was a just cause...
...If you only raise your voices in defense of Tibor Dery and his colleagues, you will strike a greater blow for human freedom than a million words of boastfulness over the sputniks and the guided missiles...
...I think that this was less due to the quality of my writing than to your conviction that I was unafraid to follow the dictates of my conscience...
...How must the world judge you if you are silent now...
...But in all truth, it must be said that the world has less need for sputniks and missiles today than for compassion, democracy, freedom and justice...
...Last week, we learned here in America that a group of the bravest and most talented Hungarian writers were sentenced to prison by a Hungarian court on November 13, 1957...
...you claim that your land, the Soviet Union, is truly a land of freedom and human dignity...
...and you also know that it was against your own country's guns and tanks that Tibor Dery fought...
...Now I ask you this, bluntly and directly: "If you remain silent in the face of this monstrous injustice in Hungary, can you still claim that you talk with the voice of civilization and humanism...
...But in the case of Tibor Dery and his colleagues, you can make no such claims...
...Now what sort of a writer holds himself aloof from a national liberation struggle of his own people...
...And this is done in the name of Hungarian "socialism...
Vol. 40 • December 1957 • No. 48
