Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

This movement once had a big meeting against the revival of Horthy.
At this gathering I said that Horthy was responsible for the loss
of one million Hungarian lives. His defenders, on the other hand,
claimed that it was his achievement that just one million lost their
lives and not more. They said that the Jews were relatively safe
until the German occupation. But in reality they were already in
forced labour camps in the Soviet Union and used as mine detectors
on the battlefield. In 1990, the then Hungarian minister of foreign
affairs said that the ice age started in 1945. For me that was
different. I would have been dead if the period before had lasted
longer.”
As is the case in many new European Union member states, Hungarians
often attempt comparisons between the Nazi period and
the communist dictatorship that followed, arguing that both were
equally bad. Konrád has difficulty supporting this approach and
makes a clear distinction. As a Jewish child, unlike many of his relatives
and classmates, he was fortunate not to be sent to
Auschwitz. “For me personally, the Nazi and communist periods
were not the same. The communists could not forget that they were
also somehow idealists. It was a mixture of good intentions and
bad ideological tools. There was an upward mobilisation of the
people. The working class and the peasants formed the cadres of
the regime. In 1949, all the leaders of the workers’ councils were
invited to come to the central house of the unions. They had to wait
there during the whole night. They did not know what would happen,
whether they were being arrested. At four o’clock in the morning
a high ranking person of the politburo came out and said: “From
now on you are directors of big factories”. Every person was given
an important business. Their first task was to confiscate everything.
Now, it is not hard to imagine that these people suddenly felt very
important, but they were also uncertain; they knew they were not
competent. Nevertheless, in 1956 these people were prepared to
defend their position with machine guns because they believed to
have achieved something.”
In the end the difference is, in Konrád’s eyes, very simple. “The communists
did not kill children. They killed people because they were
considered enemies and not just for what they were.”
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