The Case Against Freedom

In the critical days of the Hungarian revolution last November, the hospitals of Budapest were the scenes of many grim dramas. When the hated AVH police came out of hiding and joined the Soviet tanks in their savage crackdown, they shelled wards filled with children and wounded. Hospital courtyards were packed with the bodies of dead Freedom Fighters. Last week, for some unfathomable reason, the Kadar government in its first show trial decided to base its case against the Freedom Fighters on an incident that occurred at Domonkos Street hospital during these tense, terror-packed hours.

Slim, blonde Ilona Toth, 25-year-old medical student, was charged with having murdered a patient, Istvan Kollar, with successive hypodermic injections of narcotics, gasoline and air. She had discovered, by a photograph of him in uniform, that Kollar was an AVH man. Dressed in a navy blue overcoat too big for her slight frame, Ilona Toth appeared in Budapest's gloomy municipal court with ten other Freedom Fighters chosen from the thousands in Kadar's jails. They were picked for trial, the middle-aged woman judge indicated, because they were "intellectuals, students and ne'er-do-wells" who had acted "merely out of a spirit of adventure or because of lack of information." If by this choice Kadar had hoped to discredit the Freedom Fighters as a whole, he had miscalculated: Medical Student Toth's case for freedom was as powerful as it was poignant.

The Suspicious Patient. In the trial room, under the glare of movie cameras, the pale young woman told how, early in the fight, she had knocked out a Soviet tank with a hand grenade. At Domonkos hospital she and her ten codefendants, none of them over 30, had used the hospital Mimeograph machine to crank out a revolutionary newspaper called Truth. The editors were Gyula Obersovszky, onetime cultural editor of a provincial newspaper who had been expelled from the party for organizing a satirical cabaret show, and Jozsef Gali, ailing survivor of Nazi concentration camps, who had fallen into disgrace with the Communists after his play Freedom Hill had become a hit.

When the Soviet tanks came blasting back into Budapest to oust Premier Nagy's legitimate government, Editors Obersovszky and Gali urged continued resistance, changed the name of their clandestine journal to We Live! It was during this time that Hospital Patient Kollar fell under their suspicion: the underground group feared that he would betray them. Said Ilona Toth: "I felt I had to kill him." When her needles failed, one of her companions stood on Kollar's neck and she dispatched him with a knife.

In the tense courtroom, tearful Student Toth pleaded extenuating circumstances. "I was completely overwrought," she said. "I thought I had to do everything for the revolution." She could not understand why Russia, a friend of Hungary, had sent in troops, and she insisted that the aims of the students who took up arms were not subversive. Said Freedom Fighter Toth: "Whatever I might have done, I do not consider myself a murderess."

Asking No Mercy. Editor Obersovszky, pale and taut, made a more eloquent plea: "I want to be a free man, but I do not want mercy or a compromise. I did not fight against the system or the idea, but only against those who besmirched it and discredited it, who shut their eyes, who tried to restrain the development of socialist progress and who played games with our faith. We made mistakes, but our aim and ambition were pure and honest. I do not worry about my own fate. One can get used to prison. But if I go to prison, my family--an ailing wife and three children--will break up. That does not mean I am asking for mercy. If this court has no confidence in me, then it should give me the most severe sentence. For if the court has no confidence in me, I do not want to be a free man." Said the judge, as Obersovszky turned away from the microphone: "You are still arrogant."

Editor Gali was asked how it was that, though ill and half-blind, he had managed to be everywhere on Oct. 23, the first day of the revolution. He peered through his thick spectacles and answered: "In life there is always one day when one can do anything."

For Obersovszky and Gali and six other members of the Domonkos hospital group, the sentence was prison. For Ilona Toth and two of her companions, including the one who helped hold AVH man Kollar, the sentence was death. As the word fell from the judge's lips, there was a gasp from the 400 spectators in the courtroom. The judge threatened to clear the court. Tommy-gun-toting guards edged forward. This was Kadar's Hungary.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.