Tag #138259 - Interview #77963 (laszlo nussbaum)

I was at the faculty until 1956 as a professor's assistant. That year I was in Budapest by chance and I went to the intellectual council where I knew a teacher, and I looked into how they created the revolution [27]. I came home and they told me to write up as an eyewitness of the events, what the Scinteia [The Spark], the paper of the party, had actually already written down. The keynote of the articles was that in Hungary there was a counter- revolution in order to overthrow communism, and that this was carried out by the proletariat mob that robbed the shops. They kept on insisting that I write it until I wrote my own version of the revolution.

What I wrote was not in flat opposition with the voice of the Scinteia, but I didn't write down what I didn't see. I didn't see shops being looted. It's true that they broke shop-windows, but they didn't steal anything. I did not use the words 'counter-revolution.' It had a character of authentic reportage and they didn't like that it wasn't clear in it, that it was a counter-revolution. It didn't come to light from my article that they wanted to upset communism. Finally, they accepted my third rewrite, and it appeared in Kolozsvar in the Igazsag. Then they translated it into Romanian, but it wasn't good enough, not even the third version. And then, well, they didn't fire me exactly, but they transferred me to the university library as an archivist, so that I could not deal with the students. They didn't finish me off, but they didn't let me be a professor, or have direct contact with students.