HUNGARY'S LOST GENERATIONS

Can the new prime minister, József Antall, raise his nation from the ashes of forty-five years of totalitarian hell?

KATI MARTON

Letter from Budapest

Jozsef Antall, Hungary's first freely elected prime minister in more than four decades, is running late, and, at nine in the morning, already looks disheveled. Shambling into his office with a vaguely distracted air, Antall resembles Mr.

Chips more than he does his own role model, Winston Churchill. It is no accident that Czechoslovakia's government is headed by a playwright, Lithuania's by a music teacher, and now Hungary's by a medical historian. Antall's lack of prior political experience, like Havel's and Landsbergis's, is absolute assurance that he never wore the collaborator's mask.

The chief of the Hungarian republic is a public-relations man's nightmare. His hair is too long in the back, his gray suit is shapeless, his socks droop slightly, and the bags under his eyes give him a look of incurable fatigue. "Two to three

hours of sleep a night," he says with a deep sigh, in answer to my first question, and settles into an armchair in his new office. A lady in a white coat who looks as if she might double as the cleaning lady serves us poisonous black coffee in delicate Herend cups. "Doktor Ur. .she addresses him in the formulation of pre-war Hungary.

Herr Doktor. That musty form of address suits the prime minister perfectly and is becoming the preferred form throughout the land. It is about as far from "Comrade" as a Herend demitasse is from a tin can. And Antall, weary but somehow wanly elegant, is just as much a contrast to the puffed-up party bons vivants who were his predecessors in this office. His ashen complexion and hooded eyes make it impossible to imagine his ever becoming the focus of a personality cult. Which is another reason he now occupies this baroque armchair and commands this unmatched view of the Danube. Hungarians seem to have embraced this rather dour figure the way one settles into a solid marriage, weary from too many tempestuous love affairs.

Antall's voice, whether addressing his countrymen or answering my questions, is a deliberate monotone, the soothing voice of a doctor ministering to a patient suffering from stress and hypertension. "When Churchill returned to London from the Boer War," he notes, at home

more in the early years of the century than in the later, "Lord Salisbury told him nothing had really changed. But then, he said, nothing ever really does change in the House of Lords." But surely, I interrupt, such a staggering number of events have occurred in the last few months. Why, take the very fact that the prime minister is quoting Churchill and Lord Salisbury, rather than Lenin or Marx. Dr. Antall, a pedagogue for far longer than he has been a politician, does not suffer interruptions gladly. He frowns. "It is very hard for outsiders to understand what has happened here. It's always difficult for one country to understand another, but particularly if that other country is Hungary, with our peculiar language and culture."

I have to keep reminding myself that one year ago I sat in this office with a man who paid vigorous lip service to Moscow's hegemony over Hungary's life. One year ago a huge red star capped this parliament. There are no red stars left on the Budapest skyline now, and the only thing that still carries the name Red Star is a popular cinema which is showing Born on the Fourth of July, with Tom Cruise. There are no hardeyed men and women looking furtively around in the underground and in the streets. Gone is the flotilla of black limousines urgently whisking party nabobs (shielded from the people by opaque curtains) about town. One by one, streets are reverting to their pre-war names. Soon to go is Lenin Boulevard, now featuring Budapest's second McDonald's, splendidly done up in Belle Epoque gilt.

Near McDonald's, I pass a policeman patrolling the busy intersection around the Western Railroad Station. Like a Rotarian at a convention, he wears a nametag pinned to his uniform. All beat cops, I later discover, wear them—another concession to the people's demand for accountability.

"There is so much hate here... but a whole country can't just lie on a couch while a specialist takes notes."

A short ride from Antall's office in Parliament is the white marble-columned edifice which served as the headquarters of the Hungarian Communist Party and which, with typical Hungarian irony, was called "the White House." "You couldn't get within a block of this place without being stopped a year ago, ' ' my cabbie marvels as he drops me off at the deserted building's doorstep. Electronic cameras still thrust out from every angle, but iron-grill curtains bar all the doors save one. I approach and get far enough inside to see a gaping ghost town. Two security men, both with lit cigarettes in hand, appear. Yesterday's bullies look small and nervous. "May I look around?" I ask. Two heads shake in unison. "Nothing left. Nobody here," I am told. "What will happen to the building?" I ask.

"Nobody knows."

"And to you?" I persist. One of the guards draws on his cigarette and shrugs.

I walk the city's streets, taking in the heartbreaking beauty of its crumbling architecture. For the first time in my memory, construction cranes slice the ragged skyline. It is like looking at a well-loved old face before it slips under the plastic surgeon's knife. I can already read a certain lightness in the features of the people who pass me on the street. The result of finally meshing thought and action? The masks are off.

But danger lurks in the unmasking. It is Antall's fear that the country will become obsessed with surveying its own deformities. "We are so weighed down by the past," the prime minister sighs. "No wonder things have not followed the same course that those outside would have wished." Antall refers to disturbing signs of nascent anti-Semitism during the spring elections. "The same people who experienced World War II are still part of our population. They have never had a chance to recover from those terrible events." (Those events, of course, included the wholesale extermination of a large portion of Europe's last intact Jewish population. Eighty thousand Jews remain, however, giving the country the largest Jewish population

between the Rhine and the Soviet border.) "But after the Nazis, the Russians arrived, taking entire villages with them for forced labor. Ten percent of the population ended up either in camps or prisons after the war. No wonder there is so much hate here. The problem is that all of this has surfaced now. Which may be good for a patient undergoing Freudian analysis, but a whole country can't just lie on a couch while a specialist takes notes." Clearly, that is not how Dr. Antall envisions his role.

Anger seeps out of people at unexpected moments. A successful television producer, Erika Toth, reminded of her childhood in the late forties, suddenly, in the middle of dinner, asks, "Why did they have to take everything? Why did my mother and I have to live in a hallway with rats for months waiting for an apartment after they took ours?"

I, too, am suddenly reminded that after "they" arrested my parents—reporters for U.S. wire services—on trumpedup espionage charges, "they" stamped our apartment door with a red seal, making homeless children out of my sister and me. Nobody used that apartment while my parents were in prison for nearly two years. Why was it necessary for "them" to seize it? The heedlessness of the act makes it so repellent.

Transformed into a national confessional, the radio reveals the most gruesome detail to emerge from a period far too richly endowed with them: After the 1956 revolt, scores of boys and girls who had participated in the uprising, many still pre-adolescents, were rounded up and jailed. When they turned eighteen, the legal minimum age in Hungary to vote or to die, these children were sent to the gallows. A grotesque, twentieth-century version of Hansel and Gretel.

At almost any hour of the day, you can hear people reliving their own versions of the forty-fiveyear nightmare. "I was condemned by the party in the fifties as an agent of de Gaulle," a gravelly voice recounts. "I got a last-minute reprieve from the gallows because the judge noticed I couldn't speak any French. So how could I have been de Gaulle's agent?"

A Budapest taxi driver, the sole survivor of a large peasant family, tells me the state has offered to return to him his family's land by the shores of Lake Balaton. "In 1959, they came to take our farm. When my mother refused, and said we weren't moving, they put burning cigarettes to her bare feet, until she signed away everything. Now they say I can have it back. But now the soil is like dust. Our com used to be the size of half your arm. You should see the puny things they've been growing in the collective. Land has to be looked after, nourished. What good is it to me now?"

A founder of the Smallholders Party, one of six parties represented in Parliament, Dezso Futo tells me he, too, was sentenced as a spy in the early fifties. For years he wondered who his spymaster was supposed to have been. "Spies can't work alone, can they? Well, I only found out years later your father was the spymaster. And one piece of evidence against me was that I was seen handing your father a small parcel at the opera, which he then pocketed. It was a tiny bag, a gift of caraway seeds for your grandmother. Like everything else in those days, caraway seeds were in short supply." A man served two years, in part at least, so my grandmother could bake rye bread.

Along with the smothering memories, skepticism as thick as ivy seems to have overgrown the collective unconscious. Hungarians' almost pathological mistrust of one another and their leaders is

one of Jozsef Antall's gravest problems. Antall's own party newspaper carried a column under the byline Eva Bedecs which rhetorically asked its readers, "Did you once fall for the slogans and the promises of those who rule? Did they once promise you that the factory is yours, that you are working for yourself? Did they promise you that the country is yours, you built it for yourself? Did you believe them?. . . How many times do you have to be lied to?... So what do you still believe in? In anybody or anything at all? Possibly not even in God anymore?... In your opinion what does it take to change linen? Don't you need clean linen first? Do you think there is anything left that's clean in this country? A clean person, a clean page, clean hands, a clean conscience? Is it possible to be clean if you have lived here for forty-five or more years? And he who claims to be clean, can he really be?"

lozsef Antall could make the claim. The new prime minister's father was one of those Hungarians who not only resisted the fanatics' call during the Nazi period but was heroic in sheltering hundreds of Jews and others fleeing the Reich. A tree in Yad Vashem along the Boulevard of Righteous Gentiles and a street in Warsaw both bear the Antall name. "I opened the door when the Gestapo came for my father," Antall says with some heat. "I was thirteen and they threatened to take me as well as my father if he didn't stop helping the Jews."

The fifty-eight-year-old prime minis-

"Antall is a cunning fox who keeps two dogs on a chain. When the campaign was over, he reined in the mad dog." ter has many lost years to make up for. He was banned from teaching young people, his real passion, as a result of his role in organizing the high school where he taught during the revolution. And, for a long time, he was not allowed to publish. But Antall, the historian, who understood that nothing lasts forever, made good use of those years, reading everything on politics from Mettemich to Lippmann. Along the way, he made Budapest's Semmelweis Institute into one of the best institutes of medical history in the world.

Antall emerged from his internal exile as medical archivist only a few short years ago, when the first whiff of change and opportunity was in the air. He approached his father's party, the Smallholders, but quickly surmised that, with its heavy concentration of pre-war, land-fixated gentlemen, it was too redolent of the past. He then approached the Democratic Forum, a newly formed center-right coalition of reformists imbued with Hungarian pride. Four months later, sensing that Hungarians would respond well to this reassuring and untainted figure, the Forum chose Antall as its leader. Revolutions, even peaceful ones, are the incubators of such meteoric careers.

And yet at times this clean man seems stuck like everybody else in the mud of the past. When it appeared that the election might be at stake, the Democratic Forum revived the nationalist slogans and thinly disguised code words of antiSemitism ("cosmopolitan," "insufficiently Hungarian," "Bolshevik") which had not been publicly heard since the Communist takeover. Suddenly the hatemongers surfaced to scribble Stars of David on the campaign posters of many candidates in the Alliance of Free Democrats, a party of youngish former dissidents, some of whom also happen to be Jewish. As head of the Forum, Antall could have stopped the sudden plunge into anti-Semitism. But he did not. With victory close enough to taste, the man who had spent forty-five years as a nonperson, leading the subterranean life of a medical archivist, looked the other way.

"Antall is a cunning fox who keeps two dogs on a chain," an Alliance M.P. tells me. "When the campaign was over, he reined in the mad dog." As everyone in Hungary knows, the "mad dog" this M.P. speaks of is Istvan Csurka, a populist playwright and one of the founders of Antall's party.

Csurka was the dark spirit behind the campaign's slide toward bigotry. His supemationalist slogans were embraced by a small percentage of voters and no doubt helped ease Antall into office. But Csurka, himself a parliamentary candidate, was roundly defeated at the polls (though he has since been given a seat as one of his party's representatives-atlarge), and many now regard the Alliance of Free Democrats as the fastestgrowing political party.

Antall is acutely aware of the perception that he closed his eyes to such tactics. "Csurka," the prime minister explains, "is a creative person, an individualist who does not speak for the party." Antall says The New York Times and The New Yorker raised the specter of anti-Semitism in Hungary before it was even an issue here. "We want to practice the sort of politics which will prevent the question from even arising in Hungary. But we need the help of those outside who could influence this population. ... It would be monstrous"—Antall fairly spits out the word, which in Hungarian is borzaszto and is even stronger—"if in the final years of the twentieth century in the workplace or on television a face or a voice would be judged on the basis of whether [it is] Jew or non-Jew. Monstrous."

But this is Central Europe, easily enticed by the fanatic's lure. Can a medical historian with the slightly befuddled air of a professor of anthropology keep the extremists at permanent bay? Yes, says former American ambassador to Hungary Mark Palmer. "There is more to the man than you see. I watched him build his political career. Three years ago nobody in the country had ever heard of him. In a matter of months, Antall became the head of the second-largest political party. He was methodical and very shrewd. A real chess player. He has an ability to conceptualize which is very like Kissinger's."

Between sessions, Antall works corridors of Parliament. He seems in his element here, moving quietly but confidently among clusters of newly minted politicians. Murmuring in a steady, reassuring voice, he seems to have something to say to each. Even here he is tightfisted with his smiles. When he does allow his features to relax for a moment and his mouth curls up instead of down, he is transformed. You should smile more, I tell him. "Not yet," he says, shaking his head and frowning again.

A short, stocky figure with a wrestler's rolling gait strides into the gilded chamber of deputies: Arpad Goncz, Hungary's new president. An Alliance M.P., Goncz was appointed by Antall in a gesture of reconciliation after the bitter campaign. Sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the '56 revolt, Goncz used the six years he actually served to read Shakespeare, all of it. He emerged from prison with perfect, if somewhat oddly accented, English, and became an avid and adept translator into Hungarian of E. L. Doctorow.

M.P. Miklos Vasarhelyi by rights should be a dead man. As Imre Nagy's press spokesman during Nagy's brief time as head of the '56 revolutionary government, Vasarhelyi was kidnapped by the Russians and taken to Romania after Soviet troops extinguished the revolution. Nagy was executed, but his friend and loyal aide survived; he sits in Parliament today and tries to carry out the old man's legacy. So much of his life, as well as the lives of his wife and children, was wrecked on the road to this. Can he let go of all that? "Am I supposed to chase after the miserable captain of the AVO [Hungary's K.G.B.] who interrogated me for hours on end?" he asks. "Or the prison guards? Or even the judge who sentenced Nagy and me? Everybody knows who they are. What kind of people they are. It's bad enough for them to live with themselves, isn't it? And if it isn't, then they're not human, so it doesn't matter anyway."

Most of what Antall, Vasarhelyi, Goncz, and their fellow members of Hungary's new government have in common is that they all have plenty to forget. One man, however, is actually charged with dealing with the country's collective memories. Alajos Dombach, M.P., has the job of officially closing the books on the past.

A soft-spoken lawyer in his early fifties, with silver hair and a direct gaze, Dombach looks far too gentle to grapple with the half a million cases of political injustice he has collected in a dossier which covers almost half a century. His group, grandly named the Historical Justice Committee, began its colossal task two years ago by writing to every member of the then still-Communist-dominated legislature. In response to three hundred letters, he received five answers. But after the country's first free elections, Dombach drafted legislation which pronounced all post-1945 legal judgments null and void. In a stroke, the years of fakery were erased from the books. "There is no precedent for this in legal history," Dombach says with legitimate pride.

I aws are one thing, but what about the I people who actually knocked on L doors at midnight, handcuffs and arrest warrants in their pockets? Or those who beat confessions out of tired bodies? And, above all, the judges who reigned Godlike over the kangaroo courts? What of all those efficient cogs that turned the totalitarian wheel?

Dornbach smiles a rueful smile. "Civil war. That's what we would have if we were to go looking for every one of them," he says. I am reminded of the lawless Romanian mobs, torches and fists held high, running wildly through the streets of Bucharest, looking to avenge their anger.

"Where would you draw the line," Dombach continues, "between people 'just doing their duty' and those who went farther? It would be a catastrophe for this country. There are simply too many who were responsible, too many others who collaborated. Our air would be poisoned for years to come. It would encourage people to inform on each other, just like before, but for a different cause." He shakes his head. "We have to name those responsible for the bigger crimes. Those judges who passed sentences after the revolution, for example. Those we have to publicize. The smaller fry. . .we have to let them die out."

As with Antall, I am astonished by Dombach's reasoned tone. The total absence of malice. It is impossible to read on his serene face the scars of a man who refused to play along with a system he found beneath contempt. Dombach considers himself very lucky. As a university student during the revolt, he joined Imre Nagy's forces as a sort of bodyguard. When he was issued a rifle, however, he did not remove the protective seal from the gun's barrel. "I really didn't want to shoot anybody. And that's what saved my life when the Russians rounded us up in the middle of the night. Without that seal as proof of my innocence, I would have been shot with the others." He served a short prison term, but, he says, "I was young enough so that it was like an adventure. Hard labor or deportation for a short while wouldn't kill me. I had no wife, no children then."

11 is not the brutalized, wasted lives, I however, which Dombach sees as the I most corrosive legacy of Communist rule. "It is the moral bankruptcy of our people. Forty years ago in my village if an official was caught cooking the books he would be hounded out of town. Under Communism, if he wasn't doing it they assumed he must be a simpleton. And if it came to light that the man was a cheat, and he was actually sentenced, he could count on public sympathy."

Anger seeps out at unexpected moments. "Why did they have to take everything?" asks a successful producer during dinner.

I recall a cartoon which appeared in the Hungarian humor magazine Ludas Matyi some years ago. A worker is shown leaving his plant, the factory chimney under his arm. The caption reads, "There was nothing else left to steal." Getting away with what you could was not just acceptable but a sign of spirit under a system that offered nothing but empty promises in return for hard work.

Almost everyone participated in the deception at some level. I remember my father diligently filling out weekly reports on himself, his views of the regime, his contacts with the West, that his secretary could then submit to the AVO, passing them off as her own bit of sleuthing. He performed the same task for our cook.

Moral bankruptcy is still pervasive and all the more intractable, since by now it is almost subconscious. A friend of mine found a red stripe painted by vandals on the door of her car, left on the street overnight. She called her insurance company and described the damage. "The stripe isn't wide enough for us to reimburse you. Why don't you make it a bit wider?" the agent suggested nonchalantly. Which is what she did, without another thought, the same day.

But Dombach thinks the country can be cured of this, just as he thinks the cancers of anti-Semitism and supemationalism are controllable diseases. "My father was a village teacher. A very good village teacher. But he was fired from his job for leading his students in patriotic Hungarian folk songs in the fifties. For forty years we had to suppress those feelings. That is not natural. So now they are coming out in a rush."

And yet, after being force-fed on demagoguery for four decades, the people seem repelled by any sign of fanaticism. A former member of the Communist Party attempted to revive his deadend political career by starting up a Fascist Party. He plastered trees and walls and briefly even television screens with a telephone number anyone could call for more information. Nobody rang. Many campaign posters with Stars of David scrawled on the candidate's face also feature, scribbled in the comer, the pointed question "So what?"

"I really think," Dombach muses, "and the election results confirmed this, that there just isn't much support for anti-Semitism. Mostly the old people are the ones who can't recover from this sickness, and they are dying out. We just need a little more time."

I watch Antall and the new M.P.'s take I their seats in the fabulously frescoed I hall of Parliament. The building was patterned after Westminster, an aspiration that until now seemed a cruel joke, as one rubber-stamp body of party hacks succeeded another. This group, however, is in stark contrast to the pompous Communist leaders. Many seem uncomfortable wearing a suit. In the corridors, I spot a couple of backpacks and a bunch of bow ties among the members of FIDESZ, the party for under-thirty-fives, which everybody points to as the hope of the future. Scattered about the chamber are a handful of strikingly attractive young women, who, with their long hair and dangling earrings, look more like Columbia University undergrads than lawmakers. All voice passionately held convictions on every imaginable topic from the appalling state of the country's environment to how fast Hungary can leave the Warsaw Pact. There are no taboos left.

A little time without manipulation from Moscow, Berlin, or Washington is all it will take. Three to five years, according to the prime minister, to transform his country into a free-market democracy. But, he adds, not without a steady infusion of Western capital. So far those investments have come in a cautious trickle. "They have to see first of all that we are a safe place to put their money. We will show them this is not the Balkans," the prime minister says, his lower lip pushing hard against the upper until his mouth becomes a thin downward-curving line. Mr. Chips metamorphosed into L.B.J. "We have the moral right to ask for the West's help. After all, we won World War III for you without firing a single shot." He refers to Hungary's part in (quite literally) rolling back the Iron Curtain and allowing East Germans to pour across the Austria-Hungary frontier.

Time. Time to clear the air of so many residual pollutants. Time to scrape forty-five years of soot off the crumbling Baroque buildings, and off the country's spirits. The nation is restoring bits of its battered self-esteem as it observes its own transformation into a fledgling democracy—without hysteria, without too many cheap slogans of hate, without a call for the blood of the oppressors. There is virtually no precedent for this sort of largess in Hungary's epic history of oppression begetting vengeance.

There is so much work to be done here if the country hopes to become a fully formed member of the European community in the 1990s. Moribund heavy industries which turned out shoddy goods to feed the Soviet economy have to be shut. Thousands of people will be laid off. Already high, prices will go higher still. Forty-five years of a police state, however, have not completely stripped this land of its most important resource: a talented people. Many of the best of them, the Szilards, Tellers, and von Neumanns, the Soltis, the Kordas, the Capas, the Ormandys, and Lords Balogh and Kaldor, have for years shone under the brighter lights of New York, Hollywood, and London. But exile is never anything but a compromise, and perhaps now talent need no longer flee Budapest to flourish.

The lies are gone. Fear is gone. The new leaders, Antall, Dombach, and the others, bookish and uncharismatic, modest in their promises, are in Hungarians' own image. The people have finally removed the masks to reveal their real faces. There is hardly a face without some scars from the wasted years. But the Big Neighbors, the master manipulators in the East and the West, are, for the moment, preoccupied. This moment, as Hungarians seem to understand, will not likely come again.