A man of the Army Medical Corps came in and told us that some wounded had arrived in the shed. My sister Vera and I took tea and bread. As I went along I overheard a conversation among some soldiers near the wall. Said one: “I put my knife into him with a will; the point came out at his back. The other one escaped.” “I did one in too,” said a deeper voice. I thought I must be dreaming. I stopped, but could not make out what else was said, as they began to talk in thieves’ jargon. “I’ll report them ...” I thought—but I only thought that for a moment, for I saw the sergeant with the red ribbon on his arm, and the pince-nez on his nose, going up to them and shaking hands.... No, one can’t report anyone nowadays. As I went on, the talk became louder behind me. They mentioned a name, but it meant nothing to me; at that moment it was a mere sound, and it was not till much later that I remembered that I had heard it before—Béla Kún. He had been a communist agitator in Russia, who, with several others, had been sent to Hungary by Trotski to work in his interest. It is said that they brought money with them, a lot of money, and it is rumoured that they had something to do with the events of October. More followed them, and though the government knows all about them, still it allows them to cross the border. Trotski, Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and then this lot—Nets are spread broadcast and tunnels burrowed under-ground. The suburbs of Budapest are haunted by ugly, red-eyed monsters. To-day they still hide in the dark, slink along the walls with drawn-in claws. But to-morrow—who knows?
November 23rd.
The dark wall at the station and the voices I heard there followed me into the night, lingered in my thoughts, and were still there in the morning when I woke.
In the evening I mentioned the incident to my mother, and she too had heard of the man called Béla Kún. His real name was Berele Kohn, the son of a Galician Jew who came over the frontier with a pack on his back. He himself had risen to be a journalist and the secretary of the Socialist party in Kolozsvár, from which job he went to the Workman’s Benevolent Society. There he stole. The war saved him from prosecution. He was called up, and sent to the Russian front, where he soon managed to surrender. Through his international racial connections he got to Moscow, where he fell in with Trotski, and from then onward carried on his propaganda among prisoners. He became the leader in Russia of the Jewish Communists from Hungary, edited a Hungarian paper called “The Social Revolution,” and finally joined a Bolshevist directorate in one of the smaller towns and played his part in the atrocities committed there.
“I heard,” my mother said, “that he came back with a lot of Russian money. Károlyi’s government does not interfere with him in any way.”
“Of course; Károlyi is said to be in communication with Trotski through Diener-Dénes and Landler,” I replied.
Károlyi went to Switzerland in the autumn of 1917 with Diener-Dénes and Jászi, who introduced him to Henri Guilbeaux, an extreme syndicalist and defeatist editor, who used his newspaper to work for the same moral dissolution which was carried to power in Russia by Lenin and Trotski. It is said that it was this Guilbeaux who converted Károlyi to the ideas which Béla Kún has now come to represent among us. Later came the congratulatory wire of the Soviet’s Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, the destructive work of the Radical and Socialist ministers, the confirmation of Pogány’s Soldiers’ Council and of his system of confidential shop-stewards and the unrestricted freedom of communist agitators.... These are signs of his guilt, and they are a dark augury for the future.
This is a new milestone which fills us with apprehension, another one of those measures which are meant to undermine the existing Social order.