January 1st, 1919.
This year people dare not wish each other a happy New Year. They murmur something, then cast their eyes down with a strange expression, as if they were looking into an open grave.
Kassa has been occupied by the Czechs! Under the tower of its old cathedral, down in the crypt, Rákoczi’s skeleton hands are clenched and he asks: “Is it for this that you brought my body back from Turkey?” On the same day the Hungarian troops left Pressburg at the instigation of the confidential men of the Budapest Soldiers’ Council. The local Workers’ Council thereupon assumed control, and to-day, on New Year’s day, the Italian Colonel Ricardo Barecca entered the town at the head of a Czech regiment. On the bank of the Danube, beside a marble equestrian statue of Maria Theresa, two Hungarians stand with “Moriamur pro rege nostro” on their lips: did they cast their eyes down in shame, is it only the stones that still say this in Pressburg? Meanwhile the Government informs the country with pacificist satisfaction that: “in order to avoid bloodshed the armed forces of the popular government have retired everywhere.”
During the last few weeks the life of us Hungarians has been like an attempt to climb out of a putrid well into daylight. We have toiled painfully upwards, we have made desperate efforts to escape the slimy horrors of the water, but in vain. The wall of the well, like a slippery drain, grows higher above our heads, the water rises behind us, and there is no escape. Slimy stagnant water, beastliness, utter beastliness.
Yesterday Mackensen was surrounded by French Spahis in the castle of Fóth. He is now guarded like a criminal, and people are saying that Károlyi is responsible for this.
It is an old-established custom with us that on New-Year’s day the Prime Minister should make a speech, retrospective and prospective. Michael Károlyi delivered his speech this morning. He accused the past and renounced the future, accused the old system of being responsible for all our misfortunes, and, as the only means of salvation, proclaimed his feeble-minded hobby: “We must seek help for Hungary’s cause in pacificism, for in that name alone shall we conquer.... Should pacificism fail, then I say: finis Hungariæ.”
Pressburg, Kassa, Kolozsvár ... pacificism failed to save them. And the man who said on the 31st of October: “I alone can save Hungary,” cries to the deceived millions on New Year’s day: “finis Hungariæ.”
This cowardly declaration roused me from lethargy. I felt that from the moment when Károlyi renounced his prey, our unhappy country became our own, our very own. If it is over for him, it must start anew for us. Henceforth I shall work more, and more ardently.
In the afternoon we met at my Transylvanian friend’s house. But before I started from home various people rang me up on the telephone, and warned me not to go out because riots were expected. Some made excuses for non-attendance, some said they had been warned by the police, others had received hints from Károlyi’s immediate surroundings. Though it was scarcely four o’clock when I left home, I found that the concièrge had already locked the front door of our house. Hardly anybody was visible in the dead streets, shops and house-doors were all shut. The houses looked repellingly, selfishly down on me, and I had the unpleasant feeling that if anything happened to me not one of them would open its door to rescue me. I felt depressed by a sense of expulsion and outlawry. He who has never walked in the daytime through an empty town, where there is no soul, no carriage abroad, where all the houses are shut up, has never felt what real loneliness is.