András Kovács

I suggested to Jancsi Kis that we should switch to printed samizdats. He said, all right, then you should do some research on how we should go about it equipmentwise. First I went back to Vienna, then to London, where I met up with Miki Haraszti. With Miki we browsed through what they had on offer. But all the equipment in the shops was very expensive as well as unfit for our purposes. Therefore, it seemed to make more sense to get a hand-operated one. Well, obviously, buying could have been an option. However, believe it or not, there was no money flowing in to the Hungatian samisdat from abroad. What the ’comrades’ apparently believed, that these things are supported by someone or other from the West, was rubbish. No one on earth did, in actual fact. So I started to try and find a way around it and make an effort. Now I’ll make a jump ahead in time, because at that point it didn’t happen yet. Well, I was just in London when the Solidarność strikes, the ones in Gdansk which concluded with an overwhelming victory, were on. I was very passionate about them. I talked about the fact that we needed a stencil-machine, to quite a few people, Bill Lomax being one among them. He called on me one day rather unexpectedly, by that time I was already in Cologne, and brought me a stencil-machine in a suitcase. He left it at my place so it would be up to me to work out how to smuggle it into Hungary. K: Was it actually an easy bit of the exercise not even worth mentioning? V: Well, the machine itself was already a godsend. And there were others trying to sort it out, too, I wasn’t the only one. Later on I secured another machine. At the University of Paderborn I saw an electric equipment gathering dust – the one brought by Bill was hand-operated – and I kept inquiring who it belonged to, but no one knew. It had been there for years. I met a boy who I built a very close friendship with, a Spanish anarchist working as an administrator at the Department of Sociology as well as studying there. I told him how cracking handy this machine would come for the Hungarian resistance, and then he reached it down from the shelf , put it in a box and said, there you go! So that’s already two machines. The one from Bill was sorted out by the Spanish anarchist and the expenses of the trip were covered by Péter Kende. They hired a nice big car, crammed it with holiday makers’ stuff – it was at about the summer of 1981 – an inflatable beach matress, a rubber dinghy and the machine. They simple drove through the border checkpoint. […] It was finally Gábor Iványi who received this particular machine which migh have been among the first ones that made Hungarian samisdat printing possible.