Tibor Pákh

„In April 1971 my punishment was interrupted due to the international protest about which I didn’t know obviously. I was transferred to an ordinary hospital and I was kept there until November 1971. Then I was freed from there, too. Nevertheless the injustices didn’t come to an end. On the one hand I was placed on probation, on the other hand I was put under surveillance. That is to say I was under two types of control which excluded one the other in principle. The police surveillance was officially ordered which involved that I couldn’t leave the territory of Budapest and I had to present myself twice in a month at the local police station. Contemporary to it I was also under mental observation. These two measures excluded each other, because or this or that could be in force, not both of them in the same time. These two procedures however went on. My duty to report finished in 1976 but it didn’t mean that also the nosing and the spying around me stopped. It happened for example in 1977 or 1978 that a policeman came on Sunday and he wanted to check me. I wrote a complaint on it to the Chief Prosecutor asking the reasons for the pestering. These circumstances might have led to the distortion of my personality. – And how could you avoid it? – I could avoid it by ignoring these attempst. The truth must win at the end. And if somebody fights for it, if somebody was educated in the spirit of justice and he wants to live in justice, too, he may find annoying if the authorities which are responsible for the injustices or their officials which commit the abuses pester him. But if I understand well the grace offered us by our Lord and if I accept that he is the defender of the absolute truth, these inconveniences are simply like flea-bites to dogs. And dogs get easily rid of the fleas by shaking themselves.”

„The opposition to the abuses of Moscow’s Leninism was intensively felt in Poland in 1980. Different organizations had been formed by then. There were the institutions of of the Catholic church, as well as, there were social organizations of different political trends, the Confederation of Indipendent Poland, KOR, which had been formed to defend the interests of the workers. The organizations together began a hunger-strike in the church of Podkowa Lesna.The mass media reported on it, obviously not the Polish, but the foreign ones. –What was the precise reason for the strike? –The Polish had a samizdat publishing house called Nowa. Its editor Mirek Chojecki was arrested and the hunger-strike originally was organized in order to free him. But when the strike was successful and Chojecki was freed in a few days, the hunger-strike was continued to obtain the redress for the injustices in Central Europe.This was the moment when I left for Podkowa Lesna travelling through Warsaw. –Where is exacty Podkowa Lesna geographically? –It is near to Warsaw, it is situated as near to Warsaw as Dunaharaszti is to Budapest. There is a small railway which connects it to Warsaw, I took it, too, to get there. At the station I looked around to find the church tower, so I found the church easily. I looked for the vicar, I presented myself and I told him that I wanted to join them in the spirit of Saint Adalbert because it was St. Adalbert who at the end of the first millennium had evangelized in the spirit of christianism. Adalbert was bishop of Prague, he was present at the confirmation ceremony of our king St. Stephen, then he went to Poland and he died martyr for his faith in Prussia. He is the patron saint of Esztergom and Gniezno. And he is considered to be patron saint of Central Europe by a few people besides me. So I decided to join them in his spirit at the end of the second millenary especially to protest against the crual leninism of Moscow’s empire hoping to regain our national independences. That is to say I wanted to protest against the injustices the Polish protested. The priest allowed me to join them. I was with them, I enjoyed myself because it was clear that every political trend found a common house in that church. There was a mass every evening where old and young of the town came, also the garden of the church was full, the place was too small for them. Podkowa Lesna is the nest both of the Polish and of the common Polish and Hungarian opposition. When I was there I was told that Polish people held the Hungarian in great esteem, they wanted to act in the spirit of 1956 and every political current showed interest towards 1956 and the Hungarian events.”