The Atlantic and Its Enemies

vaznica v Bratislave. I could not criticize, and wandered down that well-known staircase reciting the St Matthew Passion, which, somehow, I knew by heart: Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden, so scheid’ Du nicht von mir, in the old Klemperer version. I thought of my poor old mother, a war widow, with me as the only child — my father had been killed in the RAF in ’42 — and what she must be feeling. Your first week in prison is awful, and the chap they had moved in with me was very sympathetic as I wiped away the tears that were not entirely to be stifled. He was quite an interesting lad, Kornel Karpacky by name. Our common language was Hungarian. The authorities let me have the grammar book I had arrived with, Banhidi-Jokai-Szabo, Tanuljuk nyelveket, and I had reached lesson ten, where they explain that the verb changes according to whether it is transitive or intransitive followed by an indirect article or a dative. The translation passages were about a Palestinian going round a textile factory. At that time, the second language in Bratislava was Hungarian. It had been the second capital, until 1918, and the Jews, a quarter of the population, had spoken Hungarian; there were also Germans who had taken to it easily enough. Kornel spoke it, with a thick Slovak accent which I myself have never, to this day, entirely lost, because his mother had come from Transylvania and his father was Slovak. He explained that life had been very difficult, that he had made three of the local girls pregnant, had had three mothers chasing after him, had made for the frontier with wire-cutters. I should not have believed this, because Kornel — who was not I think entirely balanced in mind — must have been that phenomenon of Communist prisons that everyone knows, a Spitzel — someone planted to find out what you are about. He did not get anything much out of me, and must have got quite sick of the St Matthew (I also knew the Verdi Requiem). At some stage, he must have been told to try a homosexual approach. The prison pants came down, and a foot-long Pan-Slav number stretched before my eyes. On it had been tattooed the badge of Fascist Slovakia, some sort of double-headed lobster. I expressed no interest, and there we were. The weeks went by. I got to know the guards. The librarian, who had good German, trundled round his books, and I said, ‘Seitdem ich hier sitze, kann ich nicht umhin, Das Kapital zu lesen’, which I then did. H. G. Wells was not really any better, though, in later life, I would gladly read both of these men, especially Wells. Forty years later, Penguin asked me to do an introduction to his Short History of the World, a superb performance, and he is the writer whom I should want to recall from the dead. He competes with Orwell, but Orwell never dies.

The warders became friendly. ‘Mesz haza,’ they said — you’ll go home. One had served in a Slovak outfit in Italy at the end of the war, and spoke at bit of Italian, which I vaguely could manage: ‘piove’, in the exercise yard, where we went every day for half an hour, balancing on an isosceles triangle of half-thawed ice, and if you stood on one end, the other, thirty yards up, rose. Then it was back to the cell, warders clicking their keys, to warn each other that a prisoner was coming. The food was some sort of stew, pushed through a flap. Later on, one of the judges asked me, why did you never complain about the food, and I said, not to his enlightenment, have you ever lived in a Cambridge college? I was not wasting my time, and the British went into action. The Consul-General in Prague, Ramsay Melhuish, turned up with several hundred untipped State Express, which I shared with Kornel, who, Slovak nationalist that he was, said that they were inferior to his own Lipa brand, the tobacco of which was so carelessly packed that the whole thing caught fire and was therefore easier to smoke. Melhuish also gave me all the works of Bertrand Russell when, in alimony mode, he wrote books called ‘Power’, ‘Being’, etc. We used to talk about the lectures of A. J. P. Taylor in the governor’s office, and he was very kind to my mother, whom he put up in the Thun Palace in Prague. She was, I am afraid, difficult, and he was wonderful. She came: there was nothing to be said but the prison governor took the point. At a certain point, in my cell, I heard the clumping of boots. It was the governor. He said something like:

Wir chaben einen Brief bekommen von Leuten die heissen Hodder und Stoughton und besonders von einem gewissen Herrn Sissons. Sie wollen, dass Sie einen Vertrag unterzeichnen, wonach Sie auf Ihre Rechte bezuglich des Buches uber das zwanzigste Jahrhundert verzichten, wemgegenuber sie bereit sind, Ihnen einen nach Belieben jeglichen Buchvertrag mit demselben Entgegengesomething zu unterbreiten willig seien.

No more E. H. Carr in the Palais Harrach: instead, I said I would write a book about the eastern front in the First World War, signed the contract, and ten years later, wrote it.

It came to a trial. Neither the Czechoslovak nor the Hungarian KGB could work it out. Was I some kind of deep agent? Three months went by. I had a defence lawyer, Edgar Prisender, who turned out to be an enormously interesting man. He was the grandson of a Habsburg major-general, was, somewhere along the line, Jewish, and sprang from a family of Hungarian landowners in Slovakia. His French was near perfect (I gave him Proust, though that would not have been his cup of tea) and he had acquired decent English as well. He kept me going with vitamins — kohlrabi, a vegetable that I had not known — and came every week. I was all right, not wasting my time, but Jan Wilson had a far harder experience. She had been banged up with a gypsy prostitute, and had no language at all in common; she had stopped menstruating, and she did not have the support from family that I had. We met in Sydney much later, where she ran a market garden; never a word of reproach. I went to Australia in 1978, and would have stayed, except that it is so very far away. Jan, who was without friends and family, and did not speak the languages, behaved like a brick.

The trial was interesting. There was nothing much in the world news at the time, and they piled in. In the spectators’ box were an RAF war widow, and a woman who had lost her family in Auschwitz, Andrea’s mother. The interpreter — it all had to go through English, Slovak and Hungarian — was also from Auschwitz: he told me he had come out weighing 60 pounds. The judges had been fixed in advance by Edgar Prisender. They would trap the old Stalinist public prosecutor into making a fool of himself. They did. He was stupid enough to demand the maximum sentence against me and Jan, who were obvious innocents, and the minimum against the principals, Andrea and Tibor. Even then, they got six months — nothing, in terms of that system (an old Austrian woman had got nine years in Pardubice a few weeks before). Jan and I got a month, and were expelled from the country on 8 June. The Czechs — not the Slovaks — were absurdly bureaucratic, and when I wanted to take my baby son, in 1983, to see his godmother were vindictive. It needed an intervention by the Foreign Office for me to be put into a Helsinki basket.

The upshot, and the meaning, of that trial was that the public prosecutor was made to look foolish, and was got rid of. The Slovak judges rose in the land. So did Edgar Prisender. We had got on very well indeed, and I went to see a wonderful Hungarian cousin of his in Vienna afterwards, who told me, come 1968, that Edgar had been named Czechoslovak ambassador to the USA in August 1968, just before the Soviet invasion. Edgar denies this. But he escaped in 1968 and became an international patent lawyer for Ciba-Geigy in Basle. They should have made him president of Slovakia, as a prelude to the country’s rejoining Hungary in a confederation. Andrea and Tibor had a different fate. The affair had obviously been embarrassing and ridiculous. The Czechs meanly made both of them serve the other few weeks of their sentences in Pakrac prison in Prague. Then they were expelled, and I met Andrea as she came over. Tibor was received with flowers and apologies by the Hungarian secret police at Komarom. Then the Austrian government went into action, and Tibor was shoved over the border at Hegyeshalom without a passport. They got married. Then they approached the SS Herr Generaldirektor and got nowhere. However, there were the Karman paintings, deposited in the Fascist Bank of Croatia, and a deal was done: a villa on the Dalmatian coast, in return for the de Hoochs (were they even genuine?). What happened? I have taught a prime minister of Hungary, and the brother of one of his cabinet ministers took me into Transylvania when Romania collapsed. The Slovak interior minister arranged for me to visit my old cell, number 283, in 1992, and I marched up the prison steps remembering those lines, Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden, so scheid’ Du nicht von mir. I was very near tears. I still do not know what it was about: central Europe. But I did my stuff for the growth of Slovakia, and that has turned out quite well.

20. Reaction

Afghanistan was another gigantic dwarf, like Greece: a place, not very significant in itself, where geography and the local complications combined to make it important on a world scale. The Soviet invasion prompted a Western, particularly British and American, reaction, but that had in any case been building up, for quite different reasons, for some time. A wise observer had said, at the time of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, that the system