DEPORTATION OF HUNGARIANS

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28154, 18 December 1956, Page 15

DEPORTATION OF HUNGARIANS

“Undeniable” Evidence Of Miss Kethly (N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 10 p.m.) NEW YORK, December 16. A former Hungarian Cabinet member declared today that the Soviet Union is trying to wipe out intellectual activity in Hungary with wholesale deportations of professors and students to Siberian slave labour camps. Miss Anna Kethly, a member of the short-lived Cabinet of Mr Imre Nagy, who was Prime Minister of Hungary in the first days of the anti-Communist rebellion, held a press conference on her arrival in New York to seek permission to appeal to the United Nations for help for her country. She is the only member of Mr Nagy’s Cabinet known to have escaped to the West. Miss Kethly said she hopes the United Nations will send an international police force to restore order in Hungary as it is doing in Suez.

“The free world must bring world opinion to bear against the Soviet Union’s campaign of deportation of Hungarian workers and intellectuals to slave labour camps in Siberia,” she said. The Soviet Union had re-established the worst evils of the slave labour system, driving workers, students and professors into railway trucks at the point of the bayonet and machineguns, and shipping them East, she said.

“Young men and women have been kidnapped on the streets of Budapest and other cities of Hungary and taken away thousands and thousands of miles into the interior oi the Soviet Union to become part of the Communist war-machine,’’ she said.

Miss Kethly said that she had “undeniable” information that the Russians were trying to wipe out every trace of intellectual life in Hungary. Five professors and 25 students at the university in Veszprem, in western Hungary, were shipped to Russia, she said.

Every student and faculty member to be found at the technical university in Budapest were shipped off. Similar events had taken place in other parts of Hungary, she said. Notes thrown from trains bound for Russia by Hungarians were exhibited by Miss Kethly. One of them, signed by nine Budapest students, said: “November 13. We beg our fellow countrymen to notify our families about this sad event. We are together 1500 persons and are being taken to the Soviet Union.” Another note said: “We are being taken to the Soviet Union. Please tell our families.” It bore five signatures.