CARDINAL’S ILLNESS IN PRISON

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28161, 27 December 1956, Page 3

CARDINAL’S ILLNESS IN PRISON

Mother Demands Medical Attention

SOLITARY CONFINEMENT FOR FOUR YEARS

[By JOSEF CARDINAL MINDSZENTY, as told to Father Josef Vecsey)

(World Copyright New York Herald Tribune, Inc.)

When the trial was done on February 8, 1949, I was taken to the huge collecting prison in Budapest where I waited to learn my final sentence. After several days they gave me a typewritten sheet on which was written that I had to spend the rest of my life in prison. I remained in this prison until mid-October, 1949. My mother visited me here four times. I was extremely happy when I saw her for the first time since my arrest. It was on February 23, 1949, a Wednesday, and she brought me apples and other home foods. My mother is like this, she always brought me something. At this time and during her visits in June and July, 1949, I was still in relatively good health.

During this time Monsignor Bela Witz, my vicargeneral in Budapest, was also allowed to see me and he heard my copfession.

That these two were allowed to visit seemed unusual behaviour for Communists, and I felt it was done because there was indignation in the world over my imprisonment. I was allowed to make my confession at othertimes, too, and besides Monsignor Witz, Monsignor Nicholas Dundas. Bishop of Hajdudorog, was allowed to come.

But when my mother came in September, 1949, I was already a very sick man. It was my old disease, my thyroid disturbance, and I was suffering, acutely frofn it. My mother was deeply worried. She turned to the AVO guard who sat in the room with us during the visit, and asked him with a mother’s indignation. “Why don’t you give my son medical treatment?” She told him she would provide medical care for me at her own expense and would send Dr. Erno Peto, chief surgeon of the hospital at Szombathely, our old family doctor. He knew intimately the nature of my disease.

(After this visit, the cardinal’s mother intervened with letters to the authorities, and I alerted the Hungarian episcopate about the situation. As a result of our efforts the cardinal was transferred to the hospital building on the prison grounds and was given some medical treatment.)

Then, on October 19, without any warning or hint of what was to happen, they came to me one day and ushered me downstairs into the prison courtyard, where I was ordered into a waiting limousine. The curtains were drawn, I was put into the back seat between two guards. Two more were in the front. But none of them spoke to me or told me where we were going. The car drove out of the prison grounds and we started on a journey which seemed interminable. Drab, Grey Prison At its end T found myself in a drab, grey prison building. I do not know where it was, and have been unable to find out until this day. (Actually the cardinal was at the Conti street prison in Budapest, where maximum security political prisoners were kept. This was learned in Vienna from Father Ispanky.) (The cardinal occupied the middle coll of a row of six emptying into the same corridor. The first cell was occupied by a former pre-World War II government official, former chief of Hungarian prisons, named George Tury. The second cell was empty, then Mindszenty’s, then an empty one. The occupant of the fifth coll was a 23-year-old student named Zoltan Bilkei-Papp, whose death sentence, after three years of waiting, had been commuted to life imprisonment. The sixth cell was empty. The reason for alternate empty cells was to prevent prisoners from communicating by the usual knocking on the walls.) (One day, when the AVO guard opened Tury’s door, he forgot to lock it again, because he was called to one of the windows of the corridor by a fellow guard. Tury, alert all the time, realised they were talking about a girl. He slipped behind the back of the policeman to cell number three. The face of the prisoner was familiar, but he couldn’t place him.! He whispered, “My name is George Tury. Who are you?” The pale prisoner whispered back, “I am Josef Mindszenty. . . .”) (Tury, of course, knew he was at Conti street prison. When, in 1954. he became sick, he was taken to the hospital of the collecting prison. There, before he died, he told Father Ispanky that he had seen the cardinal in, his cell.) I was kept in solitary confinement for four years at this prison. The prison schedule never varied. Once a day. and never for more than 20 minutes. I was taken under guard, but otherwise always alone, to the prison courtyard for

a walk. That courtyard was narrow, unfriendly and dark. I received no mail, read no newspapers, nd no books, except my breviary and my Bible. These had been given back to me. Each day I said my rosary six times. Much of the time I prayed for strength. My cell where I spent those years of torture was small and crumbling. There was a straw mat to sleep on, a table, a stool, a small bucket for one’s needs, and another for water, which we got only once a day. Visits By Mother During my entire imprisonment, I was allowed to see my mother an average of twice a 1 year. And those visits were the only pleasure of my existence, my only contact with the outer world. But each time I would be taken out of the prison by guards and driven in a closed car to another prison at Vac, about 50 kilometres north of Budapest, where she was taken to meet me. Each time she would bring food, sometimes it would even be a roasted chicken, and I would make these gifts last a long time. Nine months passed between one of her visits, and the next. When we met it was a memorable occasion, for I was allowed to stay with her for about half an hour. My mother was now overjoyed because during the nine months past she had not had any news of me arid even had been forbidden to send packages. Trips To Vac Prison (Those trips to Vac Prison for the visits with his mother were made so that no-one would know where he was being kept. Even I did not know during this period that he was at the Conti Street Prison and I had made it my business to find out everything that I could.) (I accompanied the cardinal’s mother on five of her trips to Vac, waiting for her while she visited her son. When I was forced to leave Hungary in 1952, she continued the visits accompanied by one of her granddaughters.) (We were always watched and followed on our way to and from the prison, but this brave “woman, already in her late seventies, lived almost completely on faith and continued with her peasant indomitableness to plague officials w.ith requests that the cardinal’s health be looked after and that she be permitted more visits. By this, she helped to save the cardinal’s life.) (The above is the third in a series of sir articles by Josef Cardinal Mindszenty as told to the Rev. Josef Vecsey. The content of these articles was given Father Vecsey- in several different conversations with the cardinal, which, for the purposes of serialisation, have been put in chronological order. The paragraphs in brackets are explanatory, descriptive or connective passages added by Father Vecsey.)

World Copyright: New York Herald Tribune Inc.