HUNGARY IN PAWN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24400, 11 September 1940, Page 13

HUNGARY IN PAWN

NAZI GRIP TIGHTENS FOMENTERS OF MISCHIEF THE FAMILIAR “TOURISTS” i Throughout April and May the atmosphere in Hungary was very tense, ■wrote Francesca M. Wilson in the Manchester Guardian recently. The Arctic snows had gone, the ice had cracked; the Danube was free again for the barges with their swastikas; even the floods had subsided: there seemed no protection for Hungary any more. The increased pressure of Germany was seen at once in an almost complete censorship of the press. Even the most pro-Ally papers only dared to put in an obscure corner news from London or Paris; headlines proclaimed, day after day dazzling Nazi victories. Our Hungarian friends—and there are many whose hearts are with us—began to look gloomy and preoccupied. The war of nerves had begun; Budapest was a city of rumours.' For a while we thought that Hungary would be another Denmark. I used to look but from my balcony every morning to see if German soldiers were on the Corso. At first it was assumed that the march through would be en route for the oil wells of Ploesti (in Rumania); later Jugoslavia was whispered. Would Rumania be the Sweden of the Balkans, surrounded and squeezed, but too precious to touch?

The “ Tourists ” Arrive Meanwhile the familiar “ tourists ” flocked into the country. I stood once at the end of a queue of them at the police station. “ Object of visit" queried the official. “ Business.” “ What kind? ” “ What kind is it? ” the tourist asked his neighbour. “ Say merchant,” was the reply. In May Strength through Joy expeditions arrived in Budapest, and Hungarians were asked to give hospitality to German children; to feed their hungry neighbours they were induced to ration their sugar and butter and have two meatless days, in a country overflowing with food. The authorities who for eight months, with some exceptions, particularly among the military, had treated their Polish refugees with remarkable tolerance and kindness now became markedly harsher and stricter. The Germans, short of slave labour, were making extensive propaganda for Poles to go back. Only 700 returned in April, but in May as the dark news from the West came in and conditions in the internment camps became worse, many despairing, men gave in and went to forced labour in the quarries near Wiener Neustadt in the vain hope that they might sometime be allowed to revisit their homes; or perhaps still more in fear that they might soon be caught in recalcitrant exile and possibly shot by their implacable foe. A Mysterious Episode

A mysterious episode in April was the anti-Hungarian demonstrations among the Slovaks. A refugee brought me a leaflet that was being; scattered broadcast in that country by the Germans. "Arise, Slovaks,” it began. " the hour of the Hungarian counts has struck. Deliver your oppressed brethren. Soon all the land between the Danube and the Tisza will again be yours.” Hungarians to whom I showed this said that Germans were at the same time trying to egg them on with promises that Slovakia should once more belong to the crown of St. Stephen. In May this corrmotipn died down. More and more soldiers were mobilised, not on the Slovakian or western borders. but on the east, north-east, and south, against Rumania, Russia, and Jugoslavia. Hungarian gendarmes at a frontier post told me that when I go back to London I should be German. “And you will soon be goosestenping,” I retorted. Then they explained to me that they did not really like the Germans, but they could not help admiring successes which were so brilliant. But the Italians, they added. “ we like them.”