ESCAPE FROM HUNGARY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26618, 14 November 1947, Page 5

ESCAPE FROM HUNGARY

ANTI-COMMUNIST LEADER SANCTUARY IN UNITED STATES STEPHENSVILLE (Newfoundland), Nov. 12. Zoltan Pfeiffer, anti - Communist leader, who fled from Hungary a week ago, when he was in “ the shadow of the noose,” took off for the United States to-day to plan with other Hungarians in exile a counter-attack against his political enemies. Mr Pfeiffer stopped briefly here en route from Frankfurt to the United States, accompanied by his wife and five-year-old daughter, Laszlo Ac&ay, leader of Mr Pleiffer's Hungarian Independence Party, and Mrs Acsay. The party travelled incognito until the plane was past a point in the Atlantic where it had not enough fuel to turn back to Europe. Mr Pfeiffer said he stayed in Hungary “right up to the shadow of the noose. For three months my party was the only real Opposition, but it was like playing cards against a man with a pistol that shoots dumdum bullets.” He declined to say, how he escaped, because “ hundreds ” of others were using the same route, but he did say farmers passed him from village to village, while motor cars loaded with Russian and Hungarian secret police hunted for him. He said the Communist secret police were “ running amok. They have dropped their mask. Now that I have been graduated from a school on how to- turn democracy into terrorism, I wonder if the western nations realise what is hidden in the mist covering what they call the ‘eastern democracy.’” He said lie wanted to warn thfe western democracies against the eastern democracies. “ Democracy, as the western people know it, is dead in Hungary, but underneath the ashes there are still embers of opposition. The little people of Hungary are still democrats."