HUNGARIAN WRITERS
SIR,—May I draw your attention to the pligbt of the Hungarian writers who have put up so valiant a fight for the liberty of their own people and the mainten- ance of its links with the Free World?
Some days ago the young editor Gyula Obersovs- zeky and the young playwright Joseph Gall were sentenced to imprisonment because of printing and circulating 'illegal' newsheets. Their case was artifi- cially linked up with the alleged murder of a former security police officer. Two well-known Hungarian authors, the playwright Gyula Hay and the poet Zoltan Zelk, the former the vice-president of the Hungarian Writers' Association and the latter a mem- ber of its committee, have been arrested for a long time and are awaiting trial, presumably for no other reason than having played a leading part in a People's revolution and for having supported Imre Nay's Government, which was at that time recognised as legal by the Soviet Union no less than by the Western Powers.
Amongst the journalists kept in prison or deported arc such well-known figures in Hungarian intellectual life as Miklos Gimes, Geza Loszonczy and Sandor Haraszti—the two latter imprisoned first under Rakosi's terror regime and released and vindicated at the time of the democratisation, so as to be victim- ised once again. No one knows exactly how they are treated, but some alarming news has reached us of the impossibility of getting into touch with them. I do not want to dissociate their case from that of people persecuted in Hungary in general, but as both the Hungarian Writers' Association and the Hun- garian Journalists' Union were banned after the last Russian occupation, and as there is no Hungarian body now to take up their case, I think that writers of the Free World should use every means at their disposal to show their interest its their fate.—Yours faithfully,
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