4 JULY 1958, Page 20

IT IS REPORTED from Budapest that a further so- called

trial is taking place of a group which in- cludes Mrs. Rajk. Few people can have suffered more from Communist meanness and treachery than this unfortunate widow of the man who was formerly Hungary's No. 2. When her hus- .band was arrested it was but routine barbarism that she was taken too. That he was hanged in the yard outside her cell window was a refine- ment of horror that tells us even more about how the Soviet-type mind works. When he was posthumously rehabilitated she spoke passion- ately and effectively against his murderers, both at his ceremonial reburial and at the Pet8fi Circle —at a time when, as Imre Nagy revealed, party leaders were putting around the theory that Rajk had shown reprehensible cowardice in deceiving them with false confessions. She played a fiery part in the Revolution, took refuge with Nagy in the Yugoslav Embassy and like him was seized by the Russians in violation of a safe conduct. The whereabouts of her nine-year-old son is not known. But I see that arrests of schoolboys are reported from Budapest. There must be thousands and thousands like him, of whom the rulers rightly fear that if they live to be men it's revenged they will be.