The Call. December 1919
Source: “An Appeal from the Hungarian Communist Party to the International Working Class,” The Call, 30 December 1919, p.4;
Translated: from Avanti, December 7th, 1919.
Transcribed: by Ted Crawford.
Comrades,-After months of heroic fighting we have been beaten by the well-equipped and well-organised armies of the counter-revolutionaries. The White Guards of the Hungarian counter-revolution are terrorising the people by barbarous acts of repression and are supported by International capitalism-a war of extermination never before witnessed for its horrors against the Hungarian proletariat.
Thousands of our comrades have been cruelly tortured in order to make them confess to crimes they have not committed and finally sentenced to death, the method being by beheading. Women and children have not been spared, women have been flogged naked in the streets, lines of workers and students have been tied to the tails of horses and dragged along the ground until they have died of exhaustion; Soviet delegates have been buried alive. The persecutions and tortures are not yet at an end. The degenerate Hungarian nobility, thirsty for blood, has viciously revenged itself on the defenceless working-class, because, in feudal Hungary the workers dared to institute a Communist Society. Mutilated corpses are still to be seen lying about, but still they search for fresh victims. Now has begun a judicial comedy, for the persecutions still go on under so-called legal forms. Comrades who honestly and conscientiously carried out their duties in the Communist Government are awaiting their death sentence!
All suspected of sympathy towards the working-class movement are being interned in the camp at Heymasker, so no revolutionary movement is able to rise again between the Danube and Tibisk. The concentration camp has been prepared for 120,000 persons, and has been named the Hunger Doom! Heymasker during the war was a military camp for fever stricken and other contagious diseases.
The captured Red Army which fought so bravely for four months to defend the revolution has been deported to Rumania and other regions.
We turn to the International working class, we appeal to its conscience and reason to help the Hungarian people In this terrible hour of need, to save them from the death sentence and internment in the camps of hunger and death.
The Hungarian Revolution is not dead; the Hungarian Proletariat will again take its place in the last fight. Do not allow your Hungarian brothers to be exterminated. In sending you our best greetings, we are certain that the Italian, French, English, Belgian, and American working-class will not ignore our appeal, our cause is their cause, and once again we cry, “Long live the Social Revolution.”
THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE HUNGARIAN COMMUNIST PARTY.