Years ago, I went to the House of Terror, the former secret police headquarters on Andrássy ut in Budapest. It documents the human rights abuses of both the Nazis who occupied Hungary in 1944 and the communists who took over Hungary in 1947 and weren’t ousted until 1989. The museum, which was like descending into Dante’s Inferno, made a profound impression on me. I wrote a blog post about it titled, “An Assault on the Senses.”
One specific incident from that long, dark history stayed with me all these years. It was the case of a sixteen-year old boy named Péter Mansfield. He was arrested for writing “MUK” —Márciusban újra kezdjük,” roughly translated to “In March we start again” — on a Budapest wall in 1957. An interesting little detail: Mansfield wrote his graffiti in jam on the wall of a grocery store. Mansfeld was tried under legal machinery the Kádár government built after the 1956 Revolution, including a 1957 decree that lowered the death-penalty eligibility age to sixteen for certain crimes. He was later involved in other anti-Soviet activism. He was executed in March 1959, eleven days after his eighteenth birthday for having committed a crime against the state.
The other thing I remember most from my visit was entering the cells down in the basement. I swear the scent of death lingered in the walls and floors of the unheated cells. I recall recoiling—the visceral reaction was that strong.
I am currently working on a fictionalized account of my research on the Vogeler/Sanders case, known as “Standard-per” in Hungary. I published the nonfiction version of these events in Western Corporations and Covert Operations in the Early Cold War: Re-examining the Vogeler/Sanders Case (Taylor & Francis, 2024).
Writing a novel about those same events gives the writer a certain amount of license for dramatic purposes. Even though Mansfield was executed in 1959, I placed it earlier in my novel. The vignette is titled, “The Kid.” The injustice of this “crime against the state” remains very real.
The title of the novel is No Lever Powerful Enough: The Untold Story of Robert and Lucille Vogeler. It will be released in March 2027. Here’s the vignette for your reading pleasure. Nathaniel Davis was the Consul at the American Legation in Budapest at the time of the Vogeler case.
Budapest, 1951: Nathaniel David – “The Kid”
Nathaniel Davis met with Matt Jensen, the Political Officer at the Legation—the man responsible for tracking changes in Hungarian law and policy, reviewing party announcements, internal circulars, and the like. He was well-known at the Hungarian Ministry of Justice and among clerks at the Parliament. Even some of the Communists liked him.
Matt, usually a loquacious and outgoing man, looked downright thunderous.
“What’s going on, Matt?” Davis asked.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Jensen said with a scowl.
Davis got up, closed the door to his office, and sat back down at his desk.
“Tell me.”
“The Hungarians have lowered the minimum age for capital punishment.”
Davis waited patiently for him to go on. Jensen cleared his throat.
“They’ve lowered it from eighteen to sixteen years.”
“They can put a sixteen-year-old to death? Legally?”
Davis sat back stunned. His nephew Eddy had just turned sixteen. He was just learning to be a man. Kids got out of line. They tested boundaries.
Davis tried to control his roiling thoughts.
“Do you know why?”
Jensen nodded, his expression grim.
“They arrested a sixteen-year-old kid last month.”
Davis was almost afraid to ask. His stomach clenched in anticipation of the bad news.
Finally, he asked, “On what charges?”
Jensen straightened his shoulders, turning his jaw from left to right.
“The kid was charged with writing ‘Russkies go home’ on a wall.”
“He was arrested for graffiti?” Davis asked, his voice incredulous.
“Yes. And since they are lowering the age for capital punishment, I’m afraid they intend to execute him for his crime against the state.”
“Jesus Christ!” The words exploded from Davis’s mouth.
Jensen nodded sadly.
“Is there nothing we can do?”
Jensen shook his head sadly.
“Not one damn thing.”
Then his voice broke.
“My son is sixteen years old.”
I had a lump in my throat when I wrote this scene. The memories of the horror stories I’d learned about still haunted me.
Thanks for tuning in.
With all best wishes,
Margaret
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