MUDr. Péter Hunčík
* 1951
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”The real problem was that the day before the meeting with Arpád Göncz Mr.Duray came and claimed: ,Péter, I can‘t agree with it.´ Miklós, you have been sitting here for six months, you know all the details, could you not have said earlier that you would not agree? I have already declared – tomorrow there is a meeting and the president had one strict condition. I will say that excuse but then this issue won‘t be misused for political reasons anymore. We shall let it be then. We won’t discuss it any later. And Miklós Duray said: ,See, Péter, we can not accept it. You know the Slovaks forced us out of our homes and this president is Czech. Now the Czech is gonna apologize for what the Slovaks did?´ So I don’t know what I told him. I know it was silly because I could not control myself: ,Miklós, listen, tomorrow I will organize it as a football match – 5 million Slovaks against 500.000 Hungarians and they will tell each other: Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Thank you.´"
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"Exactly on November 17th in one flat – the radio and everything was turned off. Karči said: ,We won‘t get entertained by anything.´ They had some sandwiches and some goulash there. He said: ,You or us are now the ones, who can take some quality step. Either we do it or the discussion about minorities, minorities is worth nothing. Something needs to be done.´”
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"I loved going to the theatre. I was on my way back from an opening night in the Komárno theatre. The train was to leave at midnight. On my way to the train station there was the Gábor Steiner bust. He was a great martyr of the Communist Party, he died in Auschwitz. So he was a communist, a Jew and he died in Auchwitz. I did not think about it then. I just started to talk to him: „Hi, Gábor, so you got here, It‘s cold in here, isn’t it? And what you’ve done with those and those? Was it worth it?” As I was talking to him I did not realize it was in front of the District Committee of the Communist Party building and the bust was unveiled on that very day. Obviously there was the guard in the building – because it was in the night. They run after a few minutes. It happened on Friday, they arrested me and kept me until Monday and then took me to the prosecutor. I was shocked that he had already have my poems, my essays and all I have just said.”
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Full recordings
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Bratislava, 14.12.2018
(audio)
duration: 02:08:56
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I did not expect we would live in “normalization regime” for 21 years
Péter Hunčík was born on 25th May 1951 in Šahy. He moved to Great Britain after 1968 and returned to Czechoslovakia to study medicine. In 1985 he was arrested in front of the OV KSS (the District Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia) for “defamation of the bust of Gábor Steiner” and he could receive attestation from Psychiatry only after the Velvet Revolution 1989. He is one of the founding members of the Independent Hungarian Initiative and was its speaker from the beginning. From autumn 1990 until the elections in 1992 he was the advisor for minorities for the president Vaclav Havel. He works as a psychiatrist and publicist.
