Ladislav Szalay

* 1929

  • "I resigned in '70 - not in '70, I resigned in '69, and the director of publishing - I wrote I had lost the political legitimacy to hold that position. That's how I wrote it to him. And the director read it and wrote me a letter, "I refuse to accept your resignation. You are to continue to run the magazine. The reason you give is not grounds for termination of employment." Okay. When they went to fire me, I showed them this letter because they gave the same reason that I gave. I said: "Director, Misko, listen, I wrote you this then, and you wrote me this. How is that possible?" That, "You are right." I say: "I can take this to court. Do you want to?" "You don't have to; I know you'd win. Stay in the newsroom." I was relieved of my duties; my salary was cut. They didn't want to see me in the newsroom and gave me assignments where I didn't come in contact with others. That meant I was proofreading, I was correcting epsilons. Basically, I translated if they had something from Russian, German, or Hungarian. That's how I stayed there until '73, I don't even know how I might have stayed that long."

  • "When the next year, the editors didn't want me, but they couldn't let me go. So, like that, I wasn't doing anything. But I couldn't find a job once I was laid off for three months. Wherever I applied, I was rejected. They weren't going to employ another right-wing opportunist from Rohac. I was even trying to arrange at my former workplace in the academy, where I had a lot of acquaintances, I worked there for three years, so I fit in with that collective of my peers who stayed there. And they say: "Come join us, we're setting up this encyclopaedic institute. You look around; you understand everything from sports to economics. Come." They arranged it with the party's chairman, the union chairman, and the academy's director. "You can join us. Come." Comrade, Bilak's son-in-law, who was in charge of science at the Central Committee, disapproved. When he discovered I wanted to go there, he said that would never happen. With an exclamation point, he showed me. So that's how I ended up. So I was forced to rest somehow, and then when I didn't find anything for those three months, I had unpaid leave for three months, so they had to find a place for me, and they found me a place with them in the accounting department, where I was crunching numbers from left to right. And I had the lowest salary in the accounting office. Because there was one worker with a high school diploma, that was the boss, and three girls, women, older ladies who had - the boss had a high school diploma, those three had an eight-year burgher school and some other vocational schools, the others had elementary education. I had the lowest salary because they wrote down experience: 0. So a college degree is unnecessary where I was forced to work."

  • "Three professors judged it. I knew all three of them. I greatly respected a professional, and two were party exponents. And the man I respected published a magazine that was not an imitation, but a ghost, something like Tigrid in Prague used to publish their - what's the name of it... Well, I'll figure it out right away. After '48, it was banned (Obzory, Tigrid's Obzory). I was buying them, but one issue was missing. I was in the editorial office at the Palisades, and there he, this professor, gave me one copy you don't have to pay. Well, thank you. I've known him ever since. And coincidentally, at the first students' ball of our faculty, I was picked to go, and you're going to go, and you're going for that lady, for that lady, to keep it organised, that is, for the opening dance. And I danced with his wife. She was young; I was five years older. But a nice lady. So, that was the kind of relationship I had with this professor. And I considered him the only one who was an expert. These two other ...now - the first one said, that, "Comrade, you have proved the opposite of what you should have proved." I was surprised, "How come I was supposed to prove something? I was supposed to do research." Well, that, "Okay, but you were supposed to confirm what you didn't confirm." I say: "What was I supposed to confirm?" "That life is getting better in Slovakia." "Life was improving," I say, "You know, the numbers gave me were like that." The other one said, "That's just it, comrade; you should have evaluated the source of the numbers. Those were bourgeois statistics, you should have criticised that. And not to write here that the economy is now worse." Those were the two. And the third one, who was an expert, he didn't say a word about the content. He excused himself very well and said: "In eighty-eight pages, you quote Comrade Stalin only thirteen times. That is not a good calling card."

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    Bratislava, 14.11.2023

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My inner satisfaction with myself on fundamental issues is what somehow keeps me alive... I have paid a great deal of attention to it in every way

Ladislav Szalay during shooting
Ladislav Szalay during shooting
photo: Dominik Janovský

Ladislav Szalay was born on 23 May 1929 in Trnava. His mother’s family came from Moravia and moved to Trnava to work in a sugar factory shortly after the First World War. The family on his father’s side had Hungarian roots, but they were “slovakised” after 1849. His father worked at the District Court in Trnava until the 1950s, when he did not want to be involved in trials of people who had not handed their properties over to the state. Ladislav graduated from an eight-year Catholic grammar school and attended it during the Second World War. Ironically, at the school, he encountered the teachers’ rejection of the Slovak state’s clerofascist policies, and he himself saved a Jewish classmate from deportation in 1944. After graduating from high school, he entered the College of Commercial Engineering, but after the socialist coup d’état, his studies changed greatly. Subsequently, he was employed at the Institute of Economics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, where, after initial teaching work, he began researching the economy of Slovakia between 1918 and 1928. As the research did not turn out as the reviewers had hoped, he had to end his scientific activity. He was employed in the editorial office of the journal Roháč until 1973, when he was dismissed after refusing to sign the consent to the entry of Warsaw Pact troops and the Lessons from the Crisis Committee. After three months on unpaid leave, during which Bilak’s son-in-law made it impossible for him to return to the academy, he was allowed to return to the editorial office at the lowest salary, even though he had the highest education. Shortly after November 1989, he founded the Slovak Daily (Slovensky dennik) and was behind the idea of founding a Christian party - the KDH (Christian Democratic Movement). Ladislav was entrusted with drawing up the program, but despite his electoral success, he was expelled from the KDH. After two years, the newspaper also disappeared. In 2018, Ladislav published a book on the centenary of Czechoslovakia called The Triumph of Propaganda.