Nearly a decade after the overthrow of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Communists languishing in jail go on hunger strike sparking rare public protests against Horthy’s fascist dictatorship. The great Hungarian-born artist reports.

‘On Hunger Strike Against Fascism’ by Hugo Gellert from Labor Defender. Vol. 5 No. 1. January, 1930.

ON the 21st of October all the political prisoners in Hungarian jails went on a hunger strike. Their number, judging by the frequent large scale arrests of workers under the fascist Horthy regime, is put at several hundreds, by some at a thousand. The reasons for the hunger strike were the unsanitary prison conditions, frequent beatings, solitary confinement, censure of their reading, which is wholly limited to religious writings, and bad and insufficient food.

The food–for breakfast, one kind of thin soup; for midday dinner, a portion of cooked vegetables, or a portion of boiled paste of the macaroni type; for supper, again this soup; added to this one pound of a sticky black substance, the prison bread, which is entirely uneatable. On this fare they were expected to work eleven hours daily at hard labor! The number of prisoners who contracted tuberculosis and other diseases under these conditions is appalling.

Four of the prisoners died during the strike, among them Sandor Lowy, an able young writer and a brave leader of the revolutionary Hungarian masses. The police attacked the funeral of Sandor Lowy and arrested his bride, Irma Leuz and several others in the procession. They are charged with Communist conspiracy and were given severe beatings at police headquarters to force confessions from them. Forcible feedings while in straight jackets were administered to the prisoners. Many of them had their throats lacerated and some of the deaths occurred during these forced feedings. All the prisoners were subjected to floggings several times during the strike. That the death rate was not much higher among them is nothing short of a miracle. Rakossy, Weinberger and Szanto, the most prominent among the prisoners, were in a critical condition. One of the women was thrown out of a window and had a pelvis bone fractured.

The strike included all of the sentenced political prisoners, also those who were held for investigation. Today eighty arrested workers and peasants are facing a mass trial in the fascist courts of Horthy.

On the eighteenth of November, the political prisoners accepted food for the first time in twenty-eight days. Just as they started the strike, so they ended it. As one man. The government promised to remedy prison conditions. According to the latest reports, the condition of the political prisoners remain unchanged. There is a possibility of a renewed hunger strike.

At present the prisoners are held incommunicado, not even their attorneys may see them. The sister of Rakossy, who persisted in her efforts to reach her brother, was arrested and brutally beaten by the police in an attempt to force her to divulge the names of the organizers of the hunger strike.

During the past months throughout Hungary many industrial and agrarian strikes were quelled at the point of the bayonet. The restlessness of the masses forced the government into a pact with the social-democratic “opposition” for the effective suppression of the workers and peasants of that country. The social-democrats stood aloof and would not raise a finger in aid of the strikers. But the Hungarian masses proclaimed their solidarity with the hunger strikers. They marched upon the jails in open defiance of the police and demanded the release of the political prisoners. And for the first time in ten years, since the existence of the white terrorist government, “The International” rang through the streets of Budapest.

Labor Defender was published monthly from 1926 until 1937 by the International Labor Defense (ILD), a Workers Party of America, and later Communist Party-led, non-partisan defense organization founded by James Cannon and William Haywood while in Moscow, 1925 to support prisoners of the class war, victims of racism and imperialism, and the struggle against fascism. It included, poetry, letters from prisoners, and was heavily illustrated with photos, images, and cartoons. Labor Defender was the central organ of the Scottsboro and Sacco and Vanzetti defense campaigns. Not only were these among the most successful campaigns by Communists, they were among the most important of the period and the urgency and activity is duly reflected in its pages. Editors included T. J. O’ Flaherty, Max Shactman, Karl Reeve, J. Louis Engdahl, William L. Patterson, Sasha Small, and Sender Garlin.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1930/v05n01-jan-1930-LD.pdf