The Fate of Western Hungary 1918-1921 - Corvinus Library ...

Foreword
The writer of these few introductory lines was born Egyházasrádóc in the
county of Vas, immediately in the vicinity of the Hungarian-Austrian Trianon
defined border. He attended his four years of elementary school in a one room
schoolhouse. (Then I became a student of the Reformed Middle School of
Csurgo in 1941.) These biographical details were not put here for diversion, or
reasons of boasting. Rather, because Jozsef Botlik’s harrowing book, based on
a mass of bona fide fact-supported sources, reminded me – more accurately,
‘provoked’ them out of me. The first memory invoked by the reading of the
manuscript was of the Reformed (and every other) elementary school
classroom, where I learned writing and much else, and the administrative map
of Vas County hanging on the wall. Beginning in Grade 3, not a day would go
by without our teacher calling somebody out to the map and ask: “Describe and
point out what our county lost with the terrible Trianon peace” (and what we
must, as a matter of course, regain). We said and pointed: Austria took the
Felsőőr [now Oberwart] and Németújvár [Güssing] districts, Yugoslavia, the
Muraszombat [Murska Sobota] district. Our mutilated county thus had seven,
not ten, districts. Also, our faces burned for two reasons: the fluster of
answering and the humiliation that befell us.
However, as I was reading the manuscript, the still smoldering indignity was
joined by a shocking thought. What would have happened, the thought struck
me as a nightmare, if all the goals of the territory hungry Austrian leadership
were met in their entirety, as was the case with our other neighbors, the Czechs,
Romanians and Serbs. After all, the strongly left leaning politicians of the
newly formed Austrian Republic wanted to commandeer all of Western
Hungary: Pozsony [Bratislava], all of Moson, Sopron and Vas counties, and the
northwestern part of Zala County to the railway line of Celldömölk – Türje –
Zalaegerszeg – Lenti – Alsólendva – Csáktornya. Already in early November of
1918, writes the author, they created in Vienna the Westungarische Kanzlei
[Western Hungary Bureau], under whose auspices and direction, prepare, by
armed force if necessary, the annexation of 16,000 km 2 of territory. What made
it most repulsive was the immoral Austrian mindset. After all, Austria wanted
to take purely Magyar populated areas from an associated country, the other
half of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, with whom our soldiers shed their
blood for four years obeying our common emperor-king. Is there anything more
repulsive in the world than to rob someone together with whom we suffered
and fell?
What seemingly froze a man such as me: My God, what would have
happened to me if such vulgar appetite came to pass? If my village, and the
entire county, was given to Austria? Would I have even been born? And if yes,
what would have happened to me, become of me? An Austrian citizen? A
frustrated, neurotic member of a minority, forced to forget his origins, bury his
ancestors; a sort-of assimilated Austrian-German? Too terrible to even
4