analyzing a history document.

analyzing a history document.

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Before he escaped to the West in 1948, Nicholas Nyaradi was the Hungarian minister of finance. He had survived World War II (193945) with his family in Budapest, the capital city. In early 1945, nearly 1 million Soviet troops had defeated the Nazi occupiers in the ferocious Battle of Budapest (December 29February 13), in which Nyaradi witnessed the Soviet Red Army's barbarous use of human wave attacks. These two wintry months of siege caused food shortages so severe that Red Army troops ate their own horses. As the devastated city fell in a bloodbath to the Soviets, the desperate population fled; nearly 40,000 had died and many thousands of women and girls were raped. In the first postwar government, Nyaradi negotiated a financial settlement with the Soviets in Moscow regarding German assets in Hungary. This gave him a "ringside seat," as he called it, to observe Russian communism in action in the Soviet Union. But soon Hungarian and then Soviet Communists seized control of Hungary, which became a satellite of the Soviet Union. In exile in America, Nyaradi was frustrated by the attitudes of the majority of Americans, who, he felt, underestimated the threat posed to the West by Joseph Stalin, the general secretary of the Communist Party. Nyaradi traveled the country lecturing on the perils of communism, providing astounding statistics on Stalin's military buildup. The times were jittery in the United States; this was during the Korean War (fought by the United States against communist North Korea from 1950 to 1951) and the Red Scare, a period of intense U.S. fear of infiltrators and homegrown communists. At the beginning of this speech to the Economic Club of Detroit, Nyaradi described how a friendly American truck driver had helped him on the highway with his broken-down car. The truck driver wondered what Nyaradi did for a living; he guessed he was "at least a traveling salesman," rather than the college professor he actually was.

I am a traveling salesman of truth as I learned itthe terrible truthduring the more than four years behind the Iron Curtain while I was fighting a desperate and losing battle against advancing Communism in my own country, and while I was negotiating with top Soviet officials in Moscow.

I am going to tell you the truth. I am going to tell you about a question which is a question of life or death to every single American today, because I am going to tell you that I saw Stalin's timetable. I saw Stalin's timetable not because Stalin showed it to me, but I was in a position to see his plans for coordinating economies, concentrating military powers, preparing his people psychologically, in this dreaded "hate America" campaign for a final showdown.

I am always amazed, gentlemen, to hear some very prominent Americans say that the very last thing Stalin has in mind is a shooting war with your country. Well, I should like to tell you, of course, that Stalin would be happy if he could get around without a shooting war: if he could bleed white your economy; if he could infiltrate your country on the social level; if he could cause disorders here. But I am telling you that a shooting war is not out of the question.

It is a pity that Americans, and sometimes leading American statesmen, don't read books, because I think that the statesmen of the West who sat down at the Conference Table at Teheran, at Yalta and at Potsdam, believing that Russia was a faithful and trustworthy ally of the United States of America, would have eventually changed their opinion, if they had read there in the Lenin Library in Moscow the book of Lenin which I happened to read, and in which Lenin said that there will be a series of conflicts in the world until it will come to the final clash between the forces of Communism and capitalism. And now I am quoting Lenin verbatim: "And at the end of this last showdown, the funeral dirge will be sung either over the tomb of Communism, or over the tomb of capitalism."

Well, gentlemen, I saw Stalin and his henchmen working in order to make this prediction of Lenin come true. I saw that the basic principle of his policy was, is and will be, the destruction of America; the destruction of the last stumbling block on the road leading towards Communist world domination. When I am speaking to you about Stalin's timetable, gentlemen, I am sorry to tell you that we here already are running on borrowed time, because Stalin's timetable is overdue.

I saw his preparations, I saw his plans, and I know that Russia was to have reached its maximum capacity, both in the military and in the economic fields, by the end of last year. The result, gentlemen, that according to statistics which I have seen in the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Trade, five-sixths of Soviet industrial production is going directly or indirectly for war purposes, and only one-sixth of Soviet industrial production serves the purpose of consumer's goods.

You well know, and I don't want to repeat to you, what the military preparations of the Soviet Union are. You well know that they have today under the colors an army which is almost five million men strong, the strongest army in the peacetime history of the world. But what you might not know is that I was able to see little fragments of the plans for a Soviet mobilization, according to which I was able to see that within six months of the start of an eventual war the Soviet Union would be able to send another ten million men into the front lines, which would bring up the total number of the Soviet Army to fifteen million men. If you add to this the five million men of the Chinese Communist Army, and the two million men of the Soviet Eastern European satellites, you will see that in case of a war, you would have to reckon with a twenty-two million-man strong Communist Army on the American defense perimeter

Today, the whole Soviet orbit is turned into a military camp, and no matter what material you ship into a military camp it becomes of military importance. Wood and glass are certainly not strategic materials, but if you ship them to Russia and the Russians use them to frame Stalin's picture, which they hang up in the barracks to lift the morale of Soviet troops; then, of course, wood and glass become of military importance, too. In my belief, there is only one way to trade with Communist Russiaone safe and secure wayand that is not to trade at all

Communism as it is now is more than the armed power of a great country. Communism is more than an army. Communism is more than 20,000 jets or 50,000 tanks. Communism is an ideology. It is a philosophy. If I can use this word, it is an evil religion

I am amazed to see how you Americans take for granted all the wonderful privileges you have here. I am amazed to see how you live without the slightest knowledge of the terrible danger which threatens you. I am amazed to see how you have this most dangerous attitude of "This can't happen to me." I am terribly sorry to tell you gentlemen that Stalin has important allies in your country. I am not speaking only about those fools and criminals in the Communist Party and their fellow travelers who want to undermine your country, but I am speaking about Stalin's allies in the person of those millions and millions of otherwise good, honest Americans whose ignorance and indifference paves the way for Stalin's domination in the world

I lived once in a city which was just as beautiful, just as happy, just as big and just as colorful as any of your great American cities.

We had 1,500,000 happy men, women and children, working, living and playing in this beautiful city, which was once called "The Queen of the Danube," and thenhell broke loose. First the Nazis marched in and then the Russians came. Those two evil giants, the Nazis and the Communists, battled in our streets, battled in our apartments, in our houses, in our squares and in our gardens for two long months.

One and one-half million civilians lived down in their basements and in the air raid shelters, and for two months we went without food, without water and without medical supplies. Six thousand of our babies died because we didn't have a cup of milk to feed them. If we wanted to drink we had to melt the dirty, filthy snow in our palms because the waterworks was not functioning and we didn't have fuel to warm the snow. If we wanted to eat, at nightfall when the bombing of the city stopped for a minute the population rushed out to the ruined streets and there in the ghostly light of the burning houses we hacked off big chunks of flesh from the carcasses of dead Army horses and ate this meat raw because we didn't have fuel to cook it

When I am speaking about your privileges, I mean that it is your great privilege to go to bed at night and wake up in the morning in the same bed, because in my part of the world, among 800 million people, the hours between midnight and 4:00 in the morning are hours of anxiety, fear, terror and frustration. That is the time when the Soviet Secret Police go out for their roundups. They round up families, houses, entire cities, or even entire countries. They take the people to jail, to concentration camps or to the gallows. If someone knocks on your door at that time of the night, behind the Iron Curtain, your heart beats up in your throat

You know, gentlemen, the reason I tell you this is very simple. You of course are very happy that you have a home, that you have a job, that you have a desk, that you have an income and that you have a bank account. You haven't gone through what it means to come to the bank and find a poster on the door saying that the bank is nationalized and your account confiscated. You haven't gone to your farm and seen the Communist Party taking it over for the purpose of a collective farm. You haven't gone to your factory or to your shop and seen the Workers' Council throw you out, in the good case, or arrest you, in the bad case.

But, I went through all this. I lost everything. I was a very wealthy man in my own country, and I have lost not only my job, and not only my belongings, which were all confiscated by the Communists, but what is worse, I have lost my citizenship because my country was enslaved, and I have lost every single relative and friend of mine who remained behind the Iron Curtain. My wife and I were able to flee. The rest of them were arrested. We don't know whether they have been killed, whether they are in Siberia, or what has happened to them.

The reason I am telling you this is because it is a human characteristic that you cannot really appreciate things until you have lost them. I don't want you to lose these things. I want you to appreciate them beforehand. The reason again why I am telling you this, gentlemen, is very simple. We here in this room today have many different things in our backgrounds, but we might have one thing in common: and that is that I, as so many of you here in this audience, am the father of an American citizen. I have a little boy who was born in this country two years ago. His name is Johnny. Today I am telling you this because the only thing that I shall be able to give Johnny is that he will be able to live in a strong and free country, in a country like America always has been.

You see, my little son will never sit in the lap of his grandfather. He will never know how his grandmother would kiss him. He won't have relatives. My wife and I have lost everything that human beings could lose in their lives. I am warning youwarning you very stronglybecause the only way that I can preserve my son, the only way that I can make my son happy, is if you people will maintain America as I always knew it and as it always has been, because, believe me gentlemen, the only guarantee for my Johnny, and for the millions of other Johnnys and Marys in this great country is a strong, a powerful, a free and democratic America.