Rastislav Káčer made the controversial statements on the same TV programme where Speaker of the National Council Boris Kollár expressed similar views last April.

A line-up of expert historians presented the story of how the many different nations living by the River Danube had collaborated with each other over the tides of history and of the ambitions to create a confederation of independent Danubian nations.

Paradoxically, Communist Béla Kun and the contemporary nationalist racists had more in common in terms of their views than the Communist leader had with the social-democratic and the left-leaning bourgeois émigrés.

In a referendum on 14 December 1921, the town of Sopron voted to remain part of Hungary, for which it has been celebrated as the town of loyalty and freedom ever since.

The majority of the refugees were intellectuals, mostly from Transylvania, followed by those from what is Slovakia, Serbia and Austria today, but there were also some who fled to Hungary from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Let’s try to keep the illusion awake in ourselves that we can cross to Nagyvárad or drop by to Nagyszalonta and then run from Makó to Arad, as it used to be – so natural, so self-evident. And then all of a sudden, we realise it was no longer possible.

As a consequence of the treaty, four million Hungarians became overnight the citizens of foreign countries, some of them newly formed.

The kind of honest, pure, original shock and indignation of when we are cast into this world, start to become familiar with it, and find ourselves facing an injustice on a disproportionately large scale, which we would like to fix, but simply cannot: the pain and loss of which still lingers.  

In its entirety, Scitovszky’s memoirs are a compelling and eloquent retelling of many of the obscure events at and after Trianon, written by a man of a sophisticated age, hardened by insurmountable challenges and driven by a sense
of duty and responsibility.

‘I’ve often said that if Donald Trump had had even half the intelligence and the focus of Viktor Orbán, America would be a very different place.’