Word: koestlers
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...prison code that Novelist Arthur Koestler described in Darkness at Noon, for tapping out the alphabet, echoed through the corridors of a Communist prison in Budapest. From their tapped-out conversations, top Hungarian Journalist Paul Ignotus and a young girl named Florence Matay, who could not see one another, fell in love. Last week they were honeymooning in Italy. For their story, see FOREIGN NEWS, After the Cinema...
Leftists who get caught up in the Communist confession mills have a fair idea of what to expect these days. As long ago as 1940, Budapest-born Arthur Koestler in his novel Darkness at Noon explained something of the techniques used. Thus, when onetime Hungarian Cultural Attaché Paul Ignotus, an active Social Democrat who had read his Koestler, returned to Budapest from Britain to see his ailing father in 1949, he knew the danger he risked. Picked up by the AVO security police a few days after his father's funeral, he was not altogether surprised to find...
...confessed: "I said that I hated the workers. I admitted I was a willing tool of the Western imperialists and capitalists. I recited fully the lesson I had spent a year and a half learning." What made tough, hawk-nosed Ignotus accept his lesson? Says he: "Koestler is right. The emphasis is put on the psychological part of the treatment, the dogged, merciless, relentless job of indoctrination. But the torture-maybe Koestler underestimated that. The torture is horror...
...Lessons. Florence, too, had read her Koestler. "One day I heard a tap-tap-tap, muffled, irregular, but methodical. I remembered the alphabet in Darkness at Noon: one tap for A, two for B, and so on.* I listened and for a long time could make no sense out of what I heard-until I realized that the language was English." She tried to join in the conversation, but the others were suspicious of her. At first there was no answer. But after repeatedly tapping out her name she discovered that the man in the cell below hers...
...conversions under great emotional stress almost anywhere. He believes that every important conversion recorded in the New Testament (most notably that of Saul of Tarsus, persecutor of Christians, to Paul the Apostle) was of this type. In modern times, thinks Sargant, many conversions to and from Communism (e.g., Arthur Koestler's carefully recorded experiences) followed the pattern. So, too, did religious and pagan dedications among Voodooists in Haiti, among some tribes on the west coast of Africa, among the Quakers (says Sargant, because they "shook and trembled before the Lord"), among the lamas of Tibet and among U.S. revivalists...