Unquenchable Spirit

It is refreshing to read an entirely honest book about bad conditions in a Communist country. The last I read was one by a Catholic priest who had spent a number of years in Russian labour camps. His conclusion was that the conditions were terribly harsh (rarely on account of any actual sadism), and his fellow inmates, and some of the prison officials also, remarkably human. Dr Bone’s experience was somewhat different – because she was English (he was an American Pole); because she was herself a member of the Communist Party, until her imprisonment – on a mistaken charge, that of being ‘an English spy’ – by the Hungarian Communist regime [which?] finally reeducated her; because her imprisonment was solitary confinement.

I do not feel that her story sheds any great light on the theory or practice of Communism since it is well known that regimes of the Right or Left in page 105 Europe are accustomed these days to imprison any people who they think may be political opponents. It is remarkable, though, as a saga of personal courage and energy and integrity. Dr Bone’s conditions during her seven years’ imprisonment were bare and unpleasant to the point of great hardship; but the mental effect of prolonged solitary confinement was naturally the main interior enemy with which she had to contend. In this sphere she showed an amazing energy and inventiveness.

It was in a sense a triumph for rugged English individualism that she came through the long ordeal as well as she did. She is throughout first and foremost an Englishwoman who is determined not to be beaten down by the foreigners.

There are two interesting corollaries implicit though not obvious in her narrative – that people of her unusual integrity do move into (and out of) the Communist Party and find the atmosphere at least to some extent congenial; and that the Communist prison authorities, though frequently brutal and narrow-minded, apparently lacked the obsessional obscene sadism so characteristic of various contemporary Rightist regimes.

Her book should perhaps be read most of all as a corrective by any person who still imagines that prolonged solitary confinement can be educative, instructive, humanising, or in any way helpful to the prisoner concerned.

1966 (397)