Daniel Kovalovszky – An Infernal Play « burn magazine

In 1945 Mátyás Rákosi, the leader of the Hungarian Communist Party, following the Soviet example, introduced a new Stalinist dictatorship in which human rights were severely violated.  As a result of show trials, several hundred thousands of political convicts were sent to forced labor camps, were imprisoned and hundreds were executed based on fictional charges. In most cases the charges consisted in supplying data to western powers and secretly organizing a revolt against the people’s power. Having found the memoirs of the political prisoner a very dreadful and unknown world opened up for me. I decided to start a visual collection to shed light on a segment of what was happening during these obscure years that is unknown to many but still significant: the world of prisons in Hungary between 1945 and 1963.