CÖF-CÖKA's 2020 Spiritual Defender of the World awards were presented yesterday in a festive setting. Lawyer Bencze Izabella, a founding member of CÖF-CÖKA, also received a posthumous award. The eulogy of Attila Miklós Németh is published below.

"I don't know if Viktor Grisin has read the Egri stars, but if not, then thirty years ago he could have experienced how Hungarian women treat the invading enemy. It's true that he didn't get hot pitch or Hungarian goulash in the neck - like the Turks did at the time - but he became redder than the army that once was, whose damages to Hungary he tried to use to his own advantage.

This happened when the last Russian soldier to leave our country - Lt. General Silov - had already been looking for a Moscow apartment for the more than one hundred thousand Soviet citizens who, after decades of temporarily living in Hungary, went home stateless. Their withdrawal took place with 34,541 railway cars and 48 military convoys, but in the background negotiations of the troop withdrawal, it was not about what they took, but rather what they left here.

As a result of the round-the-clock work, a protocol was put on the table, waiting to be signed thirty years ago. The Russian Deputy Minister and the representative of the Hungarian negotiator, Lt. General Annus Antal, was trying out the pen prepared for this occasion, when Izabella Bencze spotted that there was a hidden mine in the Cyrillic text. Bella's reading comprehension was not a problem, as she perfected her language skills in Siberia, in the barracks of a construction camp known as the "Legal Successor of the Gulag". The law student's summer course went so well that Izabella Bencze left her membership card on the desk of the KISZ office when she got home. He was without it until the end of the eighties. A quarter of a century later, one of her bosses pointed out that department head Dr. Izabella Bencze was not a party member. He immediately sent her to ideological training where, when called upon to give her opinion, Bella quoted Lenin. Lenin, leaning on the railing of the Aurora, tells Gorbachev that he should start all over again...

Grisin didn't know anything about all of this, only when it was read to his eyes that he still imagined the sentence of the protocol according to which "the Soviet side can initiate the renewal of economic negotiations again at any time" - he blushed, jumped up, and put aside all the tools of diplomacy threw it and ran out of the room - can be read in the recollections of Dr. Izabella Bencze. Then, when he came back to the room, he communicated with one of the members of the Hungarian delegation: "he never thought that a woman would drive them out of Hungary."

Clever, you could say. But I say it because Izabella Bencze was a matter-of-fact person in the sense that she always found the cause that was worth standing up for, that was worth fighting for, and most importantly: that was worth carrying through to a complete solution.

As a child, he stuck to his favorite toy even at the cost that the family allegedly did not defect because of it. Terrified, but he wore the cockade given to him by his mother in those revolutionary times, when it was possible to die from it. He took the bloody flag, which the family saved from the crossfire of the Russian soldiers, and kept it to this day. He left Hungary, then died of homesickness in Hamburg and Sarajevo. This also became his business. He didn't ask or expect help from anyone. He returned to his own country - that was his business too. Because love can be so strong that one learns its vocabulary in several languages, but it cannot be so strong that someone from the West moves behind the Iron Curtain for his wife. When he waved goodbye to the greatest human feeling at the border, it also became his business.

And the fight for the accountability of the communist nomenclature became his cause, that despite the oaks whispering in Csillebérc, DEMISZ is not the legal successor of KISZ, so there is no deal. He told everyone to their face that neither the financial nor the moral accountability had been done to this day. The goods produced during socialism disappeared from hand to hand. The country was looted with the active cooperation of its own party-state elite. Good.

I did not want to be a defendant in a case represented by Dr. Bencze Izabella, because I would have let her be right. Because his gaze radiated steadfastness. Whoever sat across from him sooner or later realized that the truth was beyond. Although he is always legally serious in the films in which he discussed the big issues of the regime change, he always had a smile in his eyes during our personal meetings. A kind of watching smile. Standby. How can I help you? To ensure that everything operates legally and within the legal framework. At the board of trustees meetings, Dr. Izabella Bencze warned about deadlines, precise wording, and the relevant paragraph. However, there were several lawyers sitting around the table.

He negotiated with dignity. With a posture that didn't allow the other party to question Bella's truth. I met him for the first time when I was rocking the cradle of CÖF. At the Palm Sunday rally in 2009, there were at least as many people - but maybe even more - at the Heroes Square than at the reburial of the martyrs of '56. At the event twenty years later, there was also a crowd standing on the steps of the Műcsarnok.

The Civil Unity Forum came to the scene with the strength of the dormant civil circles, so that two weeks later we protested against the formation of the Bajna government in front of the Parliament, on the current site of the Unity monument. The police tried to gather the geese that were allowed into the square. Then the crowd marched to the castle so that Izabella Bencze could present our protest to the head of state. Because that was his business then.

He chose freedom. The freedom of retirement, but with this momentum, he threw himself into public life. He wrote, blogged, spoke into the microphone, stood in front of the camera, appeared as a program producer, always for the public good, in the spirit of the CÖF, that "nothing about us, without us".

However, I never thought that in 2021, I would think of Bella from the Transylvanian settlement whose name I first heard during the destruction of a village in Romania. Atyha, then, in 1988, was a settlement in Hargita county in Székelyföld, below the Firtos castle, almost inaccessible. Then the access road was built, and people started moving here and to Énlaka.

Father Atyha's church was struck by lightning, and Dr. Izabella Bencze found that she had something to do in this matter as well. The rebuilt church, Atyha, which survived the destruction of the village, is now identical to it. Just like Ferenc Erkel's bell sound Izabella Bencze...

The lace curtain of the water spray burst into the air, embracing the sun's rays. He bathed in the light, and now, when rainbow flags are flying around the world, he found the national color rainbow. The bells of Erkel's anthem rang out in red, white, and green, and our supplicant was carried away by the stream of water: Bless God, bless the Hungarians, bless the one who managed his life while protecting what is ours!

I remember, we remember you, dear Bella, from now on also named as "Spiritual Defender of the Fatherland".

Attila Miklós Németh

Photo: MTI Photo: Noémi Bruzák