With God for the People

"This is a small volume, written in the aftermath of 1989. Pastor Tokes was an ethnic Hungarian priest in Timisoara, and he describes here the experience of being a lone dissenting voice in Ceausescu’s Romania. They didn’t dare kill him, as they had other priests and dissenters, but he was actually sent to Timisoara to be kept under the watchful eye of a pro-regime priest who wouldn’t delegate any duties to Tokes and eventually died of overwork. Then suddenly he was told by the secret police that he was going to be expelled from his parish and from his home the following Friday. Tokes says he asked his congregation to be there and peacefully witness his expulsion, in the early Christian tradition of bearing witness. In fact, Tokes got worried when he saw them and asked them to go home. It now seems so inevitable – how could the Communist regime have survived? But people discovered then how brittle the regime in fact was. It was like a windscreen that can be shattered by one small stone, and that stone was Pastor Tokes. “Pastor Tokes was the spark that lit the fuse that turned into a bloody revolution with over 1,000 dead, including, of course, Ceausescu himself.” I arrived ten days later for the BBC and I interviewed the people who had been there, the ethnic Hungarian members of the congregation and the Romanians who had joined them. At first the congregation, who had come holding candles, were suspicious of the Romanians, assuming they were agent provocateurs. But the Romanians had just had enough and had come to support the priest. They ended up marching on the Party Headquarters and smashing the windows. Pastor Tokes was the spark that lit the fuse that turned into a bloody revolution with over 1,000 dead, including, of course, Ceausescu himself. There is a tendency to think that these revolutions were conspiracies led by a few dissidents or the military, but I have always maintained that they were genuine uprisings. Perhaps in Romania the uprising got hijacked, but these began as genuine revolutions led by the people."