One of communist Hungary’s grimmest events – and there’s plenty of competition for this title – was the murder-suicide carried out by Minister of the Interior Dr Sándor Zöld.
Zöld (1913-1951) was a Transylvania-born doctor who was involved with the far-left from an early age.
Rákosi criticised his ministry’s work on 19 April 1951 and Zöld for his friendships with ‘domestic’ communists, the ones who hadn’t spent the Second World War in Moscow.
This criticism led Zöld to believe he would be the target of a show trial like the one László Rajk suffered. Rajk’s family was also persecuted.
The following day, Zöld, his wife, his 6-year-old daughter, 8-year-old son and his widowed mother were all found dead. Zöld had apparently killed them in a murder-suicide. The family lived in a grand villa at Benczúr utca 44 in Budapest’s District VI. The murder-suicide took place on the ground floor of the house.
In his suicide note he wrote ‘I know what awaits me and my family. Why wait for this to be my destiny?’
Zöld, of course, committed a terrible crime by murdering his family. That said, his fears about what the regime had in store for them were not without foundation.
Rajk’s show trial and execution
Earlier, the former interior and foreign minister Rajk had fallen from grace spectacularly. He was executed after a show trial in 1949 and his body was dumped in an unmarked grave. A court jailed Rajk’s wife for five years. His only child, László Rajk Jnr, ended up in an orphanage. The authorities renamed him István Kovács (the equivalent of Stephen Smith), rendering the child all but anonymous. In view of this, there’s little doubt the fate of the Rajk family weighed heavily on Zöld before he snapped.
ÁVO officers wrapped Zöld’s corpse in a carpet and buried it by a road outside the city. Construction workers accidentally dug up his body in 1955. Later, he and his family were reburied in Kerepesi Cemetery.
