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villages in Transylvania , the news of which was brought to
Hungary by James Callaghan.
I, of course, could not be present at that meeting, as Kádár had
his own staff, he only trusted them, but the news was a big bang
and Callaghan and his lovely wife extended their stay in
Hungary with a three-day vacation in Balaton. In the end, he
was right after all and not the protocol bosses, I admired his
behaviour as a professional politician. By the time the
motorcade reached the Marina hotel in Balatonfüred, it had
already been evacuated from the tourists and everyone had
taken up their accommodation. I was surprised that I could
sleep alone in a room. The next three days were no longer
strictly protocol events. There was dinner in Baricska Inn,
sailing on Lake Balaton, and on those occasions, I had many
personal conversations with the candidate for prime minister
and his infinitely enchanting wife.
I learned a lot about how the world works. He told me to visit
them when I was in London. In the summer of 1976, I was
stationed as a tour guide in London and I once stopped at the
entrance to Dowing Street, by which time he was already the
Prime Minister. I was standing at the gates of Dowing Street.
The street was closed, it was no longer possible to go to the

33 Nicolae Ceausescu, Secretary General of the Romanian Communist Party and President, worked
secretly for a long time on his idea that cities should be developed and every village with less than
two to three thousand people should be demolished. People must be settled in cities. The plan was
also in line with the Romanian nationality policy, because the majority of Hungarian villages were
smaller than this, and thus, by moving the population to the city and mixing the population,
Hungarian areas would have disappeared. German villages also gradually disappeared from the
seventies. The Romanian leadership gave the German population the opportunity to resettle in
Germany, for which Romania received substantial financial benefits from the German government
for each person who resettled. Thus, with his cherished plan, Ceausescu violated the promises of a
high degree of national autonomy undertaken by Romania after the First World War, and his plan
was contrary to the International Unity Document of Civil and Political Rights and the Helsinki
Final Document, which Romania also signed. The cherished plan of village destruction threatened
the Hungarian population for a long time, but in the end the Romanian leadership was forced to give
up, after they finally decided to implement it at the end of the 1980s, it was already too late. Regime
change began and crowds took to the streets.

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