Edith Bone (28 January 1889 – 14 February 1975), originally Edit Olga Hajós, was a medical professional, journalist and translator who later became a member of the

Communist Party of Great Britain The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist organisation in Britain and was founded in 1920 through a merger of several smaller Marxist groups. Many miners joined the CPGB in the 1926 general strike. In 1930, the CPGB ...

Early life

Bone was born in

Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...

in 1889. Hajós married

Béla Balázs Béla Balázs (; 4 August 1884 – 17 May 1949), born Herbert Béla Bauer, was a Hungarian film critic, aesthetician, writer and poet of Jewish heritage. He was a proponent of formalist film theory. Career Balázs was the son of Simon Bauer a ...

in 1913. After the First World War she joined the

Bolshevik Party The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU),. Abbreviated in Russian as КПСС, ''KPSS''. at some points known as the Russian Communist Party (RCP), All-Union Communist Party and Bolshevik Party, and sometimes referred to as the Soviet ...

Petrograd Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of 5,601, ...

. In 1918, she began editing the English version of the ''Communist International'' magazine and later became a courier for the parent organisation. She lived in

Berlin, Germany Berlin ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the highest population within its city limits of any city in the European Union. The city is also one of the states of ...

from 1923 to 1933, leaving for Britain when the Nazis took over. She married Gerald Martin, a British translator, in February 1934. Bone learnt to speak six languages fluently. In July 1936, she and her friend and fellow communist, artist Felicia Browne, travelled to Spain to attend the international People's Olympiad, a protest event against the 1936 Olympics. However the event was cancelled due to the outbreak of the

Spanish Civil War The Spanish Civil War () was a military conflict fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republican faction (Spanish Civil War), Republicans and the Nationalist faction (Spanish Civil War), Nationalists. Republicans were loyal to the Left-wing p ...

. Browne would become the only British woman to play a combatant role, and one of the first of the British volunteers to die in that conflict in August 1936. Bone remained in Spain, working as a doctor and as a journalist with Claud Cockburn, a correspondent for the ''

Daily Worker The ''Daily Worker'' was a newspaper published in Chicago founded by communists, socialists, union members, and other activists. Publication began in 1924. It generally reflected the prevailing views of members of the Communist Party USA (CPU ...

''. She was involved with the establishment of the

Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia The Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (, PSUC) was a communist political party active in Catalonia between 1936 and 1997. It was the Catalan branch of the Communist Party of Spain and the only party not from a sovereign state to be a full membe ...

(PSUC) in

Barcelona, Spain Barcelona ( ; ; ) is a city on the northeastern coast of Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the Autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second-most populous municipality of Spain. With a pop ...

. She returned to Britain sometime before 1937 and worked for the magazine Lilliput where she was employed as a translator. She resigned briefly from the Communist movement before rejoining the British Communist Party in 1942.

Imprisonment

In 1949, Bone was acting as a free-lance correspondent in Budapest, affiliated with the London ''

''. When arriving in

, she was accused of spying for the British government, arrested by the

State Protection Authority The State Protection Authority (, ÁVH) was the secret police of the People's Republic of Hungary from 1945 to 1956. The ÁVH was conceived as an external appendage of the Soviet Union's KGB in Hungary responsible for supporting the ruling Hu ...

(AVH) and detained in solitary confinement without a fair trial or a prisoner identification number for seven years. During her detention, Bone managed to avoid the mental instability or

insanity Insanity, madness, lunacy, and craziness are behaviors caused by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns. Insanity can manifest as violations of societal norms, including a person or persons becoming a danger to themselves or to other ...

that typically accompanies isolation. She developed a series of mental exercises, including reviews of geometry, the several languages she knew and vocabulary. She mentally reconstructed the plots of all of the books she had read, made a comprehensive list of all of the characters in

Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...

and Dickens' works she could remember, and made letters out of the dense black bread she was fed; out of these she composed poetry. She launched what she called a series of "little wars" against her captors after realising they weren't going to use physical force on her and that she had no family to threaten. This included a language strike in 1951, in which she refused to speak Hungarian but rather used all the other five languages she knew. Her protests worked as in 1952, they allowed her access to books. From these she learnt her seventh language, Greek. She put week-long efforts into removing a very large nail from the iron-hard oak door of her cell. To accomplish this, she slowly removed single threads from towels and wove them into a solid rope with which to work the nail. After weeks of straining effort to get the nail to begin to wiggle and then loosen, she finally got the nail out. She then sharpened it on the concrete floor and used at as a drill to create a small peephole in her cell door so she could finally see out of her cell. She used these projects to keep her mind stimulated, to fill her time with goal-oriented actions, and to keep her sanity during her long period of extreme isolation. Bone was freed after 7 years, during the last days of the revolutionary Nagy Government in the

Hungarian Revolution of 1956 The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (23 October – 4 November 1956; ), also known as the Hungarian Uprising, was an attempted countrywide revolution against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic (1949–1989) and the policies caused by ...

. A student group had seized control of the Budapest political prison where Bone was held, and processed political prisoners for release. When she returned to Britain she gave interviews denouncing communism. This was due to the feeling of betrayal she felt from being imprisoned by her fellow communists and the ''Daily Worker'' which had sent her there. She died in 1975 in

Richmond upon Thames The London Borough of Richmond upon Thames () in south-west Greater London, London, England, forms part of Outer London and is the only London boroughs, London borough on both sides of the River Thames. It was created in 1965 when three smaller ...

, London.A Temze-parti Richmond 1965-ig London egyik elővárosa volt, 1965-ben vált londoni kerületté.

Early life

Imprisonment

Publications

See also

References

Further reading