your Lipstadt trial index your Deborah Lipstadt dossier No. 25, January 20, 2004 [ German translation ] : The attacks multiply. There have been unkind articles in Nepszabdsag and Magyar Hirlap , but they are all written by the usual people and I am not too badly wounded. I write to Benté: My back is killing me this morning from sitting at an angle in an ancient Volkswagen for seven hours, while three adults chain-smoke. Aaaargh. Aaaargh!
We drove along a single lane highway to Pécs near the Serbian border, a mining town. Audience was rather lost in the large 500-seater Ifjuság theatre, dimly lit, real Soviet-era stuff. Hard to get any kind of atmosphere going in a talk in such conditions. No pictures, as the interpreter who takes them for me ‘stepped outside’ as soon as the talk was over, evidently desperate for a cigarette. It is a real epidemic, the nicotine addiction in eastern Europe.
Drove back and arrived at the hotel at midnight. Your bank’s news just about capped a very grim day. . . I suspect that Barclays are doing their usual trick of sitting on their hands and whistling, and pretending they can’t find the money. The publisher comes at two PM and we drive out to Györ. Good meeting in a local hotel. Around seventy people in a tight room, only two chairs empty so far as I can see. It goes well, but the witticisms all fall flat by the time they are interpreted.
There is the usual obnoxious man in the front row who keeps bobbing up and down and flashing photos; I tell him to stop. There is also a rather wan-looking Eva, who can’t afford the book, so I donate one and have her stand next to me for a photo. At question time an elderly author complains that I have refused to accept his book.
I explain it’s in Hungarian, which I don’t read; I don’t know what’s in it; and my luggage is regularly searched at both ends, so I have made a point of carrying only the barest essentials on planes with me. I relate the story of how my trunk went “missing” in the USA in 1995 — it enjoyed a little side-trip to Washington DC, where it was opened by all sorts of people. After supper the Volkswagen breaks a fan belt and it is midnight before we get