Edith Bone (1889–1975)

Dr. Edith Bone has decided not to cry.

On this autumn afternoon in 1956, her seven years of solitary confinement have come to a sudden end. Beyond the prison gates, the Hungarian Revolution’s final, scattered shots are echoing down the streets of Budapest. Inside the gates, Bone emerges through the prison’s front door into the courtyard’s bewildering sunlight. She is 68 years old, stout and arthritic.

Bone was born in Budapest in 1889 and proved an intelligent — if disobedient — child. She wished to become a lawyer like her father, but this profession was closed to women. Her options were schoolmistress or doctor; she accepted the latter.

The Great War began soon after her graduation, and so she went to work in a military hospital. Perhaps it was there, seeing the suffering of the poorer classes, that her communist sympathies bloomed: She watched an illiterate Romanian soldier, a shepherd before the war, as he cried at the window for days, cradling a shattered arm and worrying about his lost children. He was only one broken man among many.

After the war, Bone devoted herself to political work in England for 16 years, and it was this foreign connection that would excite the suspicions of authorities when she returned to communist Budapest in 1949. Secret police stopped her at the airport on her way back to England.

Inside headquarters, a slim man presented himself, decked in fine clothing and smooth manners. He took her into a little office and told her they knew she was a spy, an agent of the British secret service. “Until you tell us what your instructions were, you will not leave this building.”

Bone replied: “In that case I shall probably die here, because I am not an agent of the secret service.” What followed — her seven years and 58 days of solitary confinement — is the stuff of horror films. She was held in filthy, freezing cells; the walls either dripped with water or were furred with fungus. She was generally half-starved and always isolated except when confronted by guards. Twenty-three ill-trained officers interrogated her with insults and threats — once for a 60-hour stretch. For one period of six months, she was plunged into total darkness.

And yet her captors received no false confessions, no pleas for mercy; their only bounty was the tally of her insolent replies. It became a kind of recreation for Bone to annoy the prison authorities on the rare occasions when she saw them.

But Bone’s most extraordinary stratagem was not the way she toyed with her captors, it was the way she held sway over her self — the dogged maintenance of her own sanity. From within that enforced void she slowly, steadily, built for herself an interior world that could not be destroyed or stripped from her. She recited poetry, for starters, translating the verses she knew by heart into each of her six languages. Then she began composing her own doggerel poems. One, made up during those six months without light, praised the saving grace of her mind’s “dark-born magic wand.”

Inspired by a prisoner she remembered from a Tolstoy story, Bone took herself on imaginary walks through all the cities she’d visited. She strolled the streets of Paris and Rome and Florence and Milan; she toured the Tiergarten in Berlin and Mozart’s residence in Vienna. Later, while her feet wore a narrow furrow into the concrete beside her bed, she set out in her mind on a journey home to London. She walked a certain distance each day and kept a mental record of where she’d left off. She made the trip four times, each time stopping when she arrived at the Channel, as it seemed too cold to swim.

Bone’s guards were infuriated, but she proved to be proficient in the art of being alone. They cut her off from the world and she exercised that art, choosing peace over madness, consolation over despair, and solitude over imprisonment. Far from being destroyed, Bone emerged from prison, in her words, “a little wiser and full of hope.”

I found her story remarkable. As I became more familiar with her attitude toward solitary confinement — and her bottomless capacity to endure it — I felt a creeping kind of envy coming over me. I wasn’t envious of her circumstances, of course. But I was envious of her faculties. Even the handful of solitary hours it took to read her story were difficult for me to endure.

In 1949, Bone was acting as a freelance correspondent in Budapest, affiliated with the London Daily Worker. She was accused of spying for the British government when leaving Hungary, arrested by the State Protection Authority (AVH) and detained in solitary confinement without trial or a prisoner identification number for seven years. During her detention, Bone managed to avoid the mental instability or insanity 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 she could remember, and made letters out of the dense black bread she was fed; out of these she composed poetry. Perhaps most stunning was the weeks-long effort she put into to 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 during the last days of the revolutionary Nagy Government in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. A student group had seized control of the Budapest political prison where Bone was held, and processed political prisoners for release.