Demény, Pál (1901–1991)
Politician. Demény took part as a student and young worker in the revolution of 1918 and the brief Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. His communist activity led to several prosecutions and years in prison between the wars. Later he turned against the Comintern-controlled illegal communist party and headed a communist young workers’ movement that took part in the wartime resistance. Agreement was reached in February 1945 to combine the two communist organizations, but he was arrested by the communist-controlled political police in February 1945 and sentenced in 1946 to four and a half years’ hard labour for crimes against the people. In 1950, he was interned at Kistarcsa, then sentenced to a further ten years’ confinement in 1953 for conspiracy. Although freed on October 13, 1956, he was not rehabilitated until 1989. After 1956, he worked as a translator until retirement in 1967. He joined the Hungarian Socialist Party in the autumn of 1989 and won a national-list seat in Parliament in the 1990 elections.
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