Three weeks! For three weeks it has been like this. Yesterday, to-day, to-morrow—it is always the same. There are no longer nights and days: there is nothing but monotonous, continuous explosions. What if it is to be always like this? What if this is to continue for ever! The very air seemed to shudder. From the opposite side of the table a pair of wide-open, fixed eyes stared at me. “The Czechs....” Machine-guns were rattling somewhere near the Ipoly, and the dogs barked. Another bullet struck the wall. “The Reds....” Again the windows shook with the detonation. At the end of the room the door opened by itself, making room for hopeless despair, which entered and sat down to keep us company. * * * * * _May 24th–25th._ If after the bloody battles of the war the victorious generals had occupied our country their conquest would have put an end to the slaughter. But Hungary was occupied without fighting by twenty-four Jews. The state of war has become permanent, the slaughter continues, and—worst of all misfortunes—for months there have been continuous executions. Sentence of death is everywhere. Some take a long time to realise it, but it is there none the less. Dreadful news reaches us from Budapest: the city is starving; and in answer to this, Béla Kun declared at a meeting of the Workers’ Council: “There are enough supplies to prevent the Proletariat of Budapest from going hungry.” He forbore to speak of the inhabitants of the city, only of the privileged Proletarians, which for him means the Jewish intellectuals and, possibly, those who profess to be Red Proletarians. They will not go hungry. If Hungarians do ... Béla Kun shrugs his shoulders. The cruel ingenuity of the People’s Commissaries is inexhaustible. Whatever they do not dare to do themselves is done by the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, and as a silent means for wholesale executions food tickets have been introduced. The inhabitants are divided into classes, one class receives bread, the other is denied it. Those who receive red tickets—the workmen performing manual labour, Red soldiers and all the Red élite—will still be able to eat their fill. The recipients of blue tickets—officials, teachers, widows, pensioners—may continue hungry. Those who receive no food tickets will have to die of starvation. Thus it is possible to carry out executions merely by the use of coloured scraps of paper.