Maybe these unfortunate men had a happier fate than was that of some of the political prisoners whom Korvin subjected to his diabolical inquisition in the cellars beneath the Houses of Parliament. What was enacted there, in defiance of all human feeling, surpasses the utmost limits of bestiality. Some had the soles of their feet beaten with rubber sticks or their bare backs belaboured with belts or straps; others had their ribs or arms broken, or tacks driven in under their nails; some were compelled to drink three litres of water at a draught, or had rulers stuck down their throats, to force them to make disclosures. By the side of a certain lieutenant-colonel Korvin placed a guard with a hand grenade, ordering the latter to kill the unfortunate officer, if he dared to open his mouth; another prisoner he threatened to shoot unless he spoke immediately. A lieutenant was found wearing on his breast an image of the Blessed Virgin: ‘hang the thing up as an ornament for his gallows,’ shrieked the inquisitor in a paroxysm of fury. A prisoner named Balogh, who refused to confess, was dragged by the terrorists—his hands tied behind his back—up to the scaffold erected in the cellar and left hanging there with the blood running from his mouth and nose. For intimidation, the inquisitors showed the accused persons a heap of noses, tongues, and ears that had been cut off corpses. One of Korvin’s hangmen, a Russian Jew, with a limp, and curly hair, named Gerson Itzkovitch, laughingly vaunted that he was in the habit of gouging out a bourgeois’ eye with a single turn of his Cossack knife, ‘like the stone from a peach.’ Those who were tortured to death in the course of the inquisition were generally thrown from the stairs of the Houses of Parliament into the Danube; the actor Andrew Szocs was thrown down from the third floor into the courtyard, where his body was left to decompose for several days. In order to prevent the wailings and death-cries of the victims being heard by outsiders, a grinning chauffeur was told off to keep the motor of his automobile incessantly whirring in front of the ventilation holes of the cellars. These frenzied blood-orgies betray all the symptoms characteristic of that perversion which manifests itself in a perverse and fiendish delight in the shedding of blood, in shrieks of pain, and in maddening tortures. Korvin’s female typist, Manci Hollos, endeavoured to comfort an imprisoned lawyer in these terms: ‘You will make a handsome corpse; it will be a pleasure to gouge out your eyes and kick your broken ribs.’