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“Cherry seeds”. He was associated with Béla Demeter almost as much as in Homer’s Odyssey, named after the queen of Phaius, Nausicika, the “arm of snow.” The history of tart cherry seeds dates back to the middle of the last century. Since then, everyone has heard of the gardener’s story, but few know exactly what happened. According to one of the city’s legends, for example, he obtained the discarded cherry seeds from the cannery (Kecskemét, Nagykőrös, etc.) for free, and passed them on to a pharmaceutical factory for good money. Alternatively, it was closed for an unfair gain and was only released after the regime change. Neither story is correct.
Fourteen piglets
Béla Demeter’s father had a famous rose garden in Szőreg. They cultivated on 20 acres of mostly rented land, and the old man understood not only plants but also people because he had such radiation. The family worked hard, but they also made a living by growing flowers. However, the Rákosi regime did not take a good look at the mask gardener’s successes, so they put him on a kulak list. Their three adult children (Béla, Károly and József) continued gardening, which ended with the arrest of all three.
The main defendant in Kulák’s Szeged lawsuit was Béla Demeter, who, according to contemporary reports, used her old contacts to sell seedlings to road maintenance companies, most of which she bought from small producers. Károly from his family also joined this business. The trees were purchased from small producers for HUF 3 and handed over to road maintenance companies for six. In the autumn of 1951, the two Demeter brothers were earning 40,000 florins per person from these stores. In its issue of July 8, 1952, southern Hungary noted:
Béla Demeter was also not deterred from resorting to bribery. He was already in prison when he offered one of the prison guards 100 guilders to request a letter.
The third defendant in the lawsuit was the third brother, Joseph. For the sake of the promising business, Béla did not shy away from using any means, according to the indictment. He wanted to persuade the director of one of the road maintenance companies to recommend his saplings to the other companies as well, and promised a commission for the brokerage activity.
The spending, luxurious lifestyle of the defendant in the first degree, stamped on the kulaks, was characterized in the trial by the slaughter of fourteen piglets dressed in black, evading the law.
The Szeged District Court sentenced Béla Demeter to 5 years in prison, a fine of 10,000 guilders and a forfeiture of 20,000 guilders for trafficking. Károly was sentenced to one year and two months, József to one year in prison.
“I made gold out of the garbage”
The persecution of kulak on an industrial scale reached its peak in 1951-1952. Judit Tóth is a historian Pest County Service App and Toolkit (2011) mentions an incredible case in which they could not prove to a former gendarmer that they were kulaks, so
the court of first and second instance also classified the cow (!) as kulaks.
Therefore, it was a desire of the courts to present sentences in line with the expectations of the state leadership, that is, the peasant policy of the MDP. This meant that a certain number of suspects from a particular social group had to be placed in the dock, that is, in addition to the principled selection based on class situation, instructions on their number were also given.
Béla Demeter sat on the Star of Szeged for two and a half years, but imprisonment did not break him, at most because he lost his temper over politicking throughout his life. His two brothers, on the other hand, came from all over the country because after their release they set up a horticultural business in Canada and the United States, respectively.
Photo: kerteszet.hu
Béla also had to start over. He got his property back with a real “Demeter trick”: he sold his property to a high-ranking communist leader in the arbitrary home burglar, who asserted his greater power and broader system of relationships in acquiring the property. He bought a plot of land and a villa in Zugliget with the purchase price of the house and rented a plot of land in Budakalász. He bought fifteen peach seeds from Kecskemét Cannery, which he sowed after proper treatment and grew seedlings from them. Starting from the price of approximately fifty thousand seedlings, he paid off his previous debts and stabilized his financial situation.
Another turning point came when he found a truly original solution to the lack of cherry seedlings. For pennies (exactly: 1.70 guilders per kilogram), forty glazed cherries bought from the Kecskemét cannery.
First, the cannery managers didn’t even understand what he wanted to do with industrial waste and only set a purchase price at his express request. Demeterek washed the forty glazed cherries, dried them, and then selected the seeds that could be used as seeds, from which seedlings could be grown. The cleaned seeds were inspected and sealed with metal in the then Propagation Materials Inspection. He sold some of the metal-sealed seeds to homegrown rootstocks, and others were sold through the Hermes Cooperative for 40 guilders a kilo.
I made gold out of garbage, and others made garbage out of gold.
He later commented on his idea.
The Szabó is shown illuminated in blue
In August 1971, a car stopped in front of Demeter’s house, from which came the journalist László Szabó, host of the television magazine Kékfény, and Major János Dobos, the permanent expert of the program. Since Béla Demeter, who was wanted in a journalistic matter, worked in horticulture, her son, Dénes Demeter, welcomed the guests. The gardening went well, a nice family home was built with the proceeds. László Szabó announced that a fraudulent construction contractor was being reported to Kékfény, who learned that he had also misled Demeter. The reporter put the boy at home in front of his house to speak there:
Laszlo Szabo: The Demeter family villa was also built by Jenő Horváth in a private company.
Demeter Dénes: He recovered, but with a lot of follow-up, and he did not know from where, from what material.
No. L .: Do you know how much your father paid Jenő Horváth? So what did this building cost?
DD: That’s about 800,000, because he did the fence separately, well that was a six-month job.
No. L .: How many rooms does the villa have?
DD: Five rooms.
No. L .: Garage?
DD: There is a garage for two cars and …
No. L .: But is there a car inside?
DD: Since, since …
No. L .: Are there three cars?
DD: Two.
No. L .: But I also saw a third. The?
DD: …
No. L .: It is not yours?
DD: But that, but now we are selling Moscow.
No. L .: I get it. What is your father’s occupation?
DD: Gardener.
No. L .: With seedlings …
DD: Ornamental shrub, shrub.
No. L .: Of course. Anyone cannot earn 800,000, no matter how hard they work.
DD: That is sure. But he worked for it.
The boy felt that the reporter was not really interested in the alleged fraudster, but in the financial situation of the family. Even years later, Szabó was convinced of Demeter’s guilt:
The profit you made with the cherry seeds is not what I consider a professional feat, but a professional glass.
In the July 22, 1987 issue of the weekly Country-World, he explained what happened in more detail:
The gardener has bought and sold wholesale items at a large profit, which in such quantities, precisely because of the wholesale exclusivity of the state, are sold only to you in the socialist sector.
The report was broadcast on October 7, 1971, on the Blue Light police television program, before the indictment was closed. After the ominous transmission, the air around Demeter froze. They claim that a small black car was constantly following them. Two weeks later, the police conducted a search of the house and Béla Demeter was arrested on suspicion of trafficking. Szabó treated the case as a precedent and even met the suspect in custody, but the interview was more of a systematic questioning than a television conversation.
During the investigation, the police were more interested in where the money collected from the cherry seeds was, to which the suspect responded:
Please go to Budakalász and find him on the ground. “
In vain did his lawyer, György Berend, the court imposed a hardened prison sentence of four and a half years for committing a crime in the first instance, which was reduced to three years and two months in the second instance.
Uncertain criminal law concepts
After two decades, he became a resident of the Star of Szeged again. Article 299 of Law V of 1961, Penal Code in force at that time, provided that the person who engages in an unauthorized commercial activity or business or engages in economically unjustified intermediate trade of merchandise or in an appropriate way to make them more expensive must conduct the trade. bargain. It was a qualifying circumstance if the transaction was conducted on a commercial basis, perhaps for a significant quantity or value of merchandise.
From the current point of view, this fact bleeds from several wounds: how can the same circumstance, necessarily necessary, be assessed as an element of a more serious classification? Or: what does the law mean by “economically unjustified intermediate trade” which, moreover, can only be “pursued”? Then there is the “significant amount” that you really don’t know compared to what. For example, in the case of cherry seeds.
Photo: Népszava, 1993 / Arcanum Digital Science Library
In the Kádár regime, uncertain concepts of criminal law came to light, which gradually began to recede after the economic reforms of 1971-72, mainly under Soviet pressure. Hardline politicians have succeeded in replacing Rezső Nyers, whose name as a member of the Political Committee of the Hungarian Socialist People’s Party has been fused with the concept of the new economic mechanism.
The politician is Pál Zolnay “Let’s break a cherry seed” In his documentary (1995), he acknowledged that along with the fall of the reform, the ingenious masks had turned into criminals and traffickers in a few days. He commented on the lawsuits brought by the trafficking charges:
All of this was aimed at restricting market freedom, and at the time I thought that immoral income should be partly hampered and partly punished once it was created.
However, Béla Demeter was able to come to the attention of the authorities because his old file came into his hands, which revealed that he had been convicted of trafficking before. According to his son, Dénes
They tried to set an example, to stop, to draw a limit, a profitability limit, not to go further. So that people don’t think that capitalism is here now, and now that the reins can be released.
Epilogue
He served two years and eight months of his second prison sentence. Diabetics try again, who knows how many times, to prosper in the family business. Once again, his efforts were crowned with success. In November 1980, the court acquitted him of the adverse consequences of a criminal record. After the regime change, he also wanted to achieve readmission, but his efforts were unsuccessful. He died at the age of eighty, in 1997, and was buried in the territory of his Budakalász nursery in the land to which he had dedicated his entire life.
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