Ilona Duczyńska

Life On 11 March 1897, Ilona Duczynska was born near Vienna to a Hungarian mother and a Polish-Austrian father. In 1915, during the First World War, she became acquainted with anarcho-syndicalist revolutionary Ervin Szabó, who connected her with the work of the Galileo Circle. She became a revolutionary socialist. For her anti-war activities, she was expelled from school in 1915. She studied engineering at the Technical University of Zurich. There she was befriended by a community of representatives of the Russian Social Democratic Party opposed to the war, including Lenin, his wife Krupskaya, and Angelica Balabanoff. Together with delegations from Germany, France, and Britain, as well as other European Labour and Socialist parties, they met to draft a program of action against the war, known as the Zimmerwald Declaration (see Zimmerwald Conference). The 18-year-old Duczynska was entrusted to smuggle this call to action into Hungary.

In Hungary, she took part in the early 1918 strikes that called successfully for workers' councils. During the Galilei trial, she was imprisoned. In the Aster Revolution, she and other revolutionaries were freed. On November 17, 1918, she married and soon after joined the Hungarian Communist Party. During the Hungarian Soviet Republic, she worked in the propaganda department of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and she was a member of the Budapest Central Revolutionary Worker and Soldier Council.

She fled to Vienna to escape the counter-revolution in Hungary. With an excellent education and knowledge of several languages, she was called to Moscow to serve as translator to Karl Radek in the preparations for the historic Second International Congress of Communist Parties. In 1929, she returned to university, the Technical University of Vienna, studying technology, mechanics, mechanical drawing, electronics, and electric number theory.

In 1933 Karl emigrated to England followed by Kari in 1934 and Ilona in 1936. Duczynska participated in the 1934 workers' uprising in Vienna. Following the destruction of the Austrian working class movement in February 1934, Duczynska rejoined the Communist Party in order to continue the struggle of the now-illegal Schutzbund, the military arm of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, until 1936 when she joined her family in London. Subsequently, she was expelled from the Austrian Communist Party in London on orders from Moscow. Their presence was probably responsible for his receiving a suspended sentence. By this time Duczynska was associated with many leading Hungarian writers and poets. She translated most of the novels and short stories of József Lengyel whom English critics named "the Hungarian Solzhenitsyn."

Duczynska died on 24 April 1978 in Pickering.