That you merit the Hungarian state’s highest honour is unquestionable.

Evidently you know that the timing of the honour’s conferral is not accidental.

The question is why now, exactly? Why not any time in the past five years. What gives the award’s apropos?

They are awarding you precisely on August 20, 2014, because they want to launder the tasteless and history-falsifying Freedom square monument with your name.

With your name, with your oeuvre.

Minister Zoltán Balog claims there was no Roma Holocaust in Hungary.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán claims only the German state bears responsibility for the liquidation of Hungarian citizens of Jewish origin.

Cynicism cannot be whitewashed, cannot be compromised with, and we cannot tame it.

For this reason we must say no to cynicism.

We, Jews and non-Jews, who consider shameful the lies propounded by the government in relation to the Holocaust remembrance year, ask you to say no!

The moment you accept this award they will begin carting around your signature, like a bloody sword, in proof of your agreement with the politics of memory which the Orbán government professes and disseminates.

We all respect you as a writer, and as a man. We find it unnecessary to list why.

We ask you, who has never served any power, not to do so now.

If you accept this award, the civil endeavours carried out so far will be subject to ridicule. We will be eaten up by unbridled cunning – that with which this plan was conceived.

We ask you to say no to cynicism!

Árpád Schilling