This paper examines Tibor Déry’s 1945 play, The Witnesses, the 1986 premiere of the same, and the topics that were made taboo in the theatrical world of State Socialist Hungary. At the end of the Second World War, Déry responded to the events of current history (the deportation of Budapest Jews, the activities of the illegal Communist movement, the Soviet troops marching in) with a speed and accuracy that’s exceptional in Hungarian theatre history to the present day. The Witnesses shows (urban Budapest) society in its plurality, it is fragmented not only ethnically, but also alongside lines of class and mentality, and yet a whole that only functions through coexistence. Déry doesn’t divide them alongside the antagonism of perpetrators and victims but depicts them in the positions of passive observation or active action. Censorship did not allow the work to be performed in public for four decades, therefore this paper also reconstructs the memory history context of the 1986 premiere.