Chapter 9
October 1956 and after
The 1956 October events have been launched by the university youth of the capital. It was not only me, a boy of 15, freshly arrived and being first time in his new class, who did not know about it, my class-mates have been speaking of their plans to go to the cinema, so, they have also been unaware of all the preparations.
As I rode home after school by a Nr 27 bus, somebody spoke about a demonstration planned for that afternoon. Now I know what happened. First the Central Committee of the ruling party had prohibited the demonstration, but later, as news came to them about the size of it, they became afraid and lifted the ban.
The demo went to the Bem statue – Joseph Bem has been one of our generals of Polish origin during our freedom fight against Austria in 1849 and the last one to surrender to the Russian army –, but, as it is not unusual with demonstrations, other forces turned the energy of the crowd onto their side, and weapons from a military stock not far away have been given to people. Someone discovered that the statue’s arm was showing in the direction of the party headquarters and studios of the radio.
The crowd marched to the radio building and through different faulty instructions there began a gun-fight. The radio changed hands. For some days there was no broadcasting, only occasional readings of proclamations. All over the capital and the country there was an extremely big confuse.
The next day, as I wanted to go to school, the radio broadcast consisted only of gunfire. As nobody has organized an armed uprising it did not look like it. It was more of a many-directional semi-anarchy. Of course, all the lines can be checked today, and all the groups that did something had their own ideas. But there were only two sections that have bigger forces behind them and have seen it clearly, what and how they wanted to achieve. One of them became well organized as the government of the uprising. If there had been no counter-interests in Moscow it could have stabilized the country in a short time. Its Prime Minister has been Mr Nagy, who had held the same position for a time after his release from jail in 1953. He has collected a good team around himself and has had the backing of the majority of the nation, as well as the international missions in the country. Some days later another government has been formed – incidentally its leader, Mr Kadar had also been in prison up to 1953 – by groups from the former ruling party, and it has been urged by their backers from Moscow to take power into their hands. It was called Revolutionary Workers’-Peasants’ Government. For their assistance an armed unit has been organized mainly from former army officers to keep order during nights. For some days Steve, my brother-in-law, has been serving in it, too.
Excuse to create another cabinet could have been found through the activities of independent groups. One of them slaughtered for instance the employees of the former ruling party’s municipal committee in a true siege of the building one week after the first event. Dead from that slaughter would be considered martyrs and would give their names to streets and squares in the capital, only to vanish again from the map 35 years later. The 13 men and women surviving the massacre have become heroes of the next 35 years. One of them has been my teacher of history.
As nobody knew what was coming next, the shops and factories have stayed closed, shortage started and other places in the country followed the capital’s example. This went on about ten days.
Two weeks after the day we left the village – it was Friday again – I went with Eve, my sister, to do some shopping, as life seemed to normalize. First we went to my school and there I learned that the school’s Students’ Parliament was just sitting and decision had already been met to start ordinary work from the next Monday.
As there was no public transport we went further by foot to see my aunt. She was working as a chemist in a drugstore situated at the farthest point in the capital from the place where we lived. We walked that day about 20 miles and it was a relief to find the last stretch of our return route covered by public transport. Of course, it has been the only service that day. I remember a popular anecdote about density of tram-service during the days of the uprising: somebody wanted to commit suicide to be run over by a tram, he lay on the rails in the evening and has been taken to a hospital the next morning with pneumonia.
Eve also got information that her study would start on Monday as well.
Sunday morning we were awakened by a terrible noise. It sounded as if a thousand tanks had been marching on the highway under our windows. It was exactly that. Then I only saw them and knew nothing about the truth, but now I know what had happened.
The day before, the commander of the Red Army divisions in our country were to hold talks about their departure, more precisely about the date and time-table of it. They invited the representatives of the officially accepted government to their air base on the big island of Csepel in the Danube, south of the capital. Our group has been headed by the defence minister.
Instead of entering into talks with our people the hosts arrested them. This step had been decided in other parts of the world, not in our country. But anyway, it is a fact, that the biggest army in Europe – on the instructions of their government – has dealt with the lawful government of a country in its own territory, as if they had been leaders of their own secessionists.
With the head of the competition under arrest, the Soviet units were ordered to come at once to the capital to help in establishing the reign of Government Nr 2 as soon as possible. I have seen these units march in, and my education has been postponed by another 2 months.
I have mentioned that our moving to the capital meant getting 7 people into a small apartment. During the ten days after the beginning of the events there were some changes for us, the most important of which was our move – now all the seven – into a bigger, much more comfortable apartment. Our new flat had been a shared-rent apartment, and in the first days of the uprising one of its tenants went abroad. The other tenant suggested us to change places. So our things were again packed and moved, this time only one floor higher. Really, conditions became acceptable as I could remain with my parents, Eve and Steve had their own room, the third one has gone to the two children, Maria and Eve jr. My eight years in that place has been well established. Actually these years have remained in my memory as the most peaceful period of my life, and during that time I could have the true feeling that I was living in a big family, where, although there was no place to have any private life, everyone loved me and I felt the same in their direction.
During the first days of the uprising all have been very silent in our little living estate of 4 blocks of apartments. About 100 families lived there, all young officers, either pilots or airplane mechanics. When normal life functions stopped, also utilities ceased to work, we did not have light or running water. The latter we have solved by using the only tap in the basement that let out fluid by gravity, but for a time electricity has remained missing. Soon it was solved, too.
The airport was small, it had no concrete runways, only grass, only small airplanes could be kept in the hangars. But in those years our military had only those old fighters from the war and Czechoslovak training planes. Next to the airport there was a military camp with normal buildings for the enlisted young soldiers. These two facilities have been served by the housing estate. After the first day soldiers were ordered to take their days off and the camp stood empty. The officers moved a motor-generator to every one of the four houses and by them we had light all day. There was a large stock of fuel, we have survived the blackout well.
My memories come back to coffee drink either. It was a coffee substitute made from barley and sugar. It has been our staple, as for a long time there was a large shortage of everything, especially food.
During those months I myself have not seen anything from the events with my own eyes. Our place was as silent as before. Only occasionally we heard guns and there was only one bullet hole on the houses. It came to our kitchen window and it was so tired it could hardly make any damage on the frame. But later, when I moved from place to place in the town, I could see houses completely collapsed, and it was hard to believe that there were no bombs and heavy artillery activities, as the media was trying to make us believe.
I have learned from some of my classmates, too, what happened in the first day. Some of them have been attracted to the demonstration and it was not very easy to give up later. Talk has been rare about the events, however, and for a couple of years nobody boasted with having taken part in the first day’s fighting. We learned quickly and kept our mouths shut.
It is not unknown what has happened to the legitimate government after November 4. They asked for asylum at the Yugoslav embassy. For some weeks they have hoped for it, but, as they were loaded on a bus, and it went to the east instead of south, it became clear that they have been traded for political reasons. Originally three of the government had been expecting death penalties, but after almost two years the prime minister and the defence minister were sentenced to death, and almost all the other members have been jailed, except one or two, but their existence after the process has been undermined. No sooner than 20 years later became the political climate milder.
In the summer of 1958 the two were executed. Their remains were buried in an unknown place, and in 1988, when the movement to rehabilitate them was already in a winning position, it was hard work to find their resting place. In the following year the official reburial could not be avoided.
The government that was created in the days of uprising for ousting the legitimate one had a hard task to grab the power, and then to gain back the trust of the people. To take the power it had to accept the help of the Soviet army, and it is a shameful, but true fact that the number of people punished by death has been higher than that after our aborted freedom fight against Austria 120 years earlier. Even more shameful that in many cases the condemned juveniles were kept in jail until they could be sentenced to death. A very dark page in our history and one more reason, why our nation is divided on this question.
Winning the confidence of population has been an even harder task and it took a long time. Those, who believed in the ideas of the governing party after the war to the uprising, have not been hard to gain. They made up the crowd that assembled on Heroes’ Square on May Day in 1957 to hear the new Prime Minister, Mr Kadar – and first secretary of the new ruling party named Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party –, may be, there were a few thousand who had been misled by their impressions of the man – he had been jailed for three years. But there were others, and they were waiting. To build up confidence took about ten years. It was then that a few economists started a movement to reform the so-called socialist national economy. Another 20 years have been necessary to realize: it was not possible. But to that time, fortunately, so much will have changed into better, that it will have been much easier to turn the big nationalized enterprises into smaller privatized ones. All this means that, after the hard times of the uprising and during reconstruction, people did not believe what they read in the newspapers or heard through the radio. It was a very good climate for the well-known Hungarian political jokes. Most of them were “5 plus 3” ones. That is: 5 years in jail for him who tells it, 3 for him who listens.
A large part of the population belonged to the younger generation. This made it a little easier for the party to attract a number of people to their side.
The new party was created in November 1956 and they wanted to establish as soon as possible a youth organization under their own influence. It happened in the spring of 1957, but, as I remember, it was a phantom organization at least for three years with almost no membership. What has made the turning point was a number of young assistants at the universities, who could have been gained for by the government with bright perspectives. They could take with them the younger students mainly by participating in musical and other popular events, where a lot of the students appeared. Through music and popular science the boys accepted the ideas.
I myself have always been very cautious. For this reason it was not me looking for a way to join the organization, but its representative in our study circle, who said it was unacceptable that somebody who had earned the respect of his fellows, was out of such a group of leading ideas. To tell the truth, I have never been able to see any reason, why I stayed with them, but I always did as much as I could to make myself useful. It could have been within a religious society or for boy-scouts as it had nothing to do with the principles of Marx or any other person. At its proper place I shall write more about my activities.