1. Prelude (communism in Hungary and the forces behind the revolution)
2. Outbreak (the turbulent events of 23 October)
3. Turmoil (the hectic events in the next twelve days)
4. Fighting (the final losing battle against the Soviet tanks and its background)
24. Personal Memories (eyewitness accounts from my relatives)
5. Aftermath (what happened to the country and the people, and what role did its memory play later)

As I implied in the introduction, you shouldn't look for many general truths about the revolution in these stories: they are what happened to single persons at single locations.

As also implied in the introduction, this diary is centered on the memories of one single relative, let's call her X, whom I should introduce a bit more.

Her mother was a resolutely self-reliant working single mother of two girls who (as I learnt only a few years ago) hid the entire family of a Jewish classmate of X during WWII. With that background, you can imagine that X and family were no friends of the old regime, and no clerical-conservatives (like my grandparents). But neither was she a communist, or even much of a politising person.

She inherited her mother's resoluteness, she was and is a strong personality (physically too). At the time of the revolution, she was a young medical university student, who moved out of home and into the student hostel just two weeks earlier.

A great problem with the memories of all my relatives was that they (all young at the time) could not separate events during the first (from 24 October, see third diary in series) and second (from 4 November, see fourth diary) Soviet invasions of Budapest. I tried my best to piece together event chains for them, but often failed. So there will be some disorder below.

That memories are so vague may be also because of the fact that, unlike after prior failed revolutions, 1956 was barely mentioned until 1989 even in private. In private, people talked about WWII, cursed leaders, or listened to Radio Free Europe, but apparently the memory of 1956 was just too depressing to tell about. (More on this in the next diary.)

23 October 1956

X was clueless. That day, X and her best girlfriend C skipped school in the morning: they weren't up for a Russian exam. After taking a walk, they finally went to the university for lunch.

They were surprised to find the cafeteria empty. They asked the personnel where all the students went, and were told all went "to some celebration" at the statue of Bem [check second diary!]. Having nothing to do and curious, they ran to catch up with the crowd.

She says in retrospect that they were in the mentality of uninvolved spectators, in which they remained throughout the day. When they catched up with the marchers, they went along the sidewalks, listening. There were photographers who were obviously secret service agents. When one pointed his camera towards them, X swung C around so that they faced each other and C's back was towards the camera, no face visible thus. X says it was noticeable how the slogans slowly changed, starting out with student stuff like "We don't want to have to learn Russian!", then as people dared ever more, to ever more serious words.

Once the swelled-up crowd arrived at the statue of Bem, X and C positioned themselves at the edge of the square (and the crowd). X remembers seeing a famous actor reading a poem in a very theatrical way, and there was already a holed flag, with the cut-out part (the communist coat of arms) burning. On one side of the square, there was a military barracks, and soldiers hung in the windows like fruits on a tree. Then as the crowd wondered what to do next, there came the call, "let's go to Parliament!"

As X and C were at the edge of the crowd, they could sneak ahead and get to the Parliament among the first. Then the crowds came. And just came and came. In the side streets, she saw innumerable lorries transporting workers to the protest. The crowd grew hundred-thousand-strong, and it became rather thick, and they were right in the middle, nowhere to move. Yet there was a palpable sense of danger. There were uniformed officers walking along the edge of the square. People knew something will happen, and felt that others know too. X and C just couldn't bear it. X said "There'll be trouble!" So what to do? C had an idea. She pretended to faint and dropped herself, and then the crowd opened up to let X carry C outside.

Thus X and C were again on the edge when in the early evening, the next call for action came from the crowd: "Let's go to the radio!". The lorries that brought the workers were all lined up in the side streets, and were now employed to transport people. X and C climbed one lorry. Their luck was that apparently a second target was chosen in the meantime: at one point, every second lorry turned left, and the others right, and X and C found themselves on one heading for the Stalin statue.

Toppling the Stalin statue proved a complicated matter. With the first attempts, they failed to move it at all. Then port workers brought three steel cables thick as a thigh, fastened them to the statue and three lorries, and tried to topple the statue with simultaneous spurts.

Here I have to make a diversion first. I'll use an anecdote from another time. The one big hobby of one of my grandfathers was languages. So when the Red Army came in at the end of WWII, he tried to practise his Russian with the soldiers. One came up to him, and asked: "What time is it?" (in Russian of course). My grandfather pulled out his pocket watch, and read it: "Nine o'clock!", but the soldier just grabbed his watch and put it into his own pocket with a smile. Half an hour later, another Soviet soldier asked the time, so my grandfather told: "It was nine o'clock when your colleague asked."... This story does fit into a wider pattern, watches were apparently all the rage as booty among Russian soldiers.

Back to Stalin's statue, pulled by three lorries. All they achieved was to get it rock a little forward and back. Then suddenly someone yelled into the crowd: "Drop your watch, he'll bow down as soon!"... There was a tension-easing laughter. Finally, people brought flame-cutters, and cut through Stalin's legs. (A few days later, she also saw how the remains of the felled Stalin statue were cut up as people took parts as souvenir.)

The lorries then transported people home. When the lorry transporting X dropped her off on a main ring road, shooting could be heard in the distance -- the fighting at the radio, which X and C were lucky to not witness.

The day after

My father and his sisters remember the joy at the announcement that school is out. This was all they knew of the revolution at the time.

Later in the day my younger aunt, a first-classer at the time, took a book in her hands -- The Nutmeg Princess -- and was surprised to find that she can read, that the letters she thus far only learnt one by one at school (and didn't even got to the end of the alphabet) form into words and make sense to her!

Strikebreaker

While normal life ground to a standstill in the country, with non-fighting people either going on strike or just seeking shelter, small children still had to be cared about. My father's mother was head nurse at a kindergarten, so she did show up for work.

At the kindergarten, in course of the housing-allocation programme in the early fifties, a family of very poor workers got a room to live. A few days after the start of the revolution, the family father suddenly turned up at the kindergarten with a machine gun in his hands, and yelled at my grandmother: "Why do you break the strike, you stinking communist?!?!?"

According to recollections, my (in truth conservative Christian) grandmother was shit-scared, but gathered together all her learned educator resoluteness, and answered in a commanding tone something like, "I am tending children, you will let me do my work, and you should bugger off with that weapon from this place, what kind of manners is this?", and succeeded in shaming the guy (who after the revolution will become a collaborator, rising to the post of a district Councillor). (This wasn't the first time my grandmother had to stand firm in trouble: on Christmas Day 1944, she had to manage the situation of a number of family members dying when Germans shelled the house they were in because Russians occupied it.)

Night curfew

In the first few days of the first Soviet invasion, Imre Nagy's government declared a night curfew. It was probably during this time that X couldn't just stay stuck in the student hostel, she had to bring food for C to the clinic where they practised. But for that, she had to cross main avenue Üllői út, along which Soviet tanks rumbled towards one site of heaviest fighting, Corvin köz (which I mentioned in the previous two diaries).

So X got down and sneaked along the sidewalks until she found a silent spot. She had to do it. So she just shut her eyes and began to walk straight across in the least suspicious way. She could have been shot without a warning. She was almost on the other side when the yell came from behind, "STOP! Who are you!?!?!?" She succeeded in playing the idiot, and being woman and being a medic also helped, so the (Hungarian) soldier told "God bless you [this can be said in the tone "ah you blessed idiot" in Hungarian], go quick!".

I'm not sure where to place this memory in time, but at the clinic, depending on what kind of armed group arrived, the doctors and nurses moved either the wounded revolutionaries or the wounded Russian soldiers to the basement.

Boys and girls

There were some premonitory signs of 1968 in 1956, the breaking down of sexual segregation. At this time, student hostels were gender-separated, but when the revolution broke out, the girls and boys made visits and mixed.

Don't think of sex. Just getting along. Which was enough for strong memories. Several years (and several pounds...) later, X would lie on a hospital bed, waiting for an operation. Then the chief doctor walked in with large entourage, a nurse reading him all the data about X. Just when the nurse was about to end, the doctor added: "...and the dear collegina plays football damn well!"... Everyone laughed, but only baffled X and the doctor knew: they played football one day on the male student hostel's courtyard.

Weapons

As things got rough, over at the girls' student hostel, the boys vowed to protect the girls, and started to talk about going to get weapons. X declared that they are idiots. Which many answered by laughing and calling her a coward. This enraged her so much that she declared she'll then go with the boys, just to prove she's not a coward (but proving she's a fool, says an older X).

Their route was along Üllői út, along which occasionally Soviet tanks rolled. When one came, X thought a tank can only shoot in the direction the barrel points at, and the barrels pointed ahead, so she just walked on. But suddenly she found herself all alone, until the boys, hiding under a doorway, pulled her in too, cursing her reckless idiocy: for a tank is also fitted with machine guns...

Grisly

X does remember that she once crossed Köztársaság tér (= Square of the Republic), and saw the hanged upside down corpses of the guards of a Party building lynched earlier that day (see third diary), but not how and why she got there. She says the mouths of the corpses were stuffed full with money.

This is not what we wanted

In X's recollection, by November, the nature of the revolution shifted strongly. She says freed criminals, ex-gendarmes, ex-arrowcrossers were around, the militants demanded different things than what was asked for on 23 October, and the chased-into-exile aristocrats circled the country like vultures. I tried to ponder if she could remember specific events that gave her this impression, but she couldn't tell one --- only having felt that 'this is not what we wanted'. I think this is a combination of truth and hearsay that spread back then (for, for example, the Austrian government prevented the entry of prominent exiles to Hungary).

Waking up

On 4 November, X, C and roommates were awakened by a Hungarian and a Russian officer searching the student hostel for guns. Which was a shock, as the guns she and the boys brought a few days earlier were stored in this room, and the (previously ah so valiant) boys left.

But apparently, someone took the guns, as the soldiers found nothing. But after they left, C noticed that between her and X's beds, there is something covered by a rug. She lifted it -- and all the guns were there, someone collected and put them there in the night...

The "tankists"

Later that night, another group of Russian soldiers cruised up, apparently tank crews. They started a heated discussion, calling the students fascists. The students protested, explained what they and the revolution really wanted. They then offered food, and when the "tankists" wouldn't accept, they first tasted it to show it's not poisoned. In the end the discussion turned respectful and friendly. The "tankists" would then visit them each day to look after them.

Red Army tanks in front of the Ludovika building, transferred from the military to a university just in these weeks, for use as student hostel. My relative X lived there. 30 years later, it would house some faculties of another university, faculties in which I studied. Photo I found in the photo library of the 1956 Research Institute

There were also other units cruising up. And among them, soldiers who couldn't not notice all the beautiful girls in one place. One day, a soldier came back to take a Vietnamese exchange student in another bedroom. But she pulled apart her shirt and said, "Shoot me right here!", which was enough to get this one to back off. When X and roommates heard of this, they knew they have to prepare for a similar visit. Indeed the next day, a drunken Russian soldier came for one girl.

The girls' youth hostel was earlier the officers' quartet of a barracks of the Hungarian Army, in fact some officers still haven't moved -- including one with his mother in X's room (he already helped as interpreter for the "tankists"). This guy first helped by calmly talking with the girls about what could and could not be done, in Hungarian, while the drunken Russian soldier was waiting, frustrated for not being heard and not understanding a word, until he left. They then made dark. But soon the drunken soldier opened the door again with a candle in his hand, declared that it can be any girl but one must come with him.

The officer told the girls that they should wait for exactly one exchange of words, then jump under their beds. And so it came: after the predicted question-answer, two shots were fired: the drunken soldier shot at the Hungarian officer, but the officer pre-empted him by shooting at the candlelight and taking a bow, so no one was hurt.

However, there had to be one stupid, stupid girl (X is still outraged 50 years later) who tried to go under the bed backwards, buttocks ahead, and got stuck. And cried out in panic... so the drunken soldier could grab her, and run off in the darkness. Everyone else instantly took up pursuit, but couldn't find them. And just in this moment, the "tankists" arrived. X & co told them what's up, and the tankists quickly found the pair in an exercise room, before the would-be rapist could have done anything.

The offender was executed the next day.

Tanks rolling down the streets

My aunts and father remember their parents, when they listened to what must have been Imre Nagy's last speech on the radio on 4 November, and said with somber face that this means war. This was the first time they saw their parents afraid (they remembered WWII).

Their outer district home was near one of the three main routes the Soviet tanks rolled down towards the inner city. What's more, close to their house was a tractor factory that at the time was actually a weapons factory, and tanks rolled down directly in front of my family's house for the battle to take over that factory. One of my aunts wanted to see the tanks but was told to stay inside. In fact, the entire family (about 10 people at this time) moved down into the very small basement of the house, living on a space of two side-by-side mattresses.

I can't be sure if it was after 4 November or after 24 October that my aunts observed how the fires raging in Csepel district, place of some of the heaviest fighting in both periods of armed conflict, lit up the sky 10 km away.

My mother, who at the time lived in the same outer district, remembers hearing the thunder in the distance, and asking whether it is a thunderstorm, and being told laconically that it isn't. She doesn't remember her parents showing fear.

When the Red Army tanks rolled down the main road, a group led by the son of my mother's local doctor, which somehow got a military car with a mounted heavy gun, harassed the tank column with a hit-and-run tactic: they would pull up in one side street, shoot one round at a tank rolling down the main road, then quickly disappear and drive away along a street parallel to the main road. However, after a while, the Soviets figured out where the shots come from, and prepared for the next appearance -- the group suffered a direct hit...

Cowards

As the battle progressed outside, the officers remaining in X's student hostel didn't bother to participate. In fact, they even played football in the inner courtyard. While they did so, a group of underage revolutionaries passed the building. One of the officer wives then said, "Maybe someone should tell Kádár's paramilitary to get them!" X was very outraged by this, and couldn't hold herself back: she lashed out at the officers' wives and their husbands, who sit it out here in hiding leaving the dirty work to others, and who want to get children killed. She had to be pulled away by C and others before she made herself a target in the officers' eyes... (here the older X again calls her younger self foolish).

In the middle of a chase

Probably after the above event, X did something even more foolish. She again had to visit someone in the midst of fighting. She went down Üllői út, but saw a tank shooting at the military barracks opposite Corvin köz, and a boy throwing a Molotov cocktail down its visor, so she changed to a parallel street. There, she saw fighters atop a school building.

Suddenly, there was gunfire. She and eight others hid in a doorway. Then there was a much louder gunfire, and everyone run apart. (She would learn later that the first shooting was from the gunmen atop the school, fired at two men in uniforms on a sidecar motor nearing along a side street, the second shooting was these shooting back, this is why no one was hurt.) X fled into the inside of the building, ran up one level on the staircase, and off the gangway.

But looking back, she saw the barrel of a gun (in the hand of someone running behind her) in the gangway, so she ran for the door of the first flat. She opened at a scared old woman and a child, who instantly ran away, while she and a student boy behind her ran inside. But a split second later, two uniformed men [the same ones who came on the motor] also ran inside, and pointed their machine guns at them, ordering them to search for civilian clothing.

The student tried to signal X that he'll 'take care' of the uniformed guys, but X went searching clothes. She went to the neighbouring room, and had enough sense to walk in such a way that she doesn't get near the door, so that the armed men won't think she wants to escape. (She says she later learnt someone was later killed in the exact same situation in the exact same room.)

But then, some revolutionaries arrived at the door and began knocking. The student again signalled that he would try to overpower the uniformed guys, making X again furious about such foolishness. She squeezed the boy's upper arm, and then had an idea: the uniformed men should leave via the air-vent shaft! She just managed to push the second guy across the window when about a dozen teenagers, armed to the teeth, exploded into the room. Now it was these kids who pointed guns at X and the student. X feared for her life, certain that she can't explain away this situation, not before such young hotheads. But seconds later, someone yelled from the outside that "They are on the roof!" -- the revolutionaries left.

At this point, X collapsed into one corner. She must have suffered a shock. The next thing she remembers is waking up in the janitor's bed in the late evening. The janitor explained what happened, and said the two uniformed guys were caught.

This was at best half true. For, years later, X would get a book about the fighting published by the new (Kádár) regime (the White Book), which was based on personal accounts from those taking part on their side. And she found a first-person account from some sergeant, describing the very incident she went through!

A rather mangled-up memory of X may also have happened this day. The memory is of returning to the student hostel around 11 pm, to be greeted by a Russian soldier posted at the entrance who asked whether he is in Bucharest [the capital of Romania for the uninitiated]. She says this connects to the events of 23 October in her mind, but doesn't believe it herself -- indeed there were no Soviet soldiers inside the capital until 24 October, and no fresh troops from the USSR until November.

Dark days

After the end of fighting, there was a total strike (more in the next diary). All my relatives remember this only in the form of people standing in 24-hour lines for bread. One aunt remembers clearly standing in line of 6 December, because that was the day of first snow, and she was happy it comes just on Santa Claus day.

A few days earlier, my father could witness the carnage the fighting left behind, when his mother took him on an odyssey across the city to visit some relative. She took my father because she calculated that lorries are more likely to take up a woman with a child.

Emigration

X says that to this day, his relatives blame her for not being able to leave the country for the West: the only reason they didn't left was that they couldn't find X in the chaos.

Another two relatives of mine, two brothers just in their teens, had an alcoholic father and a truly nasty stepmother. One day, as emigrants left the country in droves, this stepmother gave some money to the brothers, and told them to go to the railway station and buy a ticket for Belgrade. They went there together, the younger catched cold feet and went to relatives (my grandparents) instead, but the other, let's call him Y, boarded the train, and sat down opposite an old railwayman.

Nearing the border, Y had a problem: lack of papers. So when the border control came, he was near panic. But by chance, the border policeman asked the old railwayman whether Y is his son. The old man, looking at Y, said yes!

Y then got into a refugee camp in Yugoslavia. He told authorities that he is an orphan, on one hand to not be sent back, on the other to break with his step/parents (as far as I know, he is still angry at them today). After a few months, he got foster parents in the Netherlands, and that's where he established himself. (By chance, my grandmother, the one who was kindergarten head nurse, also spent some time with Dutch foster parents: when she was a WWI half-orphan.)