It was Thursday morning, October 25. The radio had just announced that Ern_ Ger_ was no longer the secretary of the Communist Party and that Imre Nagy had been named the new prime minister. At breakfast, Aptyi explained, “The Russians are in a difficult spot. They have been claiming to be anti-imperialists in order to make inroads in the former colonies of the West. Now, if they crush us, they can no longer claim to be an anticolonial power; if they don’t, they show weakness. Therefore, you and your friends must make it easy for them to withdraw their tanks. You must reassure them that the new Hungary will be a neutral and friendly neighbor.” He was talking to me as if I were the new government.

At that point Memi interjected, “Couldn’t somebody else reassure the Russians, instead of our Öcsi?”

“But we, the students, started it, we have a responsibility to lead!” I interrupted.

“And where would you lead, if they let you?” asked Péter.

“Well, we certainly do not want to exchange the Communist zoo for a capitalist jungle. Nor do we want to turn back history, and we don’t want revenge, either. But we do want justice. At a minimum, we want repentance from the traitors and we want the courts to decide the fate of those whose hands are bloody. We are against state ownership of everything, because it breeds bureaucracy inefficiency and corruption. We want to return the homes, land, and small businesses to their rightful owners. We favor employee ownership of larger industry, or of collective farms if the workers want that, but if they do not, we favor privatization. We want opportunity for the talented, but we also want protection and dignity for the less fortunate, the old and the poor. And most of all, we want liberty, we want our new society to be free and democratic.”

Now, there was silence in the kitchen. Memi blew her nose, Aptyi cleared his throat, and we, Péter and I, slipped our sandwiches into our pockets; it was time to go.

Because of the strike, there were no trains. The only way to get to Budapest was by hitchhiking. Péter decided to come with me. Andris, at sixteen, would have been too young to join us, but I did not see him. As we waited on the side of the road, a horse-drawn lorry passed by. It was collecting food for the people of Budapest. The lorry was in front of the Rapavys’ house.

“No way! It is against the religion of Jóska Bácsi to give anything to anybody without getting paid!” I said jokingly. József Rapavy was known to be as miserly as only a Hungarian farmer can be. A moment later I saw him coming out of his house carrying a gargantuan sack of potatoes on his broad shoulders. My mouth must have fallen open, because he gave me an angry look, ran back into the house, and reappeared with a slab of bacon. “There!” he said triumphantly. “This is my fight, too, you know!”

After some walking, finally a truck slowed down and we climbed up. All the traffic was headed into the city, and all the trucks were loaded with young people. There was little question why they were coming. The fighting in Budapest had subsided, but we were still far from a full victory. There still were a few ÁVH pockets left, and the Russian tanks, while they were no longer firing, were still stationed at the major intersections. So we did not really know where we stood, and volunteers were probably still needed.

We got off the truck at the Eastern railroad station because Péter was taking a train to the Agricultural University of Keszthely. After we parted, I walked through Baross Square. It was swarming with armed young people. I was on my way back to the Technical University but made a detour to check on Ágnes. Gábor, her brother, opened the door. “She is still down at Lake Balaton,” he said. I also learned from Gábor that the police chief of Budapest, Sándor Kopácsi, and his regular police had joined the revolution, the radio station had been captured, the twelve hundred soldiers of Kilián Barracks, now commanded by General Maléter, had repulsed the Russian tanks, and a major demonstration was being planned on that day at about noon in front of the parliament.1

In front of the Emke restaurant, near the National Theater, dozens of people were swarming over the carcass of Stalin’s statue. Using welding torches, hammers, and a variety of saws, they chipped off pieces of the fallen tyrant’s statue. Behind the statue, on the Grand Boulevard, one could see the remains of burnt-out Russian tanks.

As I walked on Rákóczi Street, I noticed that most of the store windows had bullet holes, and some had no glass at all. Yet the goods were untouched. In one window I saw a small, handwritten note: “Protect the honor of the Revolution! Show the World that we fight for FREEDOM, not to steal!” I stood and stared at the sign for a long time; I was proud of my people. In the windowless display case all the goods were still there.

As I walked toward Museum Boulevard, I saw a small, freckled teenager with black-ringed eyes and a big rifle. He stood in front of a watch store.

“Are you guarding them?” I pointed at the watches behind the broken window. He first looked me in the eyes, then at my tricolored armband, and said, “You should know better. Guards are not needed here!”

A woman listening nearby added, “Besides, now, all of this is ours anyway! Not just the watches, but this wreck of a house, this street, this devastated city, everything. You don’t steal what is yours, you don’t steal from your family! This store belongs to my family; this is a Hungarian store!”

A few houses down the street, I saw a horse-drawn lorry. People were lined up, waiting while the driver filled their baskets and shopping bags with potatoes. He was like any street vendor except for one difference: there was no payment; the distribution was free and anonymous. He was handing out the gifts from the surrounding villages. This took place on several street corners.

At the corner, the body of a young man was lying on the pavement. He was on his back. His face was white, serene, almost happy. His body was covered with a flag and flowers. He had no gun; somebody probably felt that he no longer needed one and took his. He was the first corpse I had ever seen in such close proximity. I stood there for a long time. I wondered if my dead face would also be so proud and reassuring. There was a large, handwritten sign on his chest. It read: “They did not die in vain.”

There was a crowd in front of the Astoria restaurant on the corner of Kossuth Street and the Small Boulevard. They were surrounding some Russian tanks. The tank hatches were open, and the commander had climbed out and was talking with the people in the crowd. This officer had obviously been stationed in Hungary for some time, because he spoke some Hungarian: “Russian people, Hungarian people, friends people,” he said. There was a rose in the barrel of his cannon, and a Hungarian flag fluttered over his tank. (His unit later followed the demonstrators to the parliament, and when the ÁVH opened fire on the marchers, his tanks returned fire on the ÁVH. Hundreds of unarmed Hungarians died that day in front of the parliament. The demonstrators went there to demand the withdrawal of the Russian tanks from the capital. They also expected to greet Imre Nagy, their new prime minister, who at Communist Party headquarters was still a virtual prisoner of the Hungarian secret police.)2

On the next corner I saw the burnt-out Ady movie theater. Apparently the Russian tank commander on that corner was not as friendly as the one on the Kossuth Street corner. When the firefighters’ truck arrived to put out a fire in the movie house, the tank opened fire on that truck too. Now both the building and the fire truck were smoldering. “Madness!” I mumbled to myself, “Madness!”

On Kossuth Street I saw a large wooden box, placed there by the Writers’ Union. A sign above the crate read, “Please give to the casualties of the Revolution!” The container was full of paper money. The box was unguarded. In terms of my standards, a fortune was already in that box.

A dazed, elderly women stood in front of the box; her eyes were red, she could barely stand. She was picking up some red one-hundred-forint bills. Then I saw that instead of taking out more, she was putting some back. “It does not need to be oak, he can rest in pine too,” she was murmuring to herself. I just stood there and thought of Memi. I reached into my pocket and took out my 140 forints. I dropped in the red hundred and one of the blue twenties. I kept the other twenty-forint bill, just in case Ágnes came back from the lake and she still wanted to see The Women of Selistye.

When I arrived at the university, the doors were open, the gates were unguarded, and the buildings were empty. Only Jancsi Danner and Pali Zádor were in the headquarters office of the newly formed MEFESZ. Previously, that office had belonged to the Communist Party and was the gathering place of the DISZ penguins. Now it was our MEFESZ office. The tables were covered by copies of our sixteen demands and by other proclamations. Pali was writing; Jancsi was on the phone. “Yes, we will fully cooperate with the police. Yes, we will organize regular patrols throughout the eleventh district,” he was saying.

“Who was that?” I asked when he put down the phone.

“Sándor Kopácsi, the chief of police.”

Now the phone rang in the inner office. I picked it up. I could tell that it was a long-distance call, because the connection was bad, barely audible: “I am calling from the MEFESZ office of the University of Forestry and Mining in Sopron. I would like to reach the MEFESZ headquarters of the Technical University,” said the distant voice.

“You did,” I replied.

“So, what do we do next?” the voice asked.

“The general strike continues until the Russians leave. You should disarm the ÁVH, organize an armed student battalion, organize joint patrols with the police, use the radio to keep the public informed, and stay in touch with us.”

“We will do that,” said the voice and hung up.

The telephone kept ringing all afternoon. About five, Kati Sz_ke and Sándor Varga arrived. Then came the university’s two drivers, Imre Majoross and Gyurka Vereczkey. They reported that the garage was intact and the cars were safe. Later on, in the evening, we decided to invite Colonel Marián from the military department to settle in the inner room of our offices. He accepted.

During the night we talked and talked, and talked some more. By the time I went to sleep, we were all on a first-name basis (which in Hungary, under normal circumstances, might take a decade). Colonel Marián became Pista (the nickname for István). We felt like brothers and sisters. It was a warm, marvelous feeling. We had developed such a strong bond and I felt such love and respect, such trust and admiration for them that I had never known before. Our bond was based on more than our willingness to give our lives for Hungary’s liberty. It was our conviction that we were changing the world and that it would be a happier place when we were finished.

During the night I learned a lot about Pista and Jancsi. The colonel was born in Transylvania. He was a talented and ambitious young Jewish officer who joined the Communist Party because of his desire for social justice. Now, in his early thirties, he found himself at a crossroads. He had to make a choice, and he chose his country. It was not an easy decision. He also had a family to worry about, and he knew how Moscow treated “traitors.”

Jancsi, twenty-seven, had grown up in Szeged as the son of a rich shopkeeper. There, he had organized demonstrations against the outlawing of religious education in the schools. As a consequence, he was placed under police surveillance. He was well organized, level-headed, but also a romantic. He was both a refined cosmopolitan and a lover of ancient Hungarian folk culture. “There is a lot of accumulated background in how one holds a tea cup,” he said, “yet social order is more than that, and Christianity is more than social order.”

He talked a lot about historic roles. “The role is more than the individual playing it; the role is given, the actor is replaceable! Not you but your role determines destiny, you cannot be late for meeting your fate!” Jancsi was old for his age; Jancsi was too serious for a twenty-seven-year-old. Only his bride, Gabriella, understood him completely. Her eyes sparkled whenever she looked at him.

At the invitation of a medical student, Ili Tóth, I slept on a narrow leather bed in the medical emergency room in the basement of the university. The bed could not have been less comfortable. It was one of those narrow contraptions on wheels, used to roll the patients into the operating room. For me, it was also way too short. The leather sloped to the center and my head rested on the aluminum frame, yet I slept like a baby. I was so happy!

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