On Monday, October 29, it was hard to believe that my high-jump competition had been just a week ago on Sunday and that my main concern at that time had been to get my stipend of 140 forints needed to take Ágnes to the movies. So much had changed since then, both outside and inside, that it felt like a century had passed during these days.
In the MEFESZ office we had developed a daily routine. We started the day together, listening to the news on both Radio Budapest and Radio Free Europe. After that, Pista usually gave us the first assignments of the day. But this Monday morning was different. Today the news was terrible. We learned that Israel had attacked Egypt and that war had broken out in the Suez Canal. I did not understand why this was so bad for us, but Pista explained.
"For years, Nasser of Egypt, a Soviet ally, has denied the use of the Suez Canal to Israel. In July of this year Nasser also nationalized the canal and kicked out its previous owners, the British. So now the Israelis and the Brits are trying to take it back. These bastards timed their attack on Nasser to coincide with a time when the Russians are busy and preoccupied (in Hungary) so they will not be able to also defend Nasser. Instead of helping us, they plan to use the blood of Hungarians to grab the canal. They probably have already told the Russians that if they let them have the canal, they can do whatever they feel like in Hungary. It is Yalta all over again. Unbelievable! Simply unbelievable!"1
Pista's hands were shaking, his neck was red, he was out of control. We were dumbfounded but could not fully believe that the Israelis and the English could sink so low to do something like that.
Now the radio began explaining President Eisenhower's desire to roll back the Communist empire, as well as his "Policy of Self-Liberation," which was one to assist the Soviet satellite countries in liberating themselves. Our depressed mood was beginning to improve. According to the radio, Eisenhower promised that if the enslaved peoples would throw off their occupiers, the West would help them. Pista was shaking his head. He did not believe a word of what the radio said. He did not trust Eisenhower. He said that if Eisenhower really cared about us, if he really meant to help enslaved people, the Brits would not be bombing the Suez Canal today. Kati Sz_ke was about to cry; she had her hand in front of her mouth. The expression on Gyurka's face was one of total disgust and revulsion. But Jancsi Danner was still an optimist. He said, "Eisenhower will not allow the Brits to stab us in the back. He is an honorable man. In a week or so, there is an election in America. The nation of Washington and Lincoln, the people of liberty and justice, will not let oil and a stolen canal stand between the deeds and the ideals of their government. No, we have no reason to despair. The ÁVH has been abolished, some of the Russian tanks are already pulling out, Imre Nagy has reestablished the democratic multiparty system, and the hero of the Kilián Barracks, Pál Maléter, is our minister of defense. No! Don't despair! Forget the Suez Canal and concentrate on what we have to do here."2
While we were discussing the Suez Canal on this cloudy Monday morning, thousands of students were pouring through the gates of the university. Our little contingent in the MEFESZ office was overwhelmed by the task of organizing them into the Pet_fi battalion. There was a lot to do; we had to distribute the arms, establish a system of communications, and arrange living accommodations. Because of this frantic activity, even Pista forgot the bad news, and we all threw ourselves at the many practical tasks. Almost the whole junior class of mechanical engineering was there. It was such a pleasure to once again see my classmates: Gyuri Egry (Csámpi the Men_), Laci Zsindely, Attila Lipcsey—everybody.
My first task today was to accompany a redheaded Western reporter and his cameraman, who wanted to inspect our battalion. My ability to communicate with them was rather limited, as he spoke only English, while my knowledge of that language was limited to three words: yes, no, and camel. Camel I knew because there was a picture of that misdesigned horse on my father's favorite, usually empty, cigarette pack.
The reporter was very disappointed in me. It was obvious that he wanted to report on sensation, to make the front page in some tabloid. He was looking for corpses, blood, torture chambers, destruction, or at least some Nazis or ÁVH goons hanging from trees. "If it bleeds, it leads," he kept repeating while I showed him our well-organized national guard unit. In the gymnasium some eight hundred guns had already been handed out. The students stood quietly in line as they signed for the guns they received. Next to the crates of guns were piles of food, sent in as gifts from the villages.
When the reporter learned that we had some ÁVH prisoners in the KA-51 lecture hall, his eyes lit up, but when he saw that these prisoners were neither scared nor in chains, he lost interest. There was a chess game going on between an ÁVH officer (who wanted to be safe and therefore came in voluntarily) and a mailman (whom we arrested because we found stolen watches in his pocket). They would both face the same judge once we had a functioning legal system.
At that point the redheaded reporter had enough of us. He left. A few days later I saw him once more, but in a hospital bed with a head wound. On one side of his head the red hair was shaved off; the other side was soaked with blood. Obviously, he had found what he was looking for.
On my way back to the MEFESZ office, I checked on the situation at the gates. In front of the main entrance was a horse-drawn lorry. An old farmer dressed in his Sunday best climbed down from the driver's seat and asked me, "Are you the university students?"
"Yes we are."
"Well, you see, I brought this load of produce to the capital, thought that you might need it."
"Oh, we have no money for that, Uncle," I said, but as soon as I said that, I knew that it was the wrong thing to say.
His eyes narrowed, his neck got red, and his voice was choked and full of emotion as he replied, "Don't say such a thing! How could you think that I would take your money? You think that you can give your lives free of charge and we in my village would take money for our produce?" I must have looked scared, because he lowered his voice as he continued: "You see, we don't know how to write demands, and even the rifles feel strange in our hands, but we do want to take part. So please, take what I brought." I could tell that this was a very long speech for him. Under normal conditions, he probably would not have spoken that much in a week. So now he was out of breath and also needed to blow his nose. As his face was half covered by the monogrammed white handkerchief, he quietly added, "We, too, want to be free, you know!"
In the afternoon we participated in a large meeting of all the representatives of armed groups at police headquarters. Most leaders of the various freedom fighter groups were there. The topic was the organization of the new national guard. Pista sent me to represent our Pet_fi battalion. Sándor Kopácsi greeted me like an old friend. He was impressed by my new boots. They, Kopácsi and his wife, were so nice that I almost thought of them as family. Naturally, I sat next to Pista Angyal. He was still in his white smock. His wheezing was better, and he seemed optimistic.
"So, how is your research progressing? How do Jewish- and German-Hungarians compare?" he asked me with a big grin. "Have you reached any conclusions yet?"
"Sure thing. Jewish-Hungarians like to drink a lot of coffee in their coal cellars, while German-Hungarians grow tall and prefer religion. So, how is your self-propelled garbage can doing?"
"Well, our friendly neighborhood tanks have left the intersections. Now we can actually walk the streets."
The meeting went smoothly. We agreed on the need to register all members of the national guard and to issue membership certificates. It was agreed that Kopácsi would be our commander and that he would sign all our documents. We made a quick head count of the different groups of freedom fighters: it seemed that the national guard was already some ten thousand strong and still growing. After the meeting, Pista Angyal went on to another meeting in the parliament, Gyurka went home to visit his family, and I walked over to Ágnes's apartment house to see if she was back from Lake Balaton.
She was not there, but her brother Gábor and her half-sister Judit were. They were in a strange mood and seemed to be packing. "What is going on?" I asked.
"It's all over!" said Gábor. "Haven't you heard? Israel attacked Egypt. This is the green light the Russians have been waiting for. I tell you, it is all over now. And I will not be a Russian slave again. I just can't take that. If they attack again, I am leaving."
"Me too!" said Judit. "My Father was Jewish, but right now I hate Israel. How can they do such a thing? What do you think will happen now?"
Judit was seventeen; I was twenty, so it was my job to reassure her. "Don't worry. The Russians are leaving. Eisenhower will put a stop to that nonsense at the Suez Canal. I just came from a meeting of the armed forces. Our national guard is ten thousand strong, and we are not threatening the Russians or anybody else, but we will defend our country. So, instead of packing, you should be signing up."3
Then Judit pulled out a small yellow envelope and handed it to me. She did not say where it came from; she did not need to. I grabbed the envelope and ran out. I was already on the street when I opened it. My hands were shaking; I smelled that familiar scent that Ágnes said was only her soap. My eyes caressed the familiar childish handwriting as I read the message, which went something like this: "It would feel better if I was the most important part of your life. It is hard to accept that I am not. If it was another woman, I would fight, but I cannot fight your love for our country. Actually, with time, I might even learn to respect it. Now, all I can do is to forgive you. Don't worry about the movie, do what you have to do. When the Russians are gone and we are free, I will be waiting for you here at the lake. Be very careful and make sure that I will see you. Please don't get hurt. I could not take that! Love, Ágnes."
Back at the university, it was total chaos. There were some fifty people in the MEFESZ office, and they each wanted to talk with Colonel Marián. The guards at the door were completely useless; they did not screen the people but merely checked their identity papers and let them in. It was near midnight by the time this madness ended and we settled down to talk about correcting the situation. Pista was dazed, exhausted. Kati, Jancsi, Sándor Varga, and I formulated the plans.
Because at the university we now had a couple of thousand armed students, plus the cadets of the Pet_fi Military Academy and some regular army units, it was essential that we establish some system of structured communication. To prevent the repetition of today's chaos, we agreed that the students staying in each lecture hall would elect a representative and that these representatives would in turn pick a representative for the whole building. Only the building representatives and people reporting emergencies would be allowed into the MEFESZ office. We also decided that only three people would be admitted at any one time and that each morning we would distribute a general news bulletin to all building representatives. Before going to bed, we printed an announcement of these decisions.
On Tuesday morning, October 30, I had to get up early, because my bed-on-wheels in the medical emergency room had to serve its intended purpose. At daybreak, one of our brilliant warriors had nothing better to do than to try to clean his loaded submachine gun and managed to shoot off one of his own toes. So now he resided in my bed. Since my bed was gone and I had to be in a vertical position anyway, I grabbed a box of pushpins and some copies of the announcement we had reproduced the previous night and made a tour of the main building.
The main building had four stories in the shape of the capital letter E. On each floor the corridor ran in the center, and the offices and lecture-hall doors opened on both of its sides. On this morning students were sleeping everywhere, including the corridors, offices, laboratories, and lecture halls. I pinned our announcement to the doors and bulletin boards and completed my tour of the building in about an hour.
When I got back to the MEFESZ office, Pista and the others had already finished listening to the morning news. "It was a mixed bag," said Jancsi. "The good news is that Imre Nagy has abolished the one-party system and has formed a new cabinet. The bad news is that in spite of all that, Radio Free Europe is still calling him a Communist. They are also saying that he is not to be trusted. I don't understand how a radio program can editorialize like that. I don't understand why they hate him so. It is very strange how they talk. I have no idea what these people are trying to do, or who tells them that this is what they should say."
"So, is there some good news?" I asked Jancsi, because I was not particularly interested in what Radio Free Europe had to say. I did not care about their views about Imre Nagy. I knew who he was, and nothing else mattered. So Jancsi switched the topic:
"The good news is that there is no fighting anywhere in Hungary. People are cleaning up and are preparing to return to work. Israel is still bombing the Suez Canal, but the Russians have now formally agreed to pull their troops out of Hungary. They have also initiated a major airlift to remove all the Russian families from Hungary. They claim to be using some two hundred airplanes in that effort. To streamline the airlift operation, they have occupied all three airports of Budapest. Pista thinks that this streamlining business is just an excuse, and their real goal is to neutralize the Hungarian air force."4
Overall, our mood was still pretty optimistic. Gyurka told me that Igor Sík had started to monitor the radio transmissions of the Russian military, and twice a day he was transmitting our own broadcast to them. Pista decided that I should spend the day in the MEFESZ office with Kati, because everybody else had meetings to attend either in the parliament or at army headquarters. So I tried to maintain some semblance of order in the office. I was making snap decisions on car assignments, living quarters, and food distribution. I even sent out a patrol to protect two ÁVH officers from getting lynched. In short, I did anything and everything that needed to be done.
By the evening, when the others got back from their meetings, the MEFESZ office was operating smoothly. Their meetings had gone well also, so we were all happy and relaxed. Pista gave me my assignments for the next day, and after that, for the first time in a week, I went to bed before midnight.
In the morning of Wednesday, October 31, the radio was on in the MEFESZ office. The announcer of Free Radio Kossuth was speaking. I will never forget what he said, and I will never forget how he said it: "We have lied to you in the morning, we have lied to you at night, we have lied to you all day and on every wavelength!" He said this in a trembling, honest voice, promising that they would never do that again. Listening to those words, we all felt awed. We knew that this pledge of a free and honest media was the key to our better future. Kati was so moved that she had to run out of the office. The rest of us just stood there and stared. We could not speak.
From the radio we also learned that a Hungarian army unit had freed the imprisoned and tortured Cardinal József Mindszenty. The cardinal was beaten, drugged, thrown into women's cells, and in spite of all that, his statement started with "I hate nobody, there is no anger in my heart." But there was plenty of bad news too: the French and British, instead of stopping the Israeli attack on Egypt, had joined in the bombing of the Suez Canal. I left the MEFESZ office with mixed feelings.
My first assignment of the day was to attend a meeting of the Revolutionary Workers' Council of Greater Budapest. The meeting was held at the Belojannis Factory. As Gyurka was driving, I watched the streets. No Russian tanks were to be seen anywhere; the fighting was over. The mood of the people was happy, optimistic. They were repairing the broken windows and cleaning up the rubble. Some were listening to the radios that shop owners had placed in the windows. At the factory gate the guards seemed impressed by my letter of credence, which stated that I was a representative of the Technical University. It was still both surprising and overwhelming to feel the respect that people were displaying toward all university students.
The guards directed us to the head table in a gigantic meeting hall. As the leaders introduced themselves, I heard the names of Fazekas, Báli, and Rácz, while I still introduced myself just as Öcsi. They asked me to say a few words, so I said, "I bring you respectful greetings from the students of the Technical University. The Russian troops are leaving, the ÁVH is disbanded, and Hungary is on her way to becoming a free and neutral democracy. We ask you to correct what needs to be corrected at your factories, we ask you to express your broader concerns to our new government, but most of all, we ask you to return to work, resume production, restart the factories of Hungary, of your Hungary."
The meeting was solemn, orderly. The delegates overwhelmingly supported the motion that Hungary should leave the Warsaw Pact and should declare her neutrality.5 They voted to entrust the direction of all factories to their elected Revolutionary Workers' Councils. They authorized the councils to dismiss and replace all incompetent Communist managers, all Russian advisers, and to resume production. As to the ownership of industry, there seemed to be surprisingly wide agreement: they were against state ownership, but they did not want to return the factories to their private owners, either. They favored employee ownership for most industries.
After the meeting, we were supposed to go directly to the Kilián Barracks, but I asked Gyurka to make a detour. The Péterfy Street Hospital had called the day before to say that their supply of type AB blood was very low. In the meantime, I called the Hungarian Red Cross and learned that AB blood was available only in Vienna, and they were unwilling to deliver it. So I wanted to see how urgent the situation was.
In the hospital parking lot, Gyurka and I witnessed a surrealistic scene, one that was so unbelievable that only real life could produce it. A horse-drawn wagon, carrying a smallish barrel, had just arrived. A pipe-smoking, mustachioed peasant was sitting in the dickey seat and was explaining to an official of the hospital, "The radio said that you needed blood, so I got you some." He was saying this with a proud twinkle in his eye.
"You want to give blood?" asked the doctor.
"Well, I already gave. It's in the barrel with that of all the men in our village," he said, pointing to the dressing on his wrist.
The doctor was dumbfounded, stuttering: "The barr——— . . . the barrel, that big, dirty barrel?" he asked.
"Its not dirty!" said the mustachioed farmer defensively. "We heated the knife before cutting our wrists, and we cleaned the barrel with sulfur. This is perfectly good, clean blood!"
Inside, they told me that since the fighting had ended they were not using that much blood, but even at the present rate, they would be out of it by Friday or, at the latest, Saturday. Gyurka started counting: "Today is Wednesday, and we need two days to make the trip to Vienna and back. So that kind of decides what we will do tomorrow!"
We arrived a bit late for the meeting at the Kilián Barracks. It seemed that most of the freedom-fighter units of the capital were represented. The hall was full, and there seemed to be tension in the air. At the head table, a six-foot-eight-inch giant of a tank commander was arguing with a very angry young man with a big mustache. The mustachioed fighter was screaming, and the officer was trying to pacify him. Later, I learned that the officer was the legendary commander of the Kilián Barracks, General Pál Maléter, and the angry young man was a commander of the Corvin Cinema freedom fighters, Gergely Pongrátz. His nickname, appropriately, was "The Mustache."6
Colonel Marián was sitting in front, but I could not get close to him, so when I saw Pista Angyal, I settled down next to him. The meeting dealt with the coordination between the fighting units and with electing our national leadership. After the argument about General Maléter's earlier arrest of some of The Mustache's fighters, which was settled with a handshake, the meeting proceeded smoothly. Colonel Marián was elected into the top leadership of the national guard while General Béla Király and by Police Chief Sándor Kopácsi were elected to head the guard. Pista Angyal was also nominated into the leadership, but he declined the honor. Instead, he recommended his cocommander, a fellow named Olaf, whose nomination was accepted.7
Pista Angyal was still in his white (well, not that white any more) smock. His cold or allergy seemed to have improved a bit, but he looked tired. After the meeting we exchanged a few words: "So, how is your coffee supply?" I started in my usual teasing style and added, "What are you up to?" pointing at the toolbox at his feet.
"Well, we got a report that the cable to the radio antenna of Lakihegy has been damaged or sabotaged. I will try to fix it. And how are you succeeding in protecting the beauty of your corduroy jacket these days?"
"I will be going to Vienna to show off my jacket and to get some blood, unless Colonel Marián gives me some other job to do."
"Say hello to the Austrian girls for me," Pista said as we got into our respective trucks.
On the way back to the university, we spotted a crowd in front of the Communist Party headquarters. We stopped. Armed freedom fighters were everywhere, yet there seemed to be no fighting. The square was full of Western camera crews. They were filming something from all directions. I even saw one crew on the roof. There was a crowd at the entrance of the building.
"What is going on?" I asked the man next to me.
"They executed some ÁVH officers, and the western reporters are filming the bodies," he answered.
"Well, I know that these reporters love blood and violence, but what has happened?"
"It seems they got lynched by a mob of former political prisoners who recognized them as their own torturers, or something like that. The national guard did not get here in time to stop them."
"Too bad," I replied.
As I got closer, I saw four or five bodies on the ground at the wall and one hanging by his feet from a tree. It was an ugly sight. A circle had formed around this uniformed, heavyset corpse, which reminded me of Mussolini's end. Paper money had fallen out of his pockets. Half-crazed people spat at the lifeless body while the cameras kept rolling. "Terrible," I said, just to myself, but the person next to me continued the sentence that I had started. "This the whole world will see! This every magazine will print! This will be the symbol of our revolution and not the untouched goods behind the broken store windows, not the unguarded paper money in the collection boxes, and certainly not the unarmed children facing the tanks. Whoever did this should be hanged right next to this ÁVH goon!"
Now the national guard arrived, and they began to clear the square. I felt sick, helpless, outraged, and humiliated. Gyurka was trying to calm me down. He said that all mobs anywhere are the same. He reminded me of the redheaded reporter who kept repeating, "If it bleeds, it leads," but I just could not accept this. I felt as if my sister had been raped, I felt that the honor of the Revolution had been disgraced, and I felt that we had been robbed of our most cherished possession: our honor.

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