But broad Ferenc Boulevard presented a much different problem, for here the tanks could maneuver, and as the battle proved, here a resolute tank commander could entrench himself, mow down with machine guns boys and civilians who tried to burn him up, and almost at leisure pump high-velocity sh.e.l.ls into both the barracks and the cinema. To destroy a tank on the boulevard meant that a man-or a boy-would have to crawl right up to its mouth and throw the gasoline in directly under the guns. Only the very brave need attack a boulevard tank.
For several hours the Kilian men awaited the inevitable attack, and in time they grew almost impatient to test their skills. Then a boy serving as lookout on the street below shouted, "Here it comes!" Hoa.r.s.e cheers greeted his ominous news.
Across the Petofi Bridge from Buda came a single creaking, groaning, menacing Russian tank. Once across the bridge, it turned north and started up the boulevard. It was armed with two heavy machine guns, thick armor plate and a huge protruding rifle that waved gently in the bright afternoon air as the tank rocked back and forth on its resolute journey. This was a formidable tank, and although it moved slowly on its ponderous revolving tracks, it was capable of swift action. Of this tank Sergeant Csoki says, "Although it made a lot of noise, it seemed to be silent, because we were all silent. And the boulevard was empty. And there was n.o.body at any of the doors or windows. You didn"t even see a boy running anywhere."
Many soldiers from the Ulloi Street side of the barracks ran over to the boulevard side to see the enemy come, and they licked their lips in dry fear as the monster approached, its guns silent. But the watchers had no time for nervous speculation, for now a great shout went up from the Corvin Cinema, where watchers had detected two more Russian tanks coming down the boulevard from the direction of the burned-out Szabad Nep bookstore to the north.
And then, to cap the terror, Sergeant Csoki, maneuvering his bomb throwers in the barracks, looked down Ulloi Street toward Calvin Square to the west and there he saw four more giant tanks bearing down upon the barracks. Kilian was therefore about to be brought under direct fire from seven tanks, each thirty-four tons of destructive power.
"Here they come!" Csoki said solemnly. This time there was no cheering.
It was a bright afternoon, and the October sun made the roofs of Budapest shine warmly. Some of the soldiers in Csoki"s crew were in shirt sleeves, and they waited tensely, their jaw muscles showing their fear, as the seven tanks drew into position. For the first ten minutes, the Russians had everything their own way. The heavy guns did terrible damage to the barracks and practically shot away one of the corners. More than seventy defenders were killed and at least a hundred and fifty badly wounded. It looked as if the Russians would win.
But at this very moment, when it seemed as if the tanks could stand off with impunity and methodically rip the barracks apart, a street-car conductor, still wearing his munic.i.p.al uniform, saved the day. For some time this undiscovered genius had been sweating in the interior square before the Corvin Cinema with the sadly wrecked ant.i.tank gun which had been rescued from a burned-out Russian vehicle. At first the gun had seemed beyond salvation, but this demon street-car conductor had stayed at his job.
Now he announced tentatively, "I think it"ll work." A gang of young mechanics wheeled the gun into position, but the street-car man said, "You better stand back, because it may explode." Then he laboriously trained his masterpiece upon a Russian tank and let go.
Csoki says, "Best thing I ever saw! The tank hoisted up in front, hesitated a minute, and exploded inside."
This action so astonished the Russians that they momentarily withdrew to consider what had happened. Hurriedly scanning the streets, they could see no sign of the Corvin gun, which had been hastily drawn back by scores of young men acting as horses.
Cautiously the Russians advanced a second time, but now determined Kilian marksmen with high-powered rifles started finding weak spots in their armor. There were some deaths inside the tanks, but what was worse, one tank found its way partially blocked by the destroyed tank and two reconnaissance cars which had been killed earlier in the day. For two fateful minutes it hesitated, and in that time Csoki"s men launched a gasoline barrage from the roof, while heroic boys from the streets of Pest dashed swiftly under the guns and pitched other bombs onto the tank at close range. There was a giant sigh as the gasoline burned out the tank and left it a smoking wreck.
Five Russian monsters, still hammering away at the barracks, now remained. From Ulloi Street and the boulevard they poured a punishing fire of sh.e.l.ls and bullets into the Kilian walls, until portions of the four-foot-thick masonry threatened to collapse.
Again it seemed as if no Hungarian power could reach these tormentors, for tantalizingly they kept out of range of the Corvin Cinema gun. But at this juncture the boys hiding in the cellars put into operation one of the neatest maneuvers of the battle. In preparation for just such an impa.s.se, when their elders would be powerless, these boys had strung a thin rope across Ulloi Street, from the cellar of the barracks to a cellar in the Corvin block, where they had strung together, on one end of this rope, a batch of five large hand grenades.
Now was the time to use their secret weapon. As a tank, after having cleared the upper stories of both buildings with deadly machine-gun fire, started down Ulloi Street, the boys, jockeying their rope carefully from each side of the roadway, tried to maneuver their grenades into the path of the tank tracks. They succeeded. The grenades exploded with a mighty woosh, the tracks were blown off the cogs and the tank ground to a helpless halt.
In an instant, daring men rushed back to the windows of the barracks and rained gasoline down upon the crippled monster. Then a grenade ignited the gas line, and from the cellars boys began to chant, "It"s going! It"s going!" Finally the burning gasoline reached the interior supply, and the mighty tank erupted in a vast explosion. In ninety minutes of desperate fighting, three Russian tanks had been destroyed.
It would not be correct to say that the men and boys of Kilian Barracks had driven off seven fully armed Russian tanks. It is true that the four remaining vehicles did withdraw, but this was probably because their ammunition had been expended in the furious bombardment of the barracks. But if the fight was not a complete victory-for the barracks were badly damaged internally and the losses were staggering, well over fifty per cent-it must have been a grievous shock to the Russians. They had seen three of the world"s most powerful tanks utterly destroyed, largely by hand weapons. They must have realized that the battle for Budapest was going to be costly, long and deadly.
There was another reason why the action at Kilian ought not to be termed a victory, for when the tanks left, the inside of the building was in such precarious condition that some of the floors seemed about to collapse. Accordingly, the soldiers abandoned the barracks, some by a sewer that led to the houses of the Corvin block, where in the cinema they set up what headquarters they could. From here Csoki led a group of soldiers into the street to establish a perimeter within which the daring street-car conductor who had stolen the first ant.i.tank gun could dismantle a second from one of the destroyed tanks.
"This conductor was sensational," Csoki says simply.
He got the gun, mounted it on wheels in another angle of the theater, and caught some sleep while awaiting the next attack.
It did not come for a full day, and during the comparative lull Csoki and some of his men said, "It"s a disgrace to leave the barracks empty." So they crept back and by means of heavy timbers sh.o.r.ed up the collapsing floors.
They were there when the most furious of the Russian attacks occurred. Nine tanks wheeled into position, mostly along Ferenc Boulevard, and started a methodical annihilation of the Corvin Cinema. By a fluke shot, one of their first barrages destroyed one of the two ant.i.tank guns, and the street-car conductor was left with only one gun, while the soldiers had only a few grenades and a supply of gasoline bombs to face the full armament of nine determined tank crews.
Nevertheless, they destroyed two of these tanks, held the others off, and protected their one gun. By the time the seven remaining tanks departed, there was more rubble on the ground around the cinema, there were more Hungarian dead, but the Russians still had not achieved victory. As if to prove this, while the seven tanks withdrew, one insolent Hungarian youth ran after them, wound up, and tossed a gasoline bomb at the tail-end tank.
"It was a lovely good-by kiss," Csoki recalls. "It missed, but it was a good idea, all the same."
Two hours later occurred the most dramatic part of the fight. Three Russian tanks rumbled over the Petofi Bridge, clanked up the boulevard and came to the intersection at Ulloi Street, ready for battle. But the first tank had moved too fast, and when it got into the intersection its crew realized that because the five tanks destroyed earlier still cluttered the street, it had no safe place for maneuvering.
At this moment the street-car conductor brought his one remaining gun into position, but before he could fire, the Russians spotted it. Instead of blasting it, the Russians amazed the Kilian men by raising the escape hatch and hoisting a white flag of surrender. The other two tanks, seeing this, turned tail and fled back down the boulevard toward the Petofi Bridge.
Csoki and some of the boys from the Corvin Cinema quickly took over the Russian tank and tried to drive it into the courtyard of the barracks. "We were no d.a.m.ned good," Csoki laughs. They got the tank stuck in the doorway and it remained there for some time, but finally one of the mechanics managed to jam it into reverse gear and dislodged it, running it full tilt backwards until it hit the wall of the cinema block across the street.
Some soldiers, nearly killed by the lurching tank, shouted, "You"re doing more damage with that tank than the Russians did."
At last some of the boys who were mechanics got the hang of the controls and wheeled it into position, so that it commanded the intersection. Above them rose the pockmarked walls of the barracks. To the right stood the tottering faade of the Corvin block. Around them lay the dead ... a boy who had tried to explode his bomb against a tank, a woman killed by accident, a charred corpse and a Russian who had leaped from a burning tank.
And there we leave tough, twenty-two-year-old Sergeant Csoki-Little Chocolate Drop-a wisecracking kid who looked like Marlon Brando. As he sat in the Russian tank, waiting for the next attack, he told the mechanics, "We"ll wait till they get close. Then we"ll shoot their pants off."
In the fight that followed, additional tanks were destroyed here, making twenty in all plus eleven armored cars, and more soldiers died fighting the tanks with almost empty hands. But the Russians never captured the Kilian Barracks, they never occupied the Corvin Cinema.
The miracle of the fight at Kilian Barracks was not the triumph of Hungarian patriots over Russian tanks. Nor was it the heroism of men and boys fighting without weapons. It lay in this simple fact: Of the four hundred communist soldiers in the barracks on the night of October 23-and they were men both trained and pampered by the Russians-not a single one remained faithful to communism.
Throughout all of Hungary the percentage was about the same. Many experts believe that a similar percentage of soldiers in Bulgaria, Rumania and Poland would, if given a chance, turn their guns on communism. The Czechoslovakian army would, for curious reasons, probably support Russia. Soldiers of the Ukraine, on the other hand, might temporarily side with their communist masters, but probably not for long. And as we shall see later, soldiers from areas like Uzbekistan, Tadzikistan, and the other Central Asian Soviet Republics can certainly not be trusted to remain loyal to Russia.
As a Hungarian soldier who fought against the Russians observed after the battle was over, "Russia won, but they"d better keep two of their soldiers in Budapest for every Hungarian they give a gun. Let the Kremlin sleep on that."
4.
Brief Vision
The battle for Budapest, which began on October 23, fell logically into three parts. The first ended October 29, when the Russians, alarmed by unexpected resistance and wishing to withdraw for tactical reorganization, practically surrendered the city to the freedom fighters.
The second phase was brief, but extremely sweet. For five days Budapest delighted in the mistaken belief that Hungary was at last free of Russian domination and that some kind of more liberal government would replace the AVO terror.
The third phase began on November 4, when Russian tanks stormed back into the city in force, imposed a worse terror than the AVO, and horribly crushed the revolution. The Russians not only won; they reveled in revenge.
But during the five days when Budapest enjoyed its brief vision of freedom, the city experienced many vital changes, and from a study of these, one can deduce what characteristics would have marked a free Hungary. To comprehend these days most clearly, it will be best to follow the fortunes of one family, especially from October 29 to November 4.
Zoltan and Eva Pal, an attractive young couple in their early twenties, lived on the top floor of a four-story flat in northern Buda. Their rent, which did not include heat, light or any kind of service, cost them a large portion of their monthly pay. Of course the government owned the building. Mrs. Pal says, "The rule was simple. Any repairs inside, tenant pays. Any repairs outside, government pays. But there were never any repairs outside."
Both the Pals worked, Zoltan as an automobile mechanic, and Eva as a postal employee. If she had not worked, they would have starved. Zoltan says, "I made 1,500 forints a month and my wife made 1,000, so we were rich people. Of course from that 2,500 forints so many deductions were made for the communist party, for insurance, for AVO collections, and for study groups that we had little left. And we had to pay taxes too."
Mrs. Pal, a trim blonde with blue eyes and a pug nose, had at the end of six years" arduous work acc.u.mulated the following impressive wardrobe: one coat, two pairs of shoes, one pair of sandals, four dresses, two pairs of stockings and a pair of gla.s.ses, whose frames she had bought on the black market. "The eye doctor gives each patient about three minutes for examination. If you want good care, you have to get your doctor"s care and dental services on the black market too. n.o.body would dare go to the state dentist. As for the state doctors, they simply growled, "If you aren"t dead, go back to work." "
One thing Mrs. Pal did not have to worry about was makeup. She says, "In each office five or six girls would band together to buy one black-market lipstick and one little flat cake of rouge. So if one of the girls was going to go out with a particular boy, and she wanted to look nice, she was able to use the lipstick and the rouge. Maybe it would be her turn four different times each year. I was married, of course, but I still liked to look nice once in a while, so I helped buy the things. But we married girls mostly left them for the unmarried ones. I looked pretty twice a year."
Since Mrs. Pal worked in the post office, and might have access to secret messages, she was constantly under AVO surveillance. "How many times did I have to fill out questionnaires about myself? As many as the stars."
Getting clothes for a husband was more difficult. Zoltan, thin and wiry like most Hungarian men, but taller than the average, who rarely get enough to eat, says, "In order for us to save enough money to buy me my only suit ... I used to go around in a windbreaker. Well, it took us six months to save the money, and in that time we were not able to go to one movie. My wife likes dancing, and in six months we were not able to go to one music bar."
Eva says her husband is a good dancer, but points out that a "night on the town," a phrase she picked up from a book, would cost at least 250 forints, or about one quarter of a month"s salary, after communist deductions. "We couldn"t dance much," she says.
Actually, the Pals knew very few communists socially, for in all of Hungary, which has about ten million people, there were not more than 1,200,000 communists. So out of every eight people the Pals met, seven were not party members. "At the post office all the top officials were communists," Eva says, "and of course the AVO were too. They spoke to me many times about joining the party, but I avoided it somehow or other."
If the party had known that Eva Pal attended secret religious services at the home of her mother, she would have been dropped from her job. "You could go to church, and many people did, but not in a job like mine. Anyone at the post office who was caught going there would be checked by the AVO."
Food was very expensive, but communist books were cheap. And of course things like phonograph records were prohibitive. "Zolton liked music, and since we couldn"t go to music bars or buy records, all we could do was listen to Russian music on Radio Budapest or what we could pick up from western stations."
What disappointed Zoltan most in communism, however, was the fact that all his life he had wanted to acquire a beat-up jalopy that he could take apart and put together. His wife explained to strangers, "Zoltan is very skilled mechanically. It would be wonderful for him to have an old car on which he could experiment." Then she added, "But of course we could never save that much money ... not for a car."
Once Zoltan asked me, "Is it true that in America a workman, almost any workman, could save enough to buy himself an old car to take apart?" I nodded, not having the heart to tell him that in my town most boys of fourteen have such cars, and it drives their mothers mad, the junk lying around.
On the evening of October 23, the Pals were at home listening to the radio, which announced that the secretary general of the central committee of the Hungarian communist party was going to speak. They knew that whenever Erno Gero, the top communist in the nation, spoke, it meant news, and tonight was no exception.
"Dear comrades, beloved friends, the working people of Hungary," Gero began. "Today it is the chief aim of the enemies of our people to try to shake the power of the workers" cla.s.s, to loosen the peasant-worker alliance, to undermine the leading role of the workers" cla.s.s in our country and to upset their faith in its party, in the Hungarian Workers" Party. They try to loosen the close friendly relations of our nation, the Hungarian People"s Republic, with the other countries building socialism, especially the relations between our country and the socialist Soviet Union. They try to loosen the ties between our party and the glorious Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the party of Lenin, the party of the Twentieth Congress. They slander the Soviet Union. They declare that our trade relations with the Soviet Union are one-sided and that our independence has to be allegedly defended, not against the imperialists, but against the Soviet Union. All this is a barefaced lie, hostile slanders which do not contain a grain of truth. The truth is that the Soviet Union has not only liberated our people from the yoke of Horthy fascism and German imperialism, but she has-after the end of the war when our country still lay trampled down in the dust-stood at our side and concluded pacts with us on the basis of full equality, and that she still continues this policy. There are people who want to turn against each other proletarian internationalism and the Hungarian national feelings."
"Something"s happening," Zoltan told his wife. "When you hear Gero talking like this there"s trouble."
"Working-comrades, workers!" Gero cried with pa.s.sion. "We must say it openly, now it is a question of whether we want a socialist democracy or a bourgeois democracy. The question is: Do we want to build socialism in our country, or make a hole in the building of socialism and then open the door for capitalism? The question is: Do we allow the power of the working cla.s.s and the worker-peasant alliance to be undermined or else will you consciously, with discipline and in complete unity with our entire working population, join battle for the defense of the workers" power and the achievements of socialism?"
"I"m going out to see what"s happening," Zoltan said. "Gero"s in trouble." He caught a trolley car which took him toward the center of the city, and even before he jumped off he heard that students had been meeting, and that there was some kind of rioting at Radio Budapest.
Keeping well back from trouble, he wandered down to the radio station and found a ma.s.s of people demonstrating in front of the building. To his horror, shots were fired, and from a vantage point well back in Brody Sandor Street he watched the rapid deterioration of the situation and the ultimate wrecking of the studio.
It was late when he got home, for other riots had disrupted trolley service, but in one way the enforced walk was good, for it showed him clearly how widespread the rioting was. That night he told his wife, "There is going to be a lot of shooting tomorrow. We"d better stay indoors."
But the boredom of staying at home soon grew too great, so Eva Pal went to the post office, where all the communists tried to make believe nothing had happened. "They laughed a little more than usual and there were fewer AVO men than before," Eva says, "but when firing was heard over the river, we stopped pretending and somebody said, "It sounds as if the riots were continuing." Suddenly the communists began talking, and it was clear that a lot of them hoped that the people would keep on fighting. At noon we closed the post office, and I think some of the leading communists hurried off to get guns. Of the seven main communists in my office, at least six joined the revolutionists."
Zoltan Pal had a more adventurous day. He was by no means a revolutionist, nor even the kind of man who supports revolutions emotionally. For example, for a period of ten years he had kept clear of the AVO. At the big garage where he worked he had always given the communist party men enough encouragement to make them think he might make a good party member some day, but never enough to make them actively want him. At thirty he was an inconspicuous, underweight, pleasant man who resembled most of the men his age in Budapest.
Yet as he walked along the streets of Buda and heard about the revolution he began to experience deepening emotions. He did not hate AVO men; he merely despised them as inhuman. He did not hate Russians; he merely thought of them as robbers in his land. Only the other night Eva had said of them contemptuously, "In ten years I cannot think of a Hungarian girl who married a Russian, although they have been among us all the time. If one of my friends went with a Russian no one would speak to her. Yet when the Germans were here, there were many marriages." At another time she had asked angrily, "Can anyone in the world like a Russian?"
But when Zoltan crossed over the Margaret Bridge into Pest he began to see that it didn"t matter whether you liked Russians or not. They were the enemy. Once an armored car whizzed past, firing at another car, and Russians manned the guns. In Karl Marx Square, where Lenin Boulevard enters, a reconnaissance car was shooting at some unseen object, and again the gunmen were Russians.
So by the time Zoltan Pal reached the wrecked offices of Szabad Nep, down on Rakoczi Street, he was in a somber mood, which was heightened by the appearance of a powerful reconnaissance car, heavily armed with machine guns. "They"re heading for Kilian Barracks!" aboy shouted. "Stop them!"
From Nepszinhaz Street three youths dashed out toward the tank with gasoline bombs, but the alert Russians in the armed car spotted them and easily mowed them down with prolonged bursts of gunfire. Some of the bullets flew wild and smashed windows, so that gla.s.s tinkled into the street like children"s sleighbells, while the ma.s.sive car rumbled on. One of the gasoline bombs, its fuse already lighted, exploded in the street, and the dead bodies were enveloped in fire.
Now a Hungarian marksman on a roof fired at the car with a rifle and hit one of the Russians. As the others turned their machine guns toward this roof to destroy the sniper, a fourth young man dashed out from Nepszinhaz Street and pitched his gasoline bomb into the car. But the bottle did not break, and the fuse was too long, so an alert Russian quickly tossed the bomb into the street, where it exploded.
Grimly fascinated by this running battle, Zoltan Pal had trailed down the avenue, intending to watch, but in his excitement he got closer and closer to the actual fighting. He was half running when a young man who had suddenly appeared from a doorway thrust two gasoline bombs into his hands, whispering, "Light them and throw them."
Tucking one of the bombs under his arm, and lighting the other with a match, he increased his speed and dashed out into the boulevard while the Russians were firing at some other roof. With a wild side-arm motion, which made him stop for a moment in the middle of the boulevard, Zoltan delivered his bomb. At the same time two boys who could scarcely have been more than fourteen did the same. This time the bombs exploded, and the Russian reconnaissance car flamed up in a dazzling beacon.
That night the Pals had much to talk about. Eva was terrified by the story of the bombing. But Zoltan said, "It"s going to be a major revolution." Eva had seen urgent messages which proved the government was in panic. Each had heard, on October 24, the amazing announcement of Radio Budapest, now back on the air from improvised quarters, explaining why the Russian soldiers were fighting in the city, and each had been utterly nauseated by the statement: "Several listeners of the Hungarian Radio turned to us with the question to explain under what conditions and with what task the Soviet units are stationed in Hungary in accordance with the Warsaw Pact. On Tuesday, the enemies of our people turned the demonstration held by university youth into an organized counterrevolutionary provocation, and with their armed attacks endangered the order of the whole country and the life of the population. The Hungarian government, conscious of its responsibility in order to restore order and security, asked that Soviet troops help in controlling the murderous attacks of counterrevolutionary bands. The Soviet soldiers are risking their lives in order to defend the lives of the capital"s peaceful population and the peace of our nation.
"After order is restored, the Soviet troops will return to their bases. Workers of Budapest! Welcome with affection our friends and allies!"
Zoltan Pal felt that for the government to make such an excuse for using Russian soldiers to kill Hungarians meant that Erno Gero"s gang was in deep trouble and might collapse, but Eva, who sensed more keenly the great power of the communist party, was convinced that they would soon have the insurrection under control. "We mustn"t say anything the AVO could remember, don"t tell anyone you threw a bomb," she warned. And most of her friends felt the same way.
But when the radio claimed to be reporting from Kilian Barracks, at the moment when that bastion was undergoing a savage attack by a patrol of Russian tanks, "The city is quiet. One or two shots can still be heard on Ferenc Boulevard. The residents remain in their houses!" Zoltan could not contain himself.
"One or two shots! They"re blowing up the city. I saw it this afternoon."
The miasma of lies, propaganda and utter nonsense in which Hungary lived under communism became unbearably clear when an unctuous voice on the radio announced that it would now tell the true story of what had happened at Radio Budapest the night before. "Eva!" Zoltan called. "Listen to this!"
"The gravest events of Black Day, October 23," the oily voice began, "took place at the radio station on Brody Sandor Street."
"He"s right about one thing," Zoltan agreed. "They were grave."
"What really did happen? In the early hours of the evening when the enthusiastic and orderly group of students demonstrated near the Bern statue, the narrow street before the radio station also became crowded with young people.
"The workers at the radio station welcomed them with the tricolor, placed on the balcony, and with applause. The delegation presented itself to the leaders of the station and declared their demands. They agreed on several points, but when these delegates stepped onto the balcony, the irresponsible elements, who were increasing in numbers, prevented them from speaking. Delegation followed delegation, and it became more and more apparent that there was no question of sincerely presented questions and of their fulfillment. The ma.s.ses did not even listen to the delegates. Brody Sandor Street was resounding with fascist slogans. The first bricks flew at the windows of the radio building. The station"s car, which stood before the entrance with equipment to record the initial, still sober, demands of the demonstrators, was attacked; fire was set to another car.
"When the situation degenerated to this point, the majority of the university students and young workers left in groups; but the ma.s.ses did not disperse. New groups approached from the boulevard and later armed gangs arrived. Somewhere, the doors of a military barracks were forced open. It was from there they got their arms. The ma.s.ses at this point forced the door of the radio station open, the guards tried to keep them back with a fire hose and at the same time to put out the fire in the burning car. But when they were unsuccessful, they were compelled to use tear gas. The situation became more and more tense. The windows of the station were broken. The mob pa.s.sed through the iron bars of the studios facing Pushkin Street. They armed themselves with bricks from a building on Brody Sandor Street and caused extensive damage. Now the slogan was: "Occupy the Radio Station!"
"The guards fired in the air and tried to frighten away the attackers with blanks. They tried everything to clear the radio building without using their weapons. They did not harm anyone seriously, but more and more shots were fired from the ma.s.ses. First a major of the state security authority [AVO] was killed. Later on, during the first hours a total of six [AVO] found death. But the state security guards still did not fire.
"There was a state of siege in the station, but broadcasting went on without disturbance. When two trucks of armed youth arrived from the direction of Gutenberg Square they occupied the houses opposite and around the station and opened fire on the studio; and it was only as a last step, after many guards were wounded and dead, that the order to return fire was given. The others, however, had machine guns and hand grenades and intensified their attack against the studio. The workers of the station, in spite of the hail of bullets, continued broadcasting to the last moment, and when the ma.s.ses penetrated into the building the defenders saw to it that the provocateurs did not reach their target, that they did not silence the Kossuth Radio.
"As you are hearing this, dear listeners, the program of the Kossuth Radio is slightly different from the schedule. But the Hungarian Radio, the Kossuth Radio, is still speaking. No counterrevolutionary hordes, not even these well-organized and determined counterrevolutionaries, could silence it. Our studio suffered severe losses. More than one state security guard died a hero"s death. Our workers did not face the firing, often machine-gun firing, without loss. But we have been on the air since this morning and remain, even now, Kossuth Radio Budapest.
"Dear listeners, you have heard a report by Gyorgy Kalmar ent.i.tled "What Happened at the Radio Station." "
As he listened to this extraordinary concoction, Zoltan Pal felt weak. "I was there," he kept repeating, as if one man"s witness of incontrovertible fact could somehow outweigh the confirmed lies of a regime. And in this growing realization of the web of falsehoods and terror in which he was caught, Zoltan Pal became a revolutionary.
Zoltan"s role in the fighting was not conspicuous-for one thing, his wife kept him at home as much as possible-but when the Russians finally withdrew from Budapest on October 29, the Pals had a right to say to themselves, "We helped free the city." Their contribution was not spectacular, but without the tacit support of millions of people like the Pals, the revolution could not have triumphed.
When relative peace settled over the city, the Pals had an opportunity to find out what had been happening. They were astounded, for example, when they heard that the Kilian Barracks had not surrendered. "When I last saw it," Zoltan said, "I thought it was finished."
The Pals were unprepared for the number of burned-out Russian tanks they saw along the boulevards. "I expected to see only one or two," Eva said.
With embarra.s.sed pride Zoltan led his wife to the first reconnaissance car he had helped destroy, and then to a tank where he had taken part in a gasoline attack. Eva looked at the stricken, shattered vehicle, its treads jammed with steel pipes thrust there by children in order to halt it, and said, "I would not have believed it possible."
All Budapest seemed affected the same way. "Do you mean to say that people with no weapons destroyed all these tanks?" women marveled. And a quiet surge of patriotism possessed the city, for it had been Hungarian patriots, fighting alone and with no help from the world, who had evicted a cruel conqueror, Soviet Russia.
"I can hardly believe we did it," Zoltan reflected. "I don"t think they"ll stay out," he warned his wife, "but if they do try to come back, the United Nations and America will send us an army." Then he added, "And this one will have weapons.
Eva refused for the moment to contemplate the possibility of Russia"s return. "What amazes me," she said, "is that we drove out the AVO too."
This last claim was not quite correct. For several days, isolated groups of AVO men in high-powered cars would rip through the city at eighty miles an hour, spraying machine-gun bullets in sullen revenge. In Pest a queue of women waiting for bread was shattered by such a hit-run blast, and many were left dead.
Food was a major problem. Bakeries tried to open two hours a day, and Eva had to stand in line endlessly to replace food that Zoltan had handed out to the fighters. However, peasants from the surrounding countryside, feeling somewhat guilty for not having partic.i.p.ated in the liberation fight, tried to make amends by streaming into the city with all the food they could muster. By truck, by cart, by hand-drawn vehicles, by tractors pulling hay wagons, the country people came with food. Stopping at main thoroughfares, they gave away tons of produce and young pigs and chickens.
There was a kind of festival in Budapest. n.o.body stopped to clean up the debris, which littered most streets, nor even to bury the Russian bodies in the burned-out tanks nor the AVO men. Freedom fighters, of course, were buried in improvised graves that lined the public parks, but the hated enemies of the people were left exposed in final and complete contempt.