"No, I mean in the good stores, where the prices are cheaper."
"Look," he snapped. "If you want to go into the big stores in Pest, you can go."
"But the stores I mean are here in Csepel." And she told him of three good stores into which she couldn"t go. First there was the very good store for Russians only, and here the best things produced by Hungary were on sale at eighty-percent reductions. Second were the stores that were almost as good, for Hungarian officials and AVO men, where the reduction sometimes amounted to seventy percent. Next came the stores for minor communist officials, where the goods were of fine quality and the prices reasonable. "And when everything good has been used up by those stores," Mrs. Szabo complained, "what"s left is placed in stores for us workers, and we pay the most expensive prices. Why is this?"
Gyorgy said, "It"s that way with everything, I guess."
But his wife persisted, "I thought you told me that in communism everybody was going to be equal."
"After they get things properly worked out, everybody will be equal."
"Until then, Gyorgy, will you please see if we can buy in one of the better stores?"
But in spite of his good record and his unquestioned loyalty to the party, Gyorgy found that no ordinary worker could possibly buy in the good stores. "They"re for the big bosses," he was told. "You wouldn"t feel at home in big stores like that."
That night Gyorgy spoke to his wife in the secrecy of their home. "We"re worse off than we used to be," he confessed. "Before, we never had any money either, but we could dream, "When I get a lot of money I"ll go into the biggest store in town and buy one of everything." But now they don"t even let you in the stores."
One of the most moving stories of the revolution concerns the manner in which this hard-core communist finally took arms against the system. It was not because he was a reactionary, for he had fought in defense of communism. It was not because he was a devout Catholic, for he never bothered with the church. Nor was it because he had intellectually weighed communism and found it to be a fraud. It was because of a football game, and as one listens to his account of this memorable game, one suddenly realizes that all over Hungary, in those bitter days, men were discovering the nature of the deception that had been practiced upon them ... but always as the result of some trivial occurrence.
"It was a fine day in Budapest," he recalls, "and I was walking down Voroshilov Street to the big new stadium. Even if a man didn"t have enough money for a new suit, he set aside a few forints for football, because it was a pleasure to go into the stadium. You cannot imagine how beautiful it was. It was about the only thing the communists accomplished. I have been told it"s the biggest in Europe and the most beautiful in the world."
Hungarians" love for sport is legendary. In a nation with about the same population as metropolitan New York City, a completely disproportionate number of world champions has been produced in fencing, swimming, riding and track. For example, in the Helsinki Olympics of 1952, Hungarians copped an improbable number of first places and as a team ranked third among nations. But in recent years it has been soccer which gladdens the heart of a Hungarian, especially the Csepel man. This intricate game reached Hungary long after it had thrived in England and France, yet in the matter of a decade the Hungarians were world champions, sometimes thrashing their more famous compet.i.tors by such large scores as to lead one foreign expert to charge, "If magicians were driven out of England at the time of Merlin, I know where they went. To Hungary."
"This day there was a great game," Szabo recalls. "A championship team had come over from Vienna, and we won. Of course, we usually win, but what was unusual at this game was that I sat behind some visitors from eastern Austria who spoke Hungarian and I told them their team was going to lose. We talked a little and I said, "If you have come all the way from Vienna, why do you sit in the cheap seats?"
"They said, "We"re workmen, too."
"And I asked, "But how can you afford such good suits?" Then I asked many more questions. "How can workingmen save the money for a trip all the way to Budapest?" "Where do you get so much extra food?" And there were other questions that I didn"t ask them-why they weren"t afraid of the policeman who came by, and why they laughed so much, even though their team was losing." Big, tough Gyorgy Szabo stares at his hands and adds, "From that football game on, I never stopped asking questions as to why dirty capitalists in Vienna could have such things whereas good communists in Budapest couldn"t."
When Gyorgy Szabo returned to the bicycle works after the football game, he began asking new questions. "Where do all these bicycles go that we are making?" They went to Russia. "Am I making more money than when I worked for the capitalists?" He was making less. "Have the prices of things gone up or down?" They had gone far up. "Why are all these Russians still here?" They were here to police Hungary.
Finally he asked the most d.a.m.ning question of all: "Am I any less a slave now than I was then?" The answer was terrifyingly clear: "Then I was free. Then I was not afraid to laugh or to speak my mind. It is now that I am a real slave."
From then on Gyorgy Szabo, "the cla.s.sical communist worker," began to speak openly. He found that most of the men in the Rakosi Metal Works felt as he did. He says, "We said to h.e.l.l with the AVO. If they arrested all those who complained, they would have to arrest us all."
He stopped going to party meetings. He refused to march in fake processions. He allowed his work norm to drop back to what a human being might reasonably be expected to perform. And he began to tell his children that they, and their father and mother, were caught up in a hopeless tragedy. "I taught them to hate the regime," he said. "It sits on the necks of the workers."
It was in this frame of mind that grim-lipped Gyorgy Szabo heard, on October 22, 1956, that some students were going to stage a demonstration against the government. Without telling his wife where he was going, he went into the heart of Pest and made inquiries as to where the meeting was to be. He was told that some students had gathered in the Technical High School in Buda. He crossed the river and walked up to the brightly lighted building. Inside, he listened in dismay as one clever young man after another delivered what seemed to be pointless talks, and he thought to himself, "This won"t get anywhere."
But then, from the rear of the meeting, a man in a brown windbreaker like his own rose and said, "I should like to ask one question. Under what right are Russian troops stationed in our country?" The question electrified Szabo, and in the following minutes he was overjoyed to hear young men who spoke well expressing all the doubts and hatreds he had acc.u.mulated against the regime.
"Something big is going to happen," he muttered to himself, and then another workman, from another part of the hall, spoke Szabo"s mind for him. "I don"t have the good language you men have," this man said haltingly. "I"m a worker, from Csepel. Men like me are with you." At this announcement there was cheering, and that night Gyorgy Szabo went home determined that if "something big" did happen, he was going to play his part.
Late the next afternoon he was working at the bicycle shop when news arrived that students had begun marching in the streets. Instantly he told his fellow workmen, "There"ll be trouble. They"ll need us." The same thought had struck many workmen in Csepel that afternoon, and at dusk they marched forth. Of 15,000 workmen in Szabo"s immediate area, all but 240 ultimately joined the revolution. Of these 240, two hundred were a.s.signed by the revolutionists to guard the plants against sabotage, meaning that out of 15,000 workmen on whom communism depended for its ultimate support, only forty remained loyal.
It would be repet.i.tious to recount in detail Gyorgy Szabo"s actions during the three stages of the revolution. In the attack on the radio station, it was a truck load of arms and ammunition that he had helped dispatch from the Csepel ordnance depot which turned the tide. The young fighters who holed up in the Corvin Cinema used Csepel guns and were in large part Csepel workers. The Kilian Barracks, having little ammunition of its own, depended upon Csepel equipment and Csepel men to use it. Throughout the victorious battles of those first days Gyorgy Szabo and his fellow workmen provided the sinews of the revolution. Gyorgy himself was shot at many times, helped burn tanks, and in general proved himself to be the firebrand that most once-dedicated communists turned out to be when they finally took arms against their oppressors.
In the second, peaceful stage, he performed an even more important task, for it was under his guidance-he being an older man than many of the Csepel workers-that the Csepel workers developed their plan for the utilization of the Rakosi Metal Works in the new Hungarian state. Their plan was certainly not reactionary, and many people in America would surely have deemed it archcommunism, but for the Hungary of that day it seemed a logical and liberal solution. "What we proposed," Szabo says, "was a nationalized factory, owned by the state and supervised by it, but run in all working details by workers" committees. Our engineers would set the norms in terms of what a human being should perform. Norms would not be handed down by some boss in an office. There would be no AVO, nor anyone like an AVO, allowed in the plant. And any of the good things, like vacations and doctors, would be shared equally. We were very certain about that."
By the afternoon of November 2, Gyorgy Szabo and his committee had concrete proposals to offer the government. Szabo also had suggestions for what pattern the government itself might take. "We thought a liberal-labor party would be best, one which stressed the production of things for people to use and to eat. No more munitions for Russia. We wanted personal freedom, courts, political parties, newspapers and a free radio. And we insisted upon one right which we wanted very badly, the right to travel to other countries. We wanted to see what workers were doing in other countries." As for the general spirit which ought to guide the new Hungary, Szabo proposed, "We don"t want the aristocracy returned, or any selfish capitalists like the kind we used to know. If the Church won"t meddle in politics, it ought to come back the way it was before. We should all work for a decent government and we should try to be like Austria or Switzerland or Sweden."
When these fine dreams were destroyed by the Soviet batteries on Gellert Hill, whose sh.e.l.ls ripped through the Rakosi Metal Works, Gyorgy Szabo found himself in the middle of the prolonged and b.l.o.o.d.y battle which marked the third part of the revolution. It was a determined workers" army which faced the Russians, for Szabo was joined by every available Csepel man, and this st.u.r.dy group of workers was to give the Soviets their toughest fight in the battle for Budapest. Szabo himself used guns from the Csepel armory, helped spray Csepel gasoline on Russian tanks, lugged ammunition to the antiaircraft gun that knocked down the Soviet plane, and thought up one of the neatest tricks of the campaign. Whenever a group of Csepel men found an isolated tank which they could not destroy, some young workers of incredible daring would leap upon the turret, where no gun could fire at them, and plant there a Hungarian flag. If the Russians inside opened their hatches in an effort to dislodge the flag they were killed and the tank immediately destroyed. But if they allowed the flag to fly, the next Russian tank they met would blaze away at a supposed enemy and blow it apart. Obviously such a trick could work only a limited number of times, but until the Russians caught on, it was a beautifully simple maneuver.
But finally the Soviets triumphed, and with the annihilation of Csepel the situation of Gyorgy Szabo and his men was desperate. As we have seen, they quietly melted into the countryside and escaped capture. What they did next forms a heroic chapter in the battle for Budapest, and in order to appreciate their heroism we must pause to a.n.a.lyze the situation they faced.
The Russians dominated the city, and through a puppet government made decisions of life and death. All food supplies were under Russian control, and only those Hungarians whom the Russians decided they could pacify were fed. The Russians also controlled the police, the health services and every operation of the city"s existence. Anyone who dared oppose this Russian control ran the risk of starvation, imprisonment or execution.
In addition, the Russians had another horrible weapon, one which the Hungarians feared more than any other. On the afternoon of November 6, while the fight for Csepel still continued, Russians began rounding up Hungarian men, tossing them into trucks, and carting them off to secret railway depots where they were herded into boxcars for shipment to perpetual slavery in Siberia. Possibly by plan, Russians allowed a few such deportees to escape so that news of this inhuman punishment could circulate throughout Hungary. To most Hungarians, such deportation to Siberia was truly worse than death, and many resisted it to the death, as their bullet-riddled bodies were later to testify.
So all of what Gyorgy Szabo accomplished in the days following the termination of actual fighting he did under threat of death, starvation, imprisonment by the reincarnated AVO and deportation. Here is what he accomplished.
On November 11, the workers of Csepel reported for work. Both the Hungarian government and its Russian masters had made earnest entreaties to the workers in heavy industries to resume production lest the country collapse in a runaway inflation. Communist leaders tried to cajole miners and electrical workers into producing their prerevolutionary norms, and were promised food and full wages if they did so.
Szabo met these government enticements by helping to organize a general strike. He was only one of many to whom the idea occurred at roughly the same time, but in his factory he did have the courage to stand forth clearly as the leading spirit. He knew that the AVO spies who had been replanted in the works would report him as the instigator, but he no longer cared. "We will work long enough to replace the 3,000 bicycles stolen from freedom fighters by the police," he announced, "then we will quit."
In other plants similarly brave men stood up and made similar proposals. All over Hungary the strike proved to be amazingly successful, even though the leaders were constantly threatened with death.
The economic life of the nation was brought to an absolute standstill. Trains were halted and no industrial electricity was provided during critical hours. Truckers refused to bring food into the starving city if it had to be turned over to the communists for distribution, and women would not work at cleaning buildings. Factories in Csepel lay idle, and those in nearby Kobanya worked only enough to provide minimum essentials to the workers themselves.
The government raved and made new threats. Then it pleaded tearfully, "Dear workers, please go back to work. Don"t let inflation destroy us." When this appeal failed, wage increases were offered, then additional issues of food to "workers who were loyal to the cause of workers" solidarity and world peace."
No appeal made the slightest impression on the men of Csepel, and with consummate insolence they even refused to answer the government"s proposals. Szabo says, "We had reached a point in which not a man cared if he was shot or starved to death. We would not co-operate with our murderers." They even published a poster which read, "Wanted. Six loyal Hungarians to form a government. The only requirement is that they all be citizens of Soviet Russia."
Day after fatal day the strike continued. From Csepel it spread to other regions of the city, and from there to the countryside. In no section of Hungary was greater bravery shown than in the coal mines of Tatabanya. Here men who could be easily identified for future retaliation and torture refused to go into the mines to bring out the coal required for heating and lighting the new communist paradise. Against these miners the frantic Russians brought their full power of coercion. Food was cut off from Tatabanya, and any stray young men who wandered from the crowd ran the risk of being picked up for Siberia. Troops were moved in, and tanks, but to no avail. The mines stayed shut. The Soviets, having run out of ridiculous promises by which to lure these stubborn miners, resorted to threats of death, but the miners replied, "Shoot one man and we"ll flood the mines."
At this point it is appropriate to consider the meaning of this general strike. There had always been, during the three stages of the Hungarian revolution, a chance that Soviet propaganda might eventually turn a crushing moral defeat into a shabby victory. They could claim that reactionary forces had led the revolution. They could tell uncommitted nations in Asia and Europe that broken-down n.o.bility had tried to engineer a coup d"etat. They could and did point to Cardinal Mindszenty"s speeches as proof that the Church was about to seize control of Hungary. And they could claim, legalistically but spuriously, that a legitimate Hungarian government-the Janos Kadar puppet regime-had specifically invited them back into Hungary to put down a counterrevolution. They could also claim, spuriously, that under the terms of the Warsaw Pact of 1954 they were not only ent.i.tled but also obligated to return. Finally, in order to explain away the partic.i.p.ation of students, writers, youths and workers in the actual fighting, they could, and had already begun to, feed out the official line that the students were impetuous, true, but underneath it all really dedicated communists; that the writers were nervous types who didn"t know what they were doing; that the youth were misled by evil adults; whereas the workers acted on the spur of the moment out of hot-headed but understandable patriotism. I regret to say that such excuses would probably be accepted in India, parts of France, parts of Italy and Indonesia, where they would accomplish great harm.
But no propaganda, no matter how skillfully constructed, can ever explain away the coldly rational, unemotional strike of the Csepel men. It was conceived by workers, and by workers in heavy industry. It was carried out without the aid of writers, students or churchmen. Of greatest importance was its duration and determination, proving that it was neither hastily conceived nor emotionally operated.
The Csepel strike was a solemn announcement to the world that the men whom communism is most supposed to aid had tried the system and had found it a total fraud. Most of the leaders of this Csepel strike were members of the communist party. They had known it intimately for ten years and had, in some cases, even tried to help direct it along the promised channels. There was not, so far as I can find, a single excited intellectual or daring philosopher of freedom involved in this strike.
This was communism itself, rejecting itself. This was a solemn foretaste of what communists in India or Italy or France or Indonesia would themselves conclude if they ever had the bad luck to live under the system. This was, for Soviet communism, a moral defeat of such magnitude that it cannot be explained away.
When the world propagandists for communism have explained everything to their satisfaction, how will they explain the fact that of 15,000 workers in one Csepel area, only forty remained true to the system? How will they explain the fact that the other workers fought Soviet tanks with their bare hands? And how will they explain the behavior of a man like Gyorgy Szabo, who, when there was no hope of further resistance, was willing to stand forth as the leader of a general strike against the Soviet system?
For example, what sensible man, knowing the facts of Budapest, could possibly accept the following explanation which the trade unions of Soviet Russia offered to fellow workers in Europe as an excuse for the ma.s.sacre of a city? "You know, dear comrades, that Soviet troops upon the request of the Hungarian government came to its help in order to crush the counterrevolutionary forces and in order to protect the basic interests of the Hungarian people and peace in Europe. The Soviet armed forces could not remain aloof because to do so would not only have led to further bloodshed but would have also brought tremendous damage to the cause of the working cla.s.s. The Soviet trade unions wish to bring to your attention the fact that the Soviet army has never fought for an unjust cause."
When such lies became intolerable to the man of Csepel, and when the puppet government dared to announce that all the trouble in Budapest had been caused by discredited members of the n.o.bility who were trying to impose their will upon the simple communist workers, Gyorgy Szabo and his men could stomach the nonsense no further. They had posters made which announced, "THE 40,000 n.o.bLEMEN OF CSEPEL, EACH WITH A CASTLE NEAR THE RAKOSI METAL WORKS, AND WITH NUMEROUS SERVANTS, DEFY THE GOVERNMENT."
Then, to make their intention crystal clear, they announced, "We have mined the buildings in Csepel and if you try to take them over or to make us work, we will blow them to pieces."
The importance of the resistance in Csepel did not lie, however, in the unparalleled heroism of the workers. Rather it lay in the slow and methodical manner in which it was conducted. The world had time to hear of it and could marvel at the total rejection of communism voiced by these men of communism. Had there been no strike, the Soviets could have argued, as indeed they tried, that although there had been an unfortunate uprising, no real workmen were involved. If the revolution had ended abruptly or in obscurity, any reasonably logical interpretation could have been promulgated in Rome and Paris and New Delhi. But with men like Gyorgy Szabo doggedly striking, and in the very teeth of communism, day after day until the stoppage lasted a month, and then on into the second month-that could not be brushed aside as accidental. As this book goes to press, toward the end of January, 1957, the methodical, unemotional workers of Csepel are still showing the world what they think of communism. They have now entered their fourth month of protest.
In my recent life I have witnessed many brave actions-in war, in Korea, in munic.i.p.al riots, and one which I shall speak of later when I write of the bridge at Andau-but I have never seen anything braver than the quiet, calculated strike of the men of Csepel. I have long suspected that raw courage, like that required for blowing up a tank, is largely a matter of adrenalin; if a man gets a strong enough surge of it he can accomplish amazing feats, which the world calls courage. But courage such as the workers" committees of Csepel exhibited is not a matter of adrenalin, it is based on heart and will. Voluntarily these men signed manifestoes, although they knew that their names were being collected by the Russians. Without protesting they permitted themselves to be photographed, although they could be sure that these photographs would be filed and used to identify strikers for later retaliation. They were willing to stand forth undisguised and to demonstrate their contempt for their Soviet masters. I call that the ultimate in courage.
On November 22, when the strike was at its height, Gyorgy Szabo returned home from an exhausting meeting in which he had publicly argued for a continuation of the strike "no matter what the Russians do."
As soon as he entered his grubby home he realized that his wife was distraught. "Gyorgy," Mrs. Szabo said in a trembling voice. "The Farkas boy was deported last night."
"Sooner or later we"ll all be deported," he said, sinking into a chair.
Mrs. Szabo twisted her hands nervously, then blurted out, "I think we ought to escape with the children to Austria."
Gyorgy said nothing. Dropping his head into his hands he tried to think. For some days he had known that this question was going to come up, and twice he had forestalled discussion of it. Now he said bluntly, "I"m a Hungarian, not an Austrian."
His wife"s voice rose in both pitch and intensity. "I am too. But I can"t bring my children up in Hungary."
"This is my home," Szabo argued stubbornly.
"Gyorgy," his wife pleaded, her voice growing urgently gentle. "They need men like you in Austria. Today the BBC said America was taking refugees."
"I don"t want America-" he began.
His reply was interrupted by a terrible scream. Mrs. Szabo had risen from her chair, her hands in her hair, and was shouting hysterically, "I can"t live here any longer! I can"t live here and listen with dread for fear an auto will stop outside our house at night and the police-" She fell back into her chair and sobbed, "Gyorgy, in a few days they"ll take you away."
One of the children, hearing his mother"s screams, had come into the room. "You must put your clothes on," Mrs. Szabo said in grimly excited tones. "And tell your brothers to put theirs on, too."
Gyorgy Szabo, the good communist, the trusted worker in heavy industry so dear to communism, looked stolidly at his wife. There was no arguing with her now, so he stalked into the cold night air.
The scenes about him were familiar and warm. This was his Csepel. He had defended it against capitalists, against n.a.z.is and against the Russians. He had grown up here as a boy and had grown to love the sprawling buildings and the things they produced. This factory in the darkness, he had helped to build it, helped to protect it against the Soviet tanks. Within its ugly walls he had known much comradeship and happiness. This was a good island and a good land. Maybe things would work out better ... later on.
A car"s lights showed in the distance, and instinctively he drew into the shadows, for under communism an auto meant danger. Only the police and the party bosses had automobiles, and such men usually meant trouble. Flashing its spotlight here and there, the car approached and Gyorgy could see the glistening rifles of police on the prowl. He remained very silent and they failed to spot him. Slowly the car went about its duty, and in the darkness Szabo acknowledged finally how terrified he was.
"I was afraid," he admitted later. "For many years I had been living in a world of bleak hopelessness. I had no chance of saving for things I wanted to buy. No chance at all. But worse was the emptiness inside. All the big promises that I had lived on as a boy were gone. Not one thing the communists had promised had ever been fulfilled. You can"t understand how awful it is to look into a hopeless future. At the start of the revolution lots of us were brave, but do you know why? Because we didn"t care whether we lived or died. Then we had a few days of hope, and we spoke of a new, honest system, but when the Russians came back I knew the bleak days would start again. That time I was brave because I didn"t give a d.a.m.n about Siberia. It couldn"t be any worse than Csepel, because in Siberia you admit you"re in prison. That"s why, when I hid in the shadows afraid of the automobile and heard my wife"s screaming in my ears, I finally said, "If there"s a better life in Canada or Australia, I"ll go." I was afraid."
A man who had destroyed tanks by spraying them with gasoline from a hose, a man who had stood forth as the announced leader of the strike, beat his face with his hands and said, "I was afraid."
Using only the shadows, he turned to his home, where he found his wife and the three boys bundled up in all the warm clothes they could muster. Mrs. Szabo was no longer crying, for she had made up her mind to leave Budapest this night and walk to the Austrian border whether her husband joined her or not-to do anything to escape the terror under which her children had been living and would live for the rest of their lives if they remained in Budapest.
Szabo looked at his wife, reached for his own heavy clothes and said, "We"ll leave right away."
So Gyorgy Szabo and his family left Hungary. They carried with them one small handbag of food for their children. After ten years of dedicated service to communism this gifted workman had as his worldly possessions one small bag of food and a legacy of fear. When he fled from Csepel to the mainland and then across the bridge from Pest into Buda, he did not bother to look back on the beauty of Pest, for he knew that it had been destroyed.
8.
A Poem of Petofi"s
Of every hundred Russian tanks burned up in the streets of Budapest, about eighty-five were destroyed by young people under the age of twenty-one.
To appreciate the staggering impact of this fact, one must understand what the life experience of a twenty-year-old Hungarian youth had been. Born in 1936, such a child would have known no politics until the age of five, at which time the dislocations of World War II hit Hungary and life became a perpetual crisis. At eight the child experienced the rigors of n.a.z.i occupation and at ten entered the relative calm of communism.
It is important to remember this, for a twenty-year-old Hungarian could not, like some of his elders, look back nostalgically upon a happier world. His early years had been spent amid deep uncertainties, and communism brought security. In his early years he knew hunger, but communism brought food. In addition, since communist theoreticians based their state on the belief that a child properly indoctrinated will never defect from the system, communism made great efforts to ingratiate itself with children. More effort was spent on them than upon any other segment of the population, and children had every opportunity to become familiar with communism and to love it.
For example, a ten-year-old boy was allowed to join the Hungarian equivalent of the Russian Pioneers, in which he was given a red scarf and two hours of indoctrination a week, long talks about how wonderful it would be to live in Russia, and free pa.s.ses to propaganda movies. Many things which his family could neither afford nor find, like chocolate candies and oranges, would be freely distributed by the communists, always with the injunction, "This comes from your good friends, the Russians."
At fourteen he joined the Hungarian equivalent of the Soviet Komsomol, in which he studied the theory of communism. Special emphasis was placed on hating the west, and his instructors a.s.sured him that one day he would have to protect sacred Hungarian soil from American fascists who were waiting in Austria to destroy Hungary.
Soon he moved into the Freedom Fighters a.s.sociation, where he studied intensively such exciting subjects as military drill, how to use a revolver, how to break down a long rifle, and how to read a map. His instructors said, "You must know these things in order to destroy the American invaders." Hating the west was a major requirement in this course, but there were also pleasant occupations like singing military songs and marching in formation. Promising boys, who proved that they hated the west and were ready to lay down their lives fighting America, were given a special course: how to destroy an American tank with homemade gasoline bombs.
There were less grim subjects, like airplanes, camping, and sports, but even the last category provided training in such skills as target practice with a military gun, driving a military truck in combat, and fighting off paratroop landings. The future communist was taught that all Hungarian strength came from its friendship with the Soviet Union. One handbook described the aims of the youth organization as: "The education of the coming generation and of all working people in the principles of socialist patriotism, of devotion and love toward the Hungarian communist party, and of boundless loyalty toward the great Soviet Union in the spirit of militant revolutionary vigilance and battle preparedness." A young man who did not rely upon the Soviet Union altogether was held to be a dangerous youth who would bear watching by the AVO.
But it was in school that the pressure of communist propaganda became intense. In every cla.s.s a boy"s teachers were required to indoctrinate him in communism. They gave lectures about the glory of Russia and instruction in the communist history of Hungary. They took their students to march in communist parades, to see propaganda movies and to protest against American imperialism. The teachers praised what communism said should be praised and d.a.m.ned its supposed enemies. From the first grade through the last, no child could escape this pressure.
It was not applied by all teachers, for many were to prove themselves extraordinary heroes in the revolution, but rather by a few fanatics who were planted in each school by the AVO and who reported upon every fellow teacher to the secret police. Thus a teacher who might in his heart hate communism was nevertheless required by fear of these perpetual spies to indoctrinate his pupils with hatred of Britain and America and an unreasoning trust in Russia.
One thing absolutely required of each teacher was that he keep prominently posted in his cla.s.sroom three huge portraits of communist leaders. Marx, Lenin and Stalin were most popular, but some nationalist-minded teachers would use Lenin, Stalin and Rakosi. School children universally called these portraits "The Holy Trinity," and there was confusion throughout the schools when Stalin"s huge portrait had to be hurriedly taken down, to be followed briefly by round-face Malenkov and then by pudgy Khrushchev. Maps were skillfully drawn so as to magnify the glories of communism and emphasize the weaknesses of democracy.
It was in textbooks, however, that the communists showed their greatest ingenuity. A geography book would accord Russia seventy-five per cent of its pages, and compress the decadent nations into the remaining twenty-five per cent. One atlas, reviewing World War II, summarizes the military contributions of England and America under the heading, "Breaches by the Anglo-Americans of Their Obligations as Allies." Another heading reads, "Advances by the Anglo-American Armies in Second-Rate and Unimportant Theaters of War." And in explaining how j.a.pan was defeated, the only American achievements shown are minor victories at Midway and the Solomons in the early stages of the war. The final crushing of j.a.pan was brought about, of course, by Russian armies.
One of the most significant changes took place in the att.i.tudes of students toward each other. "You must report any actions that might be harmful to the communist state," students were constantly warned. As a result, no student was safe from the revenge of his fellows, for although most Hungarian students refused to spy upon their mates, there were always one or two who had been corrupted or dragooned by the AVO and sometimes their ident.i.ty was not known, so that one had to be careful of everyone.
Most dreadful were the occasional cases in which a son would gain approval by informing upon his parents" love for religion or persistence in old-fashioned ideas. AVO teachers held this to be the apex of good communist behavior.
Under AVO scrutiny, the school became a potential trap for every household. Teachers would ask their students, "Does your father keep a picture of Comrade Stalin in your home?" "What radio station does your mother like best?" "Does your father think that Comrade Rakosi is always right?" "Does your mother ever take you to religious meetings at night?"
Religious instruction was a very touchy problem. In some schools it was available, but only if parents requested it for their children in writing. The child was then allowed to receive highly colored official interpretations of religion, while the parents" letters were forwarded both to employers and to the AVO, who would order that any man in a sensitive position who insisted upon religious instruction for his children be fired immediately and placed in the labor corps. In fact, in the cities retaliation was apt to be so severe that cautious parents quickly learned to ignore the school"s sanctimonious announcement: "If any parents want their children to have religious instruction, all they have to do is write a letter stating that fact."
Therefore, any Hungarian youth who had reached the age of twenty had spent the first half of his life in war, starvation and insecurity, and the next half in the bosom of communism, coddled and tempted. Quickly he learned that for any preferment in life, he had to be a good communist. Did he like games? Only communist groups could have teams. Did he want to attend a summer camp? He could do so only if he was a communist. If he wished to go on to the university, he had to have an exemplary communist record. In all of Hungary there was no conceivable escape from this crushing burden of propaganda which bore down upon him to remake his personality. If the human soul could be transformed, communism proposed to transform it.
Any young man or woman who had experienced ten years of such relentless pressure should have become a living testament to the boast of Joseph Stalin, who once growled, "Education? It"s just a weapon whose effect depends upon who controls it and whom he wishes to strike with it." Hungarian boys and girls had been trained by Stalin as intensively as human beings could be to strike the enemies of communism. They were bound morally and spiritually and economically to the two pillars of Hungarian education: love Russia and defend communism.
Yet when the test came, almost a hundred per cent of Hungarian youth hated Russia and tried to destroy communism.
This fact is so striking, and has so many ramifications for world history, that we must try to discover why the Russian plan went wrong. Why did these young people behave exactly contrary to expectations? And how were they able to resist the poison with which they were daily inoculated? To find one answer we must study the nature of the Hungarians themselves and the role they have played in history. For another answer we shall pick up one typical family as it struggles through the Hungarian marshes, on its way to the bridge at Andau and freedom. From this inspection we may comprehend what the Russians were up against.
It was an American diplomat, exhausted from days of work during the crisis, who best described the Hungarian. Limply he cried, "When this pressure lets up, I want just one thing. A transfusion of Hungarian blood. I want to feel like a man again." It was the consensus of observers that the Hungarians were some of the toughest individual human beings of recent years.
In those days much was written that both inflated Hungarian pride and ignored history. It is true that the Hungarians have always been brave, but they have also been an extraordinarily contankerous people. Their neighbors have usually found it almost impossible to get along with them. At one time or another, and often within recent years, Hungary has either fought or quarreled with each nation that touches her borders.
To the east the enmity with Rumania has been historic and undying. It centers on conflicting claims to the province of Transylvania, and given a chance, it would surely flare up afresh tomorrow. Much of Hungary"s curious predilection for alliances with Germany has sprung from her desire to be revenged on Rumania.
To the south Hungary has experienced quite bad relations with her Serbian neighbors, so that the history of this border is one of war and retaliation, the most serious flare-up having occurred in 1942, when Hungarians were charged with the ma.s.sacre of at least ten thousand Serbs. Less than four months after signing a treaty of perpetual friendship with Yugoslavia, Hungary invaded that country in an act so flagrantly in violation of international morality that the Hungarian prime minister, Count Paul Teleki, committed suicide in protest.
Hungary"s relations with Croatia on the southeast and with Slovakia on the north were little better, while Austrians held that one of the main reasons for the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire that used to bind Central Europe together was Hungary"s intransigence in empire affairs and her unwillingness to accord her own minorities fair treatment. Few nations, for example, have a worse record of anti-Semitism, or a longer one.
A long-time student of Balkan affairs has remarked, "Hungary has customarily had only one staunch friend in this area, Bulgaria. That"s because there is no Hungarian-Bulgarian border." Since most histories of this part of the world have been written by scholars with Serbian or Rumanian sympathies, it is easy to guess what nation is usually cast in the role of villain. However, even an unbiased American scholar like Carlton J. H. Hayes* can summarize Hungarian behavior in this manner: "... the Magyar aristocracy made no pretense of sharing the management of Hungary with the ma.s.ses of their own people, to say nothing of sharing it with any subject nationality. They preserved their hold on large landed estates throughout the realm. They forced the use of their own language in the public schools of the whole kingdom. They did their best to Magyarize the Slovak peasantry in their northern provinces and the Serb population of the south. They abolished all traces of local autonomy in the large Rumanian-speaking province of Transylvania, in the east. In the west, they put more and more restrictions on the partial autonomy which they had granted in 1868 to Croatia. They kept the Hungarian parliament and the ministry at Budapest under their own domination. They persistently refused to extend the suffrage for parliamentary elections; and so high were the property qualifications for its exercise and so intricate were the electoral laws that in 1910, out of a total population of over twenty million in the Hungarian kingdom, fewer than one million were voters, and, though the total population was about evenly divided between Magyars and non-Magyars, almost all the seats in the parliament were occupied by Magyars.