End of an Affair

Decadent, worldly Budapest had willingly opened its arms to its old friends and customers, the Nazis. In the plushy, palatial coffee houses, in the gay restaurants on St. Margaret Island, in the Royal Palace in old Buda and across the river on the Corso of Pest, the city's life had become easy as a kept woman's. Then came the Russians. By this week Budapest found herself about to be deserted. With a Nazi pistol at her back, and the Russians in her streets, she faced destruction.

Before the Snows. The Russians waited four weeks on the Hungarian plain until they had linked up supply lines with the Polish front. When the attack came, the Germans could do little to break it on the rolling wheatland before the capital. Pest, on the east bank of the Danube, was immediately doomed.

Russian newspapers were already dismissing Budapest as just another milestone on the march to Vienna and Berlin, but it might still be hard to pass. The Germans, backed by the Hungarians of the Fascist Arrow Cross, were digging in for street fighting. Presumably they would fall back on Buda, force the Russians into a difficult (but not impossible) river crossing under the heights crowned by Fortress Hill and the Royal Palace. The Russians could count on their own power, on help from some Hungarians who saw that the affair was over, and now preferred to save their city.

Inside Budapest sirens shrilled as Russian bombers and fighters poured over. Hobnailed Nazi boots clattered across the five airy, soaring bridges. (The sixth, St. Margaret, was reported wrecked by a premature explosion, killing 1,500 persons.) The rich and the fearful were streaming toward Austria. The kavehazak (coffee houses) were shuttered and gypsy music was still. Budapest was paying the piper.

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