Freedom's Choice

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The world entered 1956 with a full complement of great men: national leaders, statesmen, philosophers, artists and scientists, many of whom, pursuing their legitimate vocations, would be remembered among the great names of the epoch. But the man who put his stamp on this particular year--the Man of the Year--was not on the roster of the world's great when the year began. Nor could anyone have guessed his identity, even when the year had run four-fifths of its course. Yet by year's end, this man was seen to have shaken history's greatest despotism to its foundations.

The ultimate consequences of his action could only be assessed in the future. But the effect upon European political and military alignments was already stupendous. He had actually lowered, by some 80 divisions, the combat potential of the world's most menacing army by showing that its colonial conscripts could no longer be relied upon. The Kremlin's current irresolution owes much to him. So does Communism's great loss of prestige around the world. Bulganin and Khrushchev, because of him, could not now expect to be received at Buckingham Palace or make the same kind of laughing-boy junket through Asia, and all over Western Europe, disillusioned Communist sympathizers turned away in nausea. Destroyed also was the 1984 fantasy that a whole generation could be taught to believe that wrong was right, or could be emptied of all integrity and curiosity. But his greatest triumph was moral: he demonstrated the profound and needful truth that humanity is not necessarily forever bound and gagged by modern terrorist political techniques. Thus he gave to millions, and specifically to the youth of Eastern Europe, the hope for a foreseeable end to the long night of Communist dictatorship.

The Man of the Year had many faces, but he was not faceless; he had many names, but he was not nameless. History would know him by the face, intense, relentless, desperate and determined, that he had worn on the evening of Oct. 23 in the streets of Budapest; history would know him by the name he had chosen for himself during his dauntless contest with Soviet tanks: the Hungarian Freedom Fighter.

The Special Quality. Hungarians are not very good plotters. The art of conspiracy--so well understood, practiced and detected by the Russians--would have been self-defeating in their struggle. What the Hungarians, a people of a special heritage and a unique language, did have was an overpowering common impulse, spirit or emotion, which suddenly united all classes against their enemy without the necessity of planning or leadership. The emotion had its origin in shared sufferings under the Russian police state, but it was made strong and enduring because it was tempered by that impracticable and, in Marxist terms, most despised of qualities, romanticism.

The restless and articulate Hungarian intellectuals who sparked the revolt of Oct. 23, mostly young Communists, were not thinking in terms of Lenin, but of the Hungarian patriots who revolted against the Habsburg monarchy in 1848. The street and rooftop fighters, who took over the struggle from the intellectuals, performed their self-appointed tasks with a valor, pride and gallantry that is found only in the revolutionary traditions of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Then, as their strength was exhausted in the battle against modern steel, the fight was taken over by the stolid nerveless men of the factories, inspired by Utopian ideals of a democratic workers' state. The Man of the Year was an amalgam of all these men and of all their qualities.

Did Hungary's Freedom Fighters hope to win? The answer is that, unlike the Poles before them, who infiltrated the party apparatus and to an extent controlled their break from Moscow, they did not pause to think that far ahead. Their motto might well have been that of another great romantic, William of Orange: "One need not hope in order to act, nor succeed in order to persevere.''

Who were these men and women, and in some cases children, who so acted? Among the thousands who made Hungary's revolution, it was possible to see, in a few individuals, those qualities and characteristics that made the whole thing credible.

Janos Feher

Janos Feher was one of the score of young intellectuals who, without being Aware of it, set the stage for the Oct. 23 revolt.

There was nothing particularly chauvinistic about Janos. His father, a mason, was the village socialist in the hamlet where Janos was born 26 years ago. What Janos got from his father was not patriotism but a thirst for knowledge. He was a thin, blond boy whose Roman nose was never out of a book. He joined the Communist Party at the age of 16, and this got him a scholarship to Budapest University.

The rigors of Marxist education--the interminable indoctrination lectures, the slanted subjects--soon disillusioned Janos, and he became one of that considerable group of discontented students who have sprung up in all Soviet countries. He wrote a novel about village life and was severely rebuked by the party for attempting to sabotage the People's Democracy. He and some other students wrote and performed a sharp satire on the wreck of Mt. Olympus (i.e., Russian Communism) and were investigated by the AVH, the Hungarian secret police. But the police did nothing to them because the students and intellectuals enjoy a special place in Communist regimes, providing the reservoir of skill and talent on which the bureaucracy continuously draws. A friend remembers Janos as saying before the revolt: "The workers and the peasants hate the regime because they know it is wrong and evil. They accept this and go on working. But we intellectuals are paid to lie about the regime. The workers know we lie, and so they hate us too. But the truth is we hate ourselves for lying."

The Russians had a political youth organization called DISZ to keep an eye on young intellectuals like Janos, but nobody took it seriously. One evening last summer, Janos and three friends met up with the top Moscow-trained DISZ leader, drunk and convivial in a restaurant, and one of Janos' friends suggested that what DISZ needed was a social club where young Communists could sit around, drink tea and play chess. A few days later, DISZ opened the Kossuth Club at its headquarters on Republic Square. Janos and his circle sent out word: use the club.

As Budapest's young Communist intellectuals crowded into the Kossuth Club, another suggestion was made to DISZ: Why not form a discussion group, strictly within the club, of course? The discussion group quickly became the hottest thing in town. It was called the Petofi Club.

Both clubs were named after Hungarian revolutionaries, which suited the Russian book, but neither the Russians nor their Hungarian stooges seemed to realize that the names of Kossuth and Petofi were dangerously charged with patriotic and nationalist sentiment. In September 2,000 young Communists crowded into the Petofi Club to hear a discussion on the Communist-controlled press. The meeting had been packed with old hard-core Communists and AVH men, but nevertheless the debate was free and furious. Janos and his friends left feeling that they had scored heavily against the system.

Janos dreamed of a still larger meeting that might finish with a demonstration in Parliament Square, demanding that Imre Nagy, who had been Premier during the "new look" period after Stalin's death, be reinstated. But the Central Committee got wind of their plans and suppressed the Petofi Club. Janos despaired: "We are too young to be followed by the people. We are unknown. We must start organizing and think in terms of years of underground work." Janos had been excited by the news from Poland of Gomulka's successful defiance of Khrushchev, and sensed that there was a corresponding force waiting to be released in Hungary.

Forbidden to meet as a discussion group, a number of Petofi hotheads gathered together at the monument of Sandor Petofi on the morning of Oct. 23. Before a group that grew in size every minute, a young actor, holding a volume of Petofi's poems, recited a poem famous in the 1848 revolution. Many onlookers wept, and by unspoken consent it was decided to go to the statue of General Bem, the Polish general who led the Hungarians and was crushed by the Russians the following year. Without orders from anyone, the crowd formed in ranks six abreast, crossed the Chain Bridge to the west bank of the Danube.

Janos Feher, slight, intense, with his shock of unruly hair and Roman nose, remained aloof from this excitement. "It's too early," he warned his friends. During the afternoon he stood by impassively as the crowd, still orderly and unled, came finally to Parliament House. It was Communist Party Boss Erno Gero, just returned from a visit to Tito, who touched off the fuse. In a radio speech, Gero accused the people of "provocations." Surging toward Radio Budapest, the crowd demanded the right to be heard. The AVH guards began shooting.

When Janos heard of the trouble, he sprang to life. He went down to Kilian barracks and got himself a rifle. A few hours later a burst of AVH machine-gun fire killed Janos Feher on a roof across the street from Radio Budapest.

Ferenc Kocsis

The atmosphere in Budapest on Oct. 23 was something no one who was there will ever forget. The weather was cold and gusty, and there was a light fog that softened the contours of the fine old buildings of the city. The gatherings at the statues of Petofi and General Bem were not the only ones. Infected by a kind of quiet gaiety, people were walking all over the city, singing in a subdued way. Among them was Ferenc Kocsis, no Petofi Club Communist, but a talented young film worker.

A friend had called Ferenc that morning and told him there was going to be a demonstration. "Well, this at least is something," said Ferenc, and passed the word along. With 80 other film workers, Ferenc pooled funds and bought some red-white-and-green ribbons to wear as arm bands, and took a bus into Budapest. They fell into line with thousands of other workers, students and cadets who had been waiting for this opportunity to blow off a little steam.

"At the head of the column were flags," remembers Ferenc. "An old woman waving a pair of scissors ran up. She reached up, grabbed a flag and cut the Red star out of the center. It was a tremendous moment."

The procession reached the West railroad station where an old man stood by the curb playing a tarogato, an ancient instrument like a clarinet that has a sad sound. He played the famous Hungarian revolutionary song which ends:

Long Live Hungarian Freedom!

Long Live our Native Land!

The demonstrators took up the refrain and roared it across Budapest. Says Ferenc: "It echoed off the walls of the city. I wept unashamedly and so did everyone else. There were no Communists any longer. We were Hungarians, and we were ready to die."

The crowd, by this time 300,000 strong, began converging in Parliament Square, chanting, "Imre Nagy to government!" When Imre Nagy appeared, he was cheered, but when he began his speech with the salutation, "Dear Comrades," he was whistled down. Nagy told them the historical situation was complicated and everyone should go home and wait for developments. The whistling started again, and Nagy, no judge of historical situations, asked, "Why do you whistle at me?" Someone shouted, "We do not whistle at you, but at your words." There was a long, dramatic silence and then Nagy asked everyone to sing the national anthem, leading the singing himself.

At this high point of patriotic emotion, messengers came with the news that Gero was talking on the radio. Ferenc Kocsis went with part of the crowd to Radio Budapest, where the AVH were throwing tear-gas grenades. He saw a young boy--"just a little fellow with an open shirt and an old jacket, no overcoat and no hat"--pick up one of the grenades and throw it back. The AVH panicked, and the mob surged forward. Ferenc heard a burst of machine-gun fire. There was a sudden silence and then a roar went up, soft at first, and then like thunder. Says Ferenc: "I saw, being passed back over the heads of the crowd, a dead woman of about 45. I found myself screaming with rage. I was like an animal." A people's wrath is a terrifying thing. That night, the next day, and for many days afterwards, the people who had suffered so much under the AVH pursued the AVH men, flushed them from their hiding places, shot, garroted, and hanged them by the heels from trees and lampposts.

When Ferenc went out to Kilian barracks to get a rifle, he was told that it was more important for him to record what was going on in film. The director of his film company refused to give him a camera and film, but Ferenc broke into the warehouse, commandeered both. From then on, until Nov. 3, he and his cameraman recorded the battle. He took pictures everywhere, in the streets, from the cellars, from speeding vehicles.

Cursed Film. They had 12,000 ft. of film in the can by the beginning of November and sent it to the laboratory, by that time under rebel control, for processing. Some of the rebel leaders wanted it sent out to the West to be developed, but Ferenc insisted on its being done under his supervision. He curses himself for that decision. On Nov. 4, the day the Soviet army came charging back into Budapest, one of the first places they captured was the film laboratory.

Ferenc awoke on Nov. 4 to the sound of heavy Russian artillery. Hearing that the rebels were handing out weapons at the Piarist school, he went there and collected a rifle, two hand grenades and 40 rounds of ammunition. He took five gallons of gasoline from his father's garage and went to look for someone to fight with. Says he: "At the corner of Baross Street and the Great Ring, I went into a restaurant and found eight Freedom Fighters. They looked all right, so I joined them." Together they barricaded Baross Street and cut out an escape route in the cellar of the restaurant. "It was a funny time," says Ferenc. "The owner of the restaurant and everyone else had left, leaving his wine bottles on the shelf. Several were empty, but beside them was a stack of money, the exact price of each bottle."

The Freedom Fighters filled the empty bottles with gasoline and corked them with table napkins, making what they called "benzine flashes." About midnight a woman reported that there was a Russian tank by itself in Jozsef Street. Ferenc and an apprentice Freedom Fighter (aged 13) went out to get it.

Ferenc and the boy entered a house at the corner of the dark street and worked their way across rooftops and down ladders until they came to the house before which the tank was parked. Says Ferenc: "I was very frightened. Here I was with a 13-year-old boy and a bottle of gasoline." Ferenc put a handkerchief in the mouth of the bottle, tipped the bottle up to soak it with gas, set the handkerchief alight and dropped the "benzine flash" on the rear end of the tank. Says he: "An enormous flame shot up, and the whole street looked like day. There was a terrible explosion, and the front part of the roof started to cave in. The boy and I ran to the chimney at the back of the roof. Russians on top of the roof across the street from us--I hadn't even seen them--started shooting. I said to myself. 'This is death' and felt pretty calm." Ferenc and the boy got away. At the restaurant Ferenc took a big drink of the restaurant owner's wine, left him some money, went home and slept for 36 hours.

Ferenc Kocsis was not quite sure why he acted the way he did. His father had been grabbed by the Russians after the war and forced to work in arctic coal mines until his health broke down. "Some nights," Ferenc recalled, "he would wake us all by shouting in his sleep. 'No! No! Don't beat me!' and 'Set me free!' But my father never said anything in public. He stayed out of politics, and he bore his hatred in silence. That's the worst kind of hate, you know." Husky Ferenc had shouldered his way through the Communist bureaucracy just the same, and had dreamed of becoming a motion-picture director. On Oct. 23 he had acted out of sheer impulse, emotion, and it was with something of the same feeling that he one day decided the revolution was over, and beat it for the Austrian border. Last month in Vienna he was ashamed of this decision, declaring that he wanted to go back and carry on the fight. Said he: "What else can a good Hungarian do?"

Peter Szanto

The Budapest which Ferenc Kocsis left behind was a ghost city. Streetcar lines were torn up, pavement stones had been piled into barricades, great buildings had been reduced to rubble, and fires still burned in others. There was not a whole pane of glass in the city. Nor was there a single Red star to be seen, or a Soviet monument. Even the boots of the gigantic statue of Stalin had been smashed to bits. The monstrous leonine head, spat on and befilthed, had long since disappeared.

Somehow this seemed a perfectly natural background for Peter Szanto. Short, powerfully built, with a freckled face and a mop of disarrayed red hair, Peter was a product of Budapest's war-battered slums. He was one of those people, men, women, even children, who came up from nowhere to carry on the freedom fight after many like Janos Feher had died, and some like Ferenc Kocsis had left.

A truckdriver who worked 96 hours a week to keep his wife and two small children from starvation in a one-room apartment, Peter had his own view of Communism. Says he: "You need a special kind of character to be a Communist and rob the workers." Peter saw the Communist bosses riding around in big cars, bawling out the workers for being lazy, but it never occurred to him to join the Communist ranks. "If I'd been a Communist, I would have been a traitor to my buddies. Anyway I would have had to go to a lot of meetings, and I didn't want that. I hate politics."

Peter had skipped his morning meal to meet the last installment on the furniture. He was feeling surly. When a friend told him that a demonstration was in the making, he was against it. "But then I didn't like this way of life, and I was mad and so I said I'd go along." Peter was among the crowd at Parliament House, and later he heard the AVH shooting people at Radio Budapest. When somebody said get some arms, he went along.

At Kilian barracks there was such a big crowd that Peter was about to quit and go home when someone called for a truck driver, and he came forward. Peter drove "a tall colonel who seemed to be in charge" to an arms depot, called the Lamp Factory, where they loaded cases of rifles and machine guns. The revolutionary fever caught Peter up at this point, and he was swept into the battle for Radio Budapest, shooting from the rooftops.

Bread & Sweat. Reporting back to the tall colonel, who turned out to be Colonel Pal Maleter (later Defense Minister in the ten-day government of Imre Nagy), Peter at last ate some bread and tea. "Guys were sitting around everywhere. Many were sleeping on the floor." Sweating it out, Peter had time to think about the consequences of what he had done. He decided to go home. He told his wife he had been working all this time. But when he heard the official radio call the Freedom Fighters "counterrevolutionaries and fascists," he knew there would be reprisals, and he returned to the barracks, determined to fight it out. At the barracks, with everyone expecting the worst, the tall colonel told them that they were not counter-revolutionaries but only people who wanted truth and freedom. When the Communist radio announced that zero hour for surrender had passed, and then extended the time limit, everyone suddenly laughed and started shaking hands and hitting people on the back. "We knew we were strong and the government was weak." said Peter.

Three days later Peter Szanto, full-fledged Freedom Fighter, fought in the biggest tank battle of the revolution. When word reached the barracks that Russian tanks were coming, the colonel ordered complete quiet. The tanks came close to the barracks wall, but no one stirred. Some infantry appeared and shot up the building, but the Freedom Fighters did not return the fire. Finally there were 20 tanks, some 75 infantrymen, a truck, and an armored car outside the barracks. "Colonel Maleter came and looked down," recalls Peter Szanto. "He picked up a small nitroglycerin bottle and threw it at the truck. The truck disappeared in one big roar. Then we all threw nitroglycerin bottles and benzine flashes and used machine pistols on the infantry. It was a fine trick. We killed the infantry, got the truck, the armored car, and four of the tanks in about five minutes."

After that, morale at the barracks was skyhigh. When citizens called up to report the presence of Russian tanks or the whereabouts of the AVH, the Freedom Fighters forayed out to do battle. A week later the Soviet army returned in strength and tried to blast the Freedom Fighters out of Kilian barracks. Peter Szanto was one of the last to leave. He came out through a hole in the back wall after a delegation of local people had pleaded with the Fighters to stop the battle because the neighborhood was in ruins. When he reached home, Peter learned that the AVH had been around asking questions about him. His wife had said that he was at work, but at the truck depot he learned that they had already checked there. Tough little Peter Szanto knew that he was a wanted man. He is a wanted man today.

Lazlo Szabo

Before the Russians came back in tenfold strength, Budapest had its famous five days of freedom. There was heady talk of quitting the satellite Warsaw Pact and proclaiming neutrality. The romantic Hungarians had gone too far: back came the Russians in ruthless array. Out went Nagy, in came thin-lipped Quisling Janos Kadar. The Russian tanks and infantry were now too much for the street fighters. This is where the Hungarian revolution might have ended but for factory workers like Lazlo Szabo, foreman of a textile mill at Vac, near Budapest.

The first outbreak in Budapest, back on Oct. 23, had created great excitement in Vac. Lazlo hurried home from the factory. "A big argument started right away," he recalls. "I said a great change is coming and that we must do something about it. My father-in-law disagreed. He said everyone should lie low, or the AVH would get us. One of my wife's brothers-in-law said, 'It is madness to turn against Russian power. It will crush you.' Then my wife, who is better educated than the rest of us, said: 'Well, I am sure that if we start something, the West will come to help us. It will give them a chance to intervene, and it will show the world that our representative at the U.N. and the Russians are lying when they say the Hungarian people are contented. What has happened to us? Have Hungarians become cowards?' "

Next day Lazlo Szabo joined demonstrations which tore down the Soviet monuments, cut the Red stars out of the flags, and freed political prisoners in the Vac prison.

Lazlo and his friends heard Radio Budapest, in rebel hands on Oct. 27, tell all factories to set up workers' councils. Lazlo was one of 14 elected by secret ballot at his mill. "I thought to myself, 'My God! What is happening? Are we really practicing democracy?' I felt like crying."

"There were happy meetings everywhere," says Lazlo. Everything went well until the day that the Soviet army attacked again. The workers got 6,000 rifles from the Hungarian army, but when 37 Soviet tanks and armored cars suddenly descended on Vac, there was no resistance.

The Russians had no food, and the Vac people gave them bread and a little meat, for which the soldiers were grateful. Says Lazlo: "Our people were not afraid of the Russians, and talked to them. Some of the Russians thought they were in East Germany and that they would soon meet American 'fascists' who had invaded the country. Other troops thought they were in the Suez Canal zone. Our people explained what was going on and what the Hungarian objectives were and what the Russians had done in Budapest. There was one captain who listened to all of this. He got redder and redder. We thought he was angry at us. Suddenly he threw his hat down and said: 'Bulganin and Khrushchev would rape their own mothers!' He was very angry, but not with us."

The Black Flags. From Budapest came orders from the new quisling government: back to the factories. About 60% of the men in Lazlo's mill showed up. But when they heard that the Central Workers' Council in Budapest had begun a general strike, the Vac workers struck too. A mass meeting of 5,000 demanded the reinstatement of Premier Nagy and the withdrawal of the Soviet army. The AVH rounded up members of the Vac workers' council. In answer, workers carrying black flags demonstrated silently, demanding their return, and the leaders were returned. "The strike," concludes Workers' Council Leader Lazlo Szabo, "is the ultimate weapon."

It is the leather-coated Hungarian worker, slow to anger, but now sullenly planting his ill-shod feet on his native ground, who is winning concessions, if not the freedom the intellectuals dreamed of, from the Russians. But Lazlo Szabo is not happy. His pretty wife dared to go to Budapest and has not been heard from since. Friends say she was last seen on her way to the West station to try to get a train to Vac. The West railroad station is one of the points where the Russians assembled Hungarians for deportation.

Lazlo Szabo, Peter Szanto, Ferenc Kocsis, Janos Feher--these are not their real names--are, each in his own way, representative of those anonymous thousands, many of them dead, who fought for their country's freedom against the most brutal tyranny on earth. Taken together, they epitomize the Hungarian Freedom Fighter, the man who made history leap forward in 1956--the Man of the Year.

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