All Hungary Supported the Insurgents

Our pilot taxis the plane to the airport building. I can make out a group of people near a blue bus, with white flags and red crosses; we have brought medicine and blood plasma . . .

In the distance we hear machine-guns. A heavy tank drives in; from another side an armoured car: soldiers with red-starred helmets jump out and surround our plane. Light machine-guns are pointed at us. The soldiers' faces are covered with dirt; they are unshaven and sweating. My heart beats. Why are they pointing their weapons at me? An officer in a leather coat leaps out from the tank and explains that they have come to ensure the security of the plane . . . I look at the faces of the Soviet soldiers. I see not only tiredness on their faces, not only the burden of days spent in fighting and under fire, but their eyes express insecurity, something uncomfortable, something which suggests how ill at ease they feel in their present role. It is not only my impression: my friend R. feels it too: the Russian uncertainty, and the stiff silent hatred of a group of Hungarians . . .

We had left Warsaw convinced that Hungary had become peaceful, and here before reaching Budapest, we hear about the war, about 'front lines'. We hear shooting. E. takes me aside towards a young woman in a dark blue coat over a white nurse's uniform. The woman speaks slowly, but with obvious emotion:

'You are a journalist—you simply don't have the right to lie! It is a lie that fascists and counter-revolutionaries are fighting in the city. We are fighting, our nation is fighting, for real democracy, for real socialism, for freedom and independence! You will be convinced about this yourself. Our aims are the same as those which your own nation put forward . . .'

The woman (a surgeon, as I learned later) goes off into the Red Cross bus. A big black motor-car of our Polish Embassy is waiting for us; we follow the bus. There is deadly silence in our car.

In front of us is the road to Budapest. At the Soviet post, heavy weapons, nests of machine-guns. All the soldiers are in position, with their fingers on the trigger. An officer with a small machine-gun and several soldiers come forward with their guns pointed at us. 'From the Polish Embassy?' He takes a rapid look at the passengers. We can proceed. Two kilometres further at a cross-road, we are stopped again. Another armed checkpoint. 'Lengyel (Pole)?' Friendly smiling faces. 'Poles are friends. Poles are brothers.' This happens again and again before our car enters the streets of a workers' suburb.

Long walls of empty factories. Little houses in front of which a few people hover, ready to hide. Something uncanny in the air. An atmosphere which I cannot yet define. Is it horror, fear, hatred or despair? . . . Behind the iron gates of one of the industrial works, a group of armed people. They explain that they are workers, revolutionaries who are defending their factories . . . At one of the insurgent posts we are advised to take a longer road because on the Ullei Street there is heavy fighting going on between Hungarian soldiers, defending their barracks, and Soviet tanks . . . From windows and balconies heavy wet flags are drooping, white-green-red, and also black colours of mourning. The symbol of freedom and the symbol of death, the price of freedom.

Broke human minds and hearts

The national flags have a jagged hole in the middle. A few days ago there was a coat of arms there. Why? . . . The answer is cruel but I must face it. The coat of arms which was cut out was the symbol of a régime which was not a régime of freedom and of human happiness, although those aims presided at its birth. I don't know the details. I cannot yet give a full analysis of the past ten or twelve years in Hungary, but I know that it was a cruel period. I know that Stalinist terror broke human minds and hearts. I know that freedom was transformed into slavery, truth into falsehood and hypocrisy. I know that the noblest of all ideas has been polluted with mud and blood, and that crimes were hidden by hollow phrases.

The system which was proudly called 'people's democracy' had definitely less in common either with people or with democracy than in any country. I know about this from many personal accounts, from deeply anguished letters of Hungarian friends; I know it from the tears of Laszlo Rajk's widow; I feel it from the terrifying coldness of these flags with the hole in the middle . . . Here is the square, spacious and empty, with high houses on all sides. In the middle, a block of granite with two enormous bronze boots on it, and above them a fluttering white-green-red flag. There is something deeply moving in the sight which contains the tragedy and the greatness of these days. I see it as the symbol of the Hungarian Revolution . . . This happened during the evening of the 23rd, when the crowd, enraged at the criminal murder of young people by AVH troops, seized arms. Those who called for democracy, freedom, socialism, were murdered by police machine-guns . . .

A good which did not exist

It is not easy to write about all this. For so many years I believed in a good which did not exist, in a nobility which turned out to be only depravity, in a greatness which was nothing but vileness. To understand now does not ease one's conscience. The pain, the anguish, the anger are all the greater . . . Thus the people smashed the statue, breaking the symbol of slavery and wild oppression and crime. The statue resisted. But the man of bronze fell . . . This is the fall of a new Bastille. Here, on its ruins, we see the flag of freedom which opens the road towards the future of a socialism freed from lies and vices, from a system which falsely paraded as socialism. We have only one thought: the tanks should vanish as soon as possible from this road. Those tanks should, after all, be defending freedom and not strangling it with gun-fire.

Another turn, a street full of autumn trees, a street named after Gorky. What would you say, Comrade Maxim: 'Man—how proud a word'?

Whole nation supports insurgents

One thing emerges from all the chaotic information—the whole nation is on the side of the insurgents. The division is clear: the nation on one side, and on the other the Stalinist faction of the government and the AVH. There are thousands of communists among the insurgents. The Hungarian Army is either neutral or takes the side of the Revolution. The workers have occupied their own plants. The whole working-class youth and the students are on the barricades. The Soviet Army was called in by Gerö.

'It would be criminal to call us fascists or counter-revolutionaries,' shouts T. on the telephone. T. is a communist, an intellectual, a man of great heart and keen mind. In the voice of R. there is a pained sadness and anguish. 'I fought in Spain. I fought in the underground against Hitler. And now I am called a counter-revolutionary. Judge for yourself . . .'

I shall have to get more details. But one thing is certain. One cannot talk to one's own nation in the language of guns, and foreign guns at that, when the nation demands the recognition of its inalienable right to freedom and justice . . .

(Po Prostu, November 25, 1956)

'Each word was a reproach'

I spent the night with Hungarian friends. In the room more than thirty people were sprawled about on improvised couches. I knew some of them. The small man next to me was a steel worker; another was a skilled worker in the shipyards; there was a plumber, a book-keeper and a young medical student.

I asked them: 'But what do you really want? What are you fighting for?' About fifteen people answered my question. The answers were different, but the essential themes were the same: a free and independent Hungary, a country in which nobody will land in prison just because of a bureaucrat's fancy. They want a Hungary free of 75,000 irresponsible AVH agents. They want a Hungary where you can talk freely to your neighbour, without being afraid that he might be a police informer. They want a Hungary where power will belong to the people, and not to a small élite abusing the slogans of socialism.

Did they want socialism?

The steel worker answered fiercely: 'We want justice, freedom, truth. If socialism doesn't give that to us, we don't want socialism.'

Each word I felt as a reproach . . . These people identified the system in which they live with socialism. The shipworker then said: 'We are going to build out own socialism.' But the book-keeper was sceptical. 'Ideas are beautiful, but people are capable of spoiling everything.'

'We are not going to allow anybody to spoil anything now,' protested the medical student.

'And fascism,' I ask. 'Aren't you afraid of fascism?'

Everybody shouted, but I understood the words of the student. 'Nobody wants fascism . . . We won't allow it.'

(Po Prostu, December 9, 1956)