By this time Gyorgy Szabo had discovered that being a member of the party really didn’t help him very much. He was forced to work harder than ever before in his life, for less money, and with less chance to make a protest. Nor did being a good communist protect him from AVO beatings. It didn’t get him vacations on Lake Balaton. It didn’t get him a better house.
“In fact,” he asked himself one day, “what does it get me?”
Only more work. Sometimes two or three nights a week he would have to stay in the plant after work to hear long harangues about the glories of communism. “Always things were going to be better in the future,” he says ruefully. “What made me angry was that we were always harangued by men who weren’t doing any work themselves.”
Then there were the enforced protest meetings. “We marched for the Rosenberg trial, for the workers of Paris, for the Koreans. During the Korean War we had to contribute four extra days a month of unpaid work to help the Chinese communist volunteers, and we protested against the American use of germ warfare.
“There were some weeks,” Szabo says, “when I hardly saw my family. And when I did see them, I had hardly a forint to give them. For all this work I received only 1,000 forints a month, not enough for a suit of clothes—I could never even save enough money ahead to buy one suit of clothes.” Gyorgy Szabo’s meager funds—his rewards from communism—went mostly to buy his children’s clothing.
Inside Gyorgy’s family a quiet protest had begun against such a defrauding system. It had been launched accidentally by Gyorgy’s wife, who had begun to ask questions. “Why is it?” she first asked. “You’re a good communist. You attend party meetings and march in parades. Why can’t we buy in the good stores?”
“You can buy anywhere you like,” Gyorgy said. “Only have enough money.”
“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 competitors 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 damning 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 classical 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 hell 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 cr
ossed 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 accumulated 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 assigned 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 repetitious 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 shells ripped through the Rakosi Metal Works, Gyorgy Szabo found himself in the middle of the prolonged and bloody 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 sturdy 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 analyze 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 indust
rial 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.”
The Bridge at Andau Page 16