The Bridge at Andau

by James A. Michener

  This brings us to the fourth, and outer, wave disturbing the once-placid lake of world communism, and it is this wave that washes the American shore. It touches all nations—Great Britain, Brazil, New Zealand, Ceylon—and its effect throughout the world is great. But America is most deeply affected by this wave.

  When the patriots in Budapest struck, we were unprepared. We neither knew what to do, nor had the will to do it. We stood before the world in very shabby moral clothes, and should this happen again we might have to surrender our position of world leadership. For if the Russians lost severely in Budapest, we also lost. Any American who served at Andau experienced a psychological shock which hit him in four predictable impacts.

  First, he was deeply shaken by the courage of the people he saw streaming toward him. Many Americans stepped aside in silent deference when Hungarians came out of the swamps and passed them. During the days when refugees had to crawl through deep mud or swim the canal, Americans would study them with awe as they came forth resilient and laughing, ready for their next test. To be in the presence of raw courage is apt to be a humbling experience.

  Second, after this initial shock, the sensitive American had to ask himself, “Why was my country unable to help these brave people?” This question, of course, permitted several reasonably acceptable answers. Americans could argue, “Everyone knows we are a peace-loving nation which abhors war. We have told everyone that.” But then came the gnawing doubt that although we loved peace for ourselves, we had perhaps encouraged the Hungarians to abandon that peace for themselves, and that somehow we had profited illegally from their action. And that is about as ugly a doubt as a man can entertain. So one next reasoned, “The Hungarians had only themselves to blame. Why did they ever start their revolution in the midst of a presidential election? They should have known we would be hamstrung.” But then came the other gnawing doubt which reminded us that for years we had been hoping for just such an uprising, and regardless of elections, we should have been prepared for this one. Finally, the American could point to the map of Europe and say, “You can see our position. Hungary has no seaport through which we could have poured supplies. And our airplanes could not have flown over the sovereign states of Austria and Yugoslavia. There was really no way we could have helped, even if we had wanted to.” The confusion of this argument was always self-apparent, for Americans usually offered it with rising voices, ending in the rhetorical question, “See?” And so this second portion of the chain reaction ended in embarrassment.

  Third, the Hungarians, sensing American confusion, were surprisingly studious about putting American friends at ease. “We know you couldn’t have helped us,” the refugees would say consolingly, as if it were the Americans who needed reassurance. Sometimes an especially sensitive Hungarian would reason, “We know you would have helped us if you could have found a way. On the radio you were always so powerful in your words of encouragement. We are sorry our revolution was so poorly timed, but we are proud if we were able to help you.” Americans at Andau, like those who happened to be in Budapest during the revolt, can all cite Hungarian friends who said without sarcasm, “Don’t worry about it. We understand why you’re powerless to help us. But we’re glad to fight for your cause.” In time, Americans took refuge in these statements and some of the embarrassment of shock two dissolved, being replaced by a feeling of great warmth toward the Hungarians who had lost so much, so gracefully. Reviewing this unreal third wave of shock, I can only say that I shared the reactions of an American who observed, “One of the most startling aspects of the revolution was that the Hungarians, deserted by the world, ended by being mad at nobody.”

  But if Hungarians were not lamenting in public, they were privately circulating among themselves sharp observations on what had happened, and occasionally an American was brought face to face with harsh and agonizing facts. I first heard these underground Hungarian comments from a twenty-six-year-old refugee named Ferenc Kobol. Originally he swore me to secrecy, for he did not want me to portray Hungarians as crybabies, but I was so impressed by his comments that I not only persuaded him to absolve me of my pledge but also to write down in his own words a summary of what he said, for I wanted to quote him exactly.

  He said, “Of course Hungarians are bitter about the lack of interest you Americans showed in our struggle for freedom. For years now, as part of your battle with communism for the possession of men’s minds, you have been giving us hope and assurance. You have been saying to us, ‘You are not forgotten. America’s ultimate aim is to help you win your freedom. To achieve this we will support you to the best of our ability.’

  “America spent millions of dollars and every known psychological trick to bring this message to us behind the iron curtain. Your Voice of America broadcast fifty hours a day of freedom programs. You used seventy frequencies and sometimes I would hear you from Tangiers or Munich or Salonika. I can remember the thrill we got when we heard that you were outfitting one of your Coast Guard cutters, the Courier, to dodge jamming stations. You said the Courier ‘would punch deeper holes in the Iron Curtain.’

  “Then you set up Radio Free Europe in 1950 and you got right down to the business of freedom. You had eleven separate stations which broadcast one thousand hours of encouragement a week from Frankfort, Munich and Lisbon. RFE told us many times, ‘Our purpose is to keep opposition to communism alive among the people of the slave states behind the iron curtain. We want to help such people gradually to make themselves strong enough to throw off the Soviet yoke.’

  “How did you help us to grow strong? You constantly reassured us that we were not forgotten by the west. You said that the fact that so many American citizens supported RFE proved that your nation was with us. We believed you.

  “Next, to make your message even more clear, you began to launch balloons to fly over our country bearing leaflets and aluminum medals. I got one with a Liberty Bell on it and the legend ‘Hungarians for Freedom—All the Free World for Hungarians.’

  “These balloons were very important to our psychological reactions. I remember thinking at the time, ‘At last something tangible. Something other than words. If America could reach us with these aluminum medals, why couldn’t they reach us with parachute supplies if a revolution started. Obviously, America intends to help us.’

  “In 1952 all of your radio stations broadcast over and over the promises made in your election campaign. We were told that America was going to roll back the iron curtain. You would stimulate a desire for freedom among the eight hundred million people under communist domination. We were assured many times that your President would find ways to make the Russians want peace. The speeches of your leaders were quoted to us day after day.

  “Then young Hungarians who had been abroad began mysteriously to appear among us and they promised, ‘If trouble starts, don’t worry. America will be on hand to give you support. But you don’t have to wait for the other side to begin. Do something yourself. After all, you’ve got to show the world what you are worth. You’ve got to prove that Hungary deserves the freedom you claim for her.’

  “We were told that in 1953 America was putting aside one hundred million dollars to support activities against communist regimes in the satellite countries. We thought that this meant you were actively on our side.

  “Then what happened? When Germans in East Berlin rioted against the Russians, your stations told us each detail. This year when the Poles rioted against the Russians in Poznan, we were again fed the full propaganda of freedom. Should we be blamed for believing what we heard? You must put yourself in our place. We had no honest newspapers, no honest radio stations of our own. We could rely only upon what you told us, and you told us to love freedom.

  “Do you know why Hungarians like me are so bitter against the United States? For six years you fed us this propaganda. For six years the Russians trampled us in the mud. But when we rose in rebellion for the very things you told us to fight for, how many Americans stepped forth to help
us? Not one. Who did join our side? Russian troops. How many American tanks helped us? Not one. What tanks did join us in our fight for freedom? Russian tanks. This is a terrible indictment.

  “But what drove us almost to desperation was not your failure to support us with materiel. It was your failure to speak up boldly on our behalf. My nation died in silence. Could not one clear voice in America have spoken forth in late October? Mr. Bulganin spoke out about Suez, and England and France retreated. There was a ten-day pause in our revolution when one daring American voice might have made Bulganin retreat. It never came. There was silence along the Danube, and in the United Nations. Days later, when only the dead could hear, America finally spoke. It was a message of condolence.”

  Ferenc Kobol was by no means a wild-eyed young revolutionist. He was a thoughtful young man with few illusions and a nice ability to calculate what could and could not be attained. He understood America and said, “Hungarians are disappointed in America, but you hear no one say, ‘We should never again follow American leadership.’ We know we can be free only through your agency. I don’t know how you are going to accomplish this, but I do appreciate that in an age of the hydrogen bomb, to start a world war merely to salvage Hungary would be unthinkable. We have got to rely upon the Untied States, and we trust that your President will find a way to accomplish all of our freedoms—Hungary’s, Poland’s, Germany’s. But I think your people must study two problems very carefully.” And he proceeded to make two points that are frightening in their clarity and ominous in their portent.

  First he said, “No Hungarian is angry at Radio Free Europe. We wanted to have our hopes kept alive. Probably we believed too deeply what was not intended by the broadcasters to be taken seriously. The wrong was not with Radio Free Europe. It was partly our fault for trusting in words. It was partly America’s fault for thinking that words can be used loosely. Words like ‘freedom,’ ‘struggle for national honor,’ ‘rollback,’ and ‘liberation’ have meanings. They stand for something. Believe me when I say that you cannot tell Hungarians or Bulgarians or Poles every day for six years to love liberty and then sit back philosophically and say, ‘But the Hungarians and Bulgarians and Poles mustn’t do anything about liberty. They must remember that we’re only using words.’ Such words, to a man in chains, are not merely words. They are the weapons whereby he can break his chains.”

  Ferenc Kobol took an honorable part in the freedom movement within his country. He risked his life to attain freedom, and he said, “I was motivated primarily by words.” He added, “If America wants to flood Eastern and Central Europe with these words, it must acknowledge an ultimate responsibility for them. Otherwise you are inciting nations to commit suicide.”

  Americans, challenged by critics like Kobol, tended to be angry at Radio Free Europe for having broadcast to the world what had merely been intended as campaign oratory for home consumption; whereas Hungarians tended to be angry, not at Radio Free Europe for having told them what leading Americans were announcing as national policy, but at Americans in the United States for never having intended to support what was, after all, mere oratory.

  Kobol’s second warning to America warrants even more careful attention. “In the case of Hungary you had several good excuses for not acting. There was a political campaign, you had no access to Hungary and you hadn’t realized that nations were taking your words seriously. But when trouble starts in East Germany or Poland you will no longer have those excuses, for there you will have immediate access, you will not be involved in an election, and you will have been warned that men do take words seriously. You had better be thinking, ‘What will we do if Germans and Poles start a revolution?’ Because the kind of words you have been sending forth, the words America has always stood for, are the kind that men want to believe.”

  The initial American performance in relation to the Hungarian revolution was not good. I have explained why Hungarians and Americans alike could excuse our failure to act, and even our failure to speak, but it is difficult to explain away some of our later behavior regarding refugees. We dangled before some of the most dedicated fighters for freedom the world has seen since the days of George Washington the possibility of entrance into the Untied States as if this were a privilege one step more sanctified than entry into heaven. We turned the job of selecting the refugees we would accept over to voluntary religious groups who stipulated the most extraordinary requirements and made themselves the laughingstock of Vienna by sending out notices that no divorced persons could enter the United States, since such people had obviously broken with religious teaching, and America wanted no one who was not openly devout. The countries of Europe, by contrast, backed steam-heated trains up to camps and said, “England or France or Switzerland will take every man, woman or child who can find a seat on this train.”

  When our ridiculous policies had caused much bitterness in Austria, an official of our government held a press conference in which he pointed out, “We may have been tardy in accepting refugees, but we have given every Hungarian who crossed the border a warm blanket.” This so outraged one listener that he asked, “How many refugees have there been so far?”

  “Ninety-six thousand.”

  “How many has America taken?”

  “Five hundred.”

  “How many has Switzerland taken?”

  “Four thousand.”

  There were no more questions, but soon the American gates were opened, and those of us along the border could at least hold our heads up. But even then the American reaction to Hungary couldn’t seem to get straightened out. We rushed our Hungarians to Camp Kilmer and processed them under such chaotic conditions that the New York Times (November 28, 1956) had to protest: “The reception and housing of the Hungarian refugees—at least in the New York area—is a disgrace to the country. If ever there has been a case of bungling and bad judgment in handling this relatively small group of people, whose courage has fired the hearts of freedom-loving people everywhere, Camp Kilmer takes the prize.

  “Everybody has gotten into the act. It is an Army operation from the moment the planes touch down, so that the very first taste of American life for the refugees is uniforms and regimentation all over again. The refugees are taken by Army buses to the barren, desolate acres of barracks at Kilmer, then cordoned off by military police. Their living quarters are as primitive as many a D. P. camp of Europe—numbered barracks. Though the great private and religious agencies, with their years of experience of handling refugees, have representatives at the camps, they have to work desperately against Army and bureaucratic red tape to find the families in their barracks, to welcome them, to give them some feeling of civilian America, even to interview them in order to find sponsors, homes and jobs for them.

  “Why couldn’t New Yorkers have found a more humane way to welcome the refugees?… What happened to New York’s good intentions on the way? Why was this turned into a show for the Army and bureaucracy, instead of its being the great, voluntary, civic operation it should have been—and can still become?”

  One story of the Camp Kilmer debacle caused much amusement in Europe. We were told that when the first refugees arrived, some of them after having fought Russian tanks for ten days, having walked over a hundred miles, and having crept through the swamps and swum the canal, an official stepped before them at the camp and said, in resounding tones, “Now I want to tell you a few things about freedom.”

  A Hungarian in one of the depots asked, “Did he speak from a balcony?”

  In the first awed days after the revolution a Polish newspaperman reviewed what had happened. He was ashamed that his country had been able to do so little to help the Hungarians, and he was embittered that neighboring Czechoslovakia had actually tried to hamper the Hungarians and help the Russians. He wrote, “Sadly we must admit that the Hungarians acted like Poles. The Poles acted like Czechs. And the Czechs acted like swine.” An observer added, “But the Americans didn’t act at all.”

  At this poi
nt the American who had been following his nation’s performance was bewildered, but he was saved by a fourth psychological shift: the recovery of national self-respect. For the United States government finally came forth with a program both vigorous and generous. Legal restrictions which had hitherto impeded the flow of refugees into America were suspended or ignored. Our embassy in Vienna speeded up the flow of paper work required for emigration. Emergency relief organizations—Catholic, Jewish, Protestant and lay—reached a truce among themselves and worked literally twenty-four hours each day reuniting families and insuring them entry into the United States. Aid societies in America sent into Austria a torrent of blankets, money, medicines and food. Our educational foundations provided both scholarships in American colleges and badly needed cash grants to overloaded Austrian institutions which had offered haven to Hungarian scholars.

  Then, when it seemed as if the United States had done all it could, there occurred the Christmas visit of Vice-President Nixon, who cut additional red tape, reassured the Austrians of our continued support of their efforts, and spurred our own government to further generosity in accepting refugees. A massive air lift was organized; Camp Kilmer was transformed into a warm-hearted reception center, and across America thousands of families who had never seen a Hungarian before suddenly opened their doors and welcomed strangers to whom they could not speak a single word. When the United States finally got organized, it behaved rather well, and by mid-March, 1957, had accepted over thirty thousand Hungarian refugees.