I woke up the next morning, wondering what extraordinary events would happen now, but over the next week, life on the streets returned to normal. The trams started running again and people returned to work. But not everything was the way it had been before. A new government was formed by Imre Nagy, who became prime minister again. Political parties that had long been disbanded came back to life, and dozens of newspapers sprang up to publicize their beliefs. It was as if the gradual thaw that had slowly been taking place over the past couple of years had suddenly turned into a flood.
We could hear Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America on our radio. Previously, these stations had been regularly jammed and we could make out only fragments of phrases behind the static of the jamming. Both these stations gave us a lot more information about what was going on in Budapest than Radio Budapest did, but more important, they gave the impression that what happened over the last few days was getting attention all over the world. The announcers were calling it “the Hungarian revolution.”
These days were exciting, but they had their scary side, too. Not too far from our house, I ran into a crowd of people craning their necks to see something happening in a side street. I joined them. I saw civilians, all with determined looks on their faces, armed with rifles and walking toward an apartment house. A small group broke off and went inside; the rest remained outside the front door. People next to me explained that they had located a member of the security police who was trying to hide in that house. The thought crossed my mind: How did they really know that the person they were hunting was, in fact, a member of the security police? What if he wasn't? I didn't wait around to see what happened.
A few days later, Radio Budapest announced that it was going to air a speech by Cardinal Mindszenty. The Communist regime had imprisoned him some years earlier as a representative of the reactionary clergy. The radio said that a Hungarian army unit had freed him a few days earlier. Even though Mind-szenty had been in prison for years, he was still the top-ranking religious figure in the country, and his release seemed very significant. That night, Cardinal Mindszenty gave a speech in which he expressed his support for the revolution. Although there was nothing explicitly threatening in his speech, I found the speech vaguely ominous. It reminded me of when I first saw the hammer and sickle cut out of the Hungarian flag. Like that act, this speech signaled another escalation in the revolution.
I had mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand, I was happy to see the Communist regime toppled. On the other hand, I worried about where all this liberation might lead. The war years were not that far in the past. I went to bed filled with uneasiness and anxiety.
Early the next morning, I woke up to the sound of wooden planks being dropped. It sounded familiar, but it took me a few minutes to think why. Then I remembered the sound from eleven years ago. It was the sound of heavy artillery fire.
My heart started pounding. I jumped out of bed and ran into the Big Room. It was still dark outside, but my parents were already up and wrapped in their bathrobes. My father was intently fiddling with the radio. No one said anything. We all knew what was going on. We were just waiting to hear official confirmation.
An announcement came over Radio Budapest. Soon, the announcer said, Imre Nagy was going to address the nation. We dressed quickly so that we could stay glued to the radio. Imre Nagy came on and gave a very brief address. He said that Soviet troops had attacked before dawn, but he assured us that the government was still functioning. That struck me as a bit dubious. I continued to hear the planks thudding louder and louder. The artillery fire was getting closer and closer. Nagy's statement struck me more like a call for help to the outside world.
As it got light outside, a strange rumble approached on Ki-raly Street. I ran back to my room and flung open the window so I could see what was happening. Before I had a chance to lean out, I froze. A vehicle that looked like a tank without a cover was coming to a stop right in front of our house. Russian soldiers inside the shell were manning machine guns pointed in all directions. I heard shouting in Russian, and one of the machine guns slowly turned toward my window. I was too frightened to move. I stared down, petrified, as the muzzle swung toward me. There was a moment when it seemed to stop, then the machine gun continued to turn, moving past my window and scanning the other apartments. There was some more shouting in Russian, and then the vehicle rumbled on.
When my heart started beating again, I went back to my parents' room and in a shaky voice told them what had happened. We decided it was time to go to the cellar. I had a sour taste in my mouth. I wanted to say, “Not again.”
We packed a bag of belongings and some food and headed down. Other tenants were doing the same thing. Without firing a shot, the troop carrier had jolted the entire house.
The air raid shelter had long since been dismantled, so we settled down on some wooden stools in the coal bin allotted to our apartment, wrapping blankets around ourselves and hanging more blankets around to try to make a warm corner. Occasionally, someone went up to check what was going on. Whenever he or she returned, we all circled around to get the latest news of the world above us. We didn't learn much.
We continued to hear shooting nearby. We half expected Russian soldiers to show up at any minute. Stories of how the Russians treated people—especially women—during the war were on everyone's minds. The women had bundled themselves in their oldest clothes and wrapped their heads in kerchiefs, trying to look as old and unattractive as possible. My mother did, too. No one said anything.
That night, we slept in the coal cellar, huddled in coats and blankets. It turned out to be a wise thing. The next morning, I heard two mortar rounds whoosh and crash overhead. They had landed in the attic of our building. All the men ran upstairs, grabbing buckets of water from their apartments on the way in the hope of extinguishing any fires that the shells might have started. I went with them. When we got up to the attic, we saw that the roof was shattered in two places. Broken tiles and splinters of wood were scattered on the attic floor. Bits of the shell were still smoldering on the floor. Luckily, the floor was covered with sand, so instead of throwing water on the embers, we shoveled more sand over them and the fire was quickly extinguished. The sand had been spread in the attic in anticipation of an attack by the American imperialists during the Korean War. The irony of the situation didn't hit me until later.
A third mortar round crashed into the courtyard later that day. One of the fragments hit a tenant in the leg as he was on his way back to the cellar. A group of neighbors took him to a hospital a couple of blocks away. We stayed in the cellar another night.
Some people went upstairs to listen to the radio. We learned that Imre Nagy was no longer prime minister. The Soviets had replaced him with Janos Kadar. Radio Budapest began broadcasting messages from the new regime. In its old cheerily positive voice, it reported the defeat of the counterrevolutionaries and the restoration of order in the city.
The next day, Russian soldiers showed up at the house. They came down to the cellar with their machine guns in hand and looked around. We looked back at them, waiting wordlessly.
They said something, gesticulating toward the upstairs apartments. I remembered enough of my school Russian to help translate. They wanted to get into the apartments facing the street. One of the apartments they had chosen was ours. They shoved some furniture out of the way to set up their machine guns in the windows. Then they waved us back into the cellar.
I wished there were no mortars falling on our house and no Russian soldiers in our apartment. I wanted the trams to run again. I wanted to go back to school. I wanted life to go back to normal.
A few days later, the shooting around us subsided. The Russian soldiers left our house and we moved back into our apartment. There were dirty footsteps on the rugs and the floor in the Big Room and handprints on the walls. The furniture was jumbled together where they had shoved it. Luckily, there was no other damage.
We could still hear soun
ds of fighting in the distance, so we didn't dare leave the house. The phone worked, however, so we scrambled to call other people who had a phone to find out what was happening elsewhere. I called my friend Peter from the Madach gymnasium, whom I had kept in touch with through my first year at university. He lived on Ring Street, and he had a girlfriend who lived in another part of Budapest and also had a phone. By looking out of the windows of our respective homes, we could give each other updates on where we heard fighting and where we saw troops coming and going.
I frequently talked with Jansci Lanyi on the phone. He lived outside of Budapest, in the suburbs. Even there, he had experiences similar to mine.
My parents tried to call my aunt Iren and uncle Sanyi to get news of them and their family. There was never any answer. My aunt Manci didn't have a phone, so we had to wait until it was safe to go out on the streets to see how she was doing.
To try to get real news, we listened to Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. Mostly they were jammed again with so much static that we couldn't make out the words. Sometimes, though, we could hear them clearly. From the safety of Western Europe, their Hungarian announcers aggressively urged Hungarians in Hungary to continue their resistance to the Russians. They painted a hopeful picture of our situation, implying that the world was ready to support us. I found this irritating. I was sure they hadn't woken up to a Russian troop carrier aiming a machine gun at their bedroom window.
For a while, I could see Russian troops standing guard at the street corners whenever I peered out the window. After some days, the sentries disappeared. That's when we started foraging for food—bread, potatoes, and whatever we could find in the few stores that had started to reopen. But we stayed in the neighborhood, not daring to go very far.
As I walked around the streets, I realized that we had been lucky. Many houses in the neighborhood were marked by artillery fire. Some houses were completely demolished, their front walls ripped open so you could see everything inside. I noticed something strange about the windows in other houses. Often, the rectangle where the window ordinarily was placed was gone. In its place was a large circle. Cannon fire had shot into the house and all you could see was the ragged edges of bricks in a round frame around the window. I thought of a week or so earlier, when the gun on the troop carrier below slowly swung past my window.
A huge department store that occupied an entire city block not far from us had collapsed into a heap of rubble. I had never seen such devastation, not even from the bombing during the war. It was a heap of concrete, bricks, and mangled steel. Nothing was recognizable. Bystanders told me that Hungarian resistance fighters had stored ammunition in the department store and Russian tanks had shot at it until it blew up and brought the whole structure down.
I managed to find a few loaves of bread and brought them back to our apartment. Then I wrapped up one loaf and set off to bring it to Viki at her dormitory. The trams weren't running, so I walked. I was reminded of the time when my mother and I walked home from Kobanya, except that this time there was no snow. Abandoned trams sat in their tracks, their antenna whips disconnected from the overhead wires and dangling to the side. The el ectricity must have gone out at some point and left them stranded. Elsewhere, I saw burned-out trucks, occasionally even a burned-out Russian tank. Wherever a tank still smoldered, it was surrounded by gawking passersby, huddled around and staring. Nobody said anything. They just stared.
Makeshift posters had been pasted on the walls. Many of them called for United Nations troops to come into Hungary and oppose the Russians. Among the small clusters of people reading the posters, one man was passionately arguing against anyone coming in. He shouted, “Do they want to turn us into another Korea?” I agreed with him but didn't say anything. I didn't feel comfortable joining in.
Viki's dorm was in the same general area as the university. This neighborhood, too, had been damaged by Russian shelling. The university, of course, was closed.
I was relieved to see Viki. She was well but told me she was thinking of going home to her family. She had talked to a truck driver she knew who was planning to set off in the next day or two. As I said good-bye to her, I wondered if I would ever see her again.
My aunt Iren and her family had disappeared. We didn't know where they were. My parents telephoned and telephoned, then went to visit. No one was home. The neighbors didn't know anything. It was very disquieting.
Manci, however, reappeared and was a frequent visitor. She would tie a kerchief around her head, bundle herself up in her winter clothes, grab a string shopping bag, and go from shop to shop, searching for food and the latest information. She was the most effective source of news we had.
After a week or so, the trams started running again. My parents went back to work. The university was still closed, so I stayed home except when I ran errands for my parents and bought bread and milk. I tried to keep in touch with whomever I could to get a sense of what was happening elsewhere in the city.
We started to hear of people who took advantage of the chaos to escape across the border to Austria. Escaping became a recurring topic of conversation between my parents and me. I was very tempted, but I didn't know how to go about it. My parents thought I should go but were terrified about what might happen to me if I got caught. So I agonized: Should I go? Did I dare go? Should I go alone? If not, with whom? How would I start? What if I got caught?
As my unanswered questions multiplied, I rationalized that things weren't so bad here after all. I really liked university, I liked my class, I liked Viki. Maybe I should stay. But then the lure of the opportunity of getting out to the West started the circle all over again.
My father contacted various friends to see if they knew of an adult who was planning to escape whom I could go with. He spent days chasing down leads. None of them materialized.
Right: Hungarian refugees were distinguished by mud-covered clothes—we got splattered as we crossed the border by walking across plowed fields.
Left: Refugees in a schoolhouse. Straw was strewn on the floor, providing a bit of cushion. (United Press Photo/Corbis)
Left: The most crucial visit was to the United States consulate. Everybody wanted to go to America. The line for registering stretched out to the chilly street. (Dickey Chapelle)
Chapter Thirteen
CROSSING THE BORDER
ONE AFTERNOON in early December I was reading near the window of the Big Room when my aunt Manci stopped by. She had been out shopping and had her usual nylon string bag hanging from her shoulder with a loaf of bread and something wrapped in brown paper in it. As always, she was dressed in a heavy coat with a kerchief tied around her head, but she was too agitated to take off her coat. She came right over to me and without any greeting said, “Andris, you must go.”
I stared at her. “You must go,” she repeated, “and you must go immediately.”
On her way back from shopping, she had seen several Russian trucks, the kind that were covered with canvas and usually carried troops. The trucks had pulled up at an intersection. Russian soldiers had jumped out, rounded up young people who happened to be in the neighborhood, herded them on the trucks, closed the canvas flap, and left.
This was not altogether new news. Stories of such roundups had been going around Budapest since the Russians returned. But all the stories were thirdhand, hearsay. I had never talked to anyone who had actually witnessed such an event. Given the climate of rumors and exaggerations, one part of me believed the worst, but another part of me wasn't sure that these events actually took place.
Manci's visit changed all that. She was an Auschwitz survivor and had seen the worst that could be. She was not a hysterical woman and had absolutely no reason to exaggerate.
The news hit me at a time when I had been going back and forth in my mind about whether to leave the country. Ever since the Russians had returned some three weeks ago, the number of young people who had set off to cross the border had grown by the week. Some clearly made it across be
cause they sent back word from Austria. Others disappeared. They either were captured and interned or made it across and didn't report back home. Nobody knew which. Still, as it became more and more commonplace to hear about acquaintances who had gone, the thought of leaving occupied me more and more.
Those thoughts led to endless discussions between my parents and me and between myself and my classmate Jancsi. Of all my friends, he was the one I had stayed in touch with the most during the turmoil of the revolution. Our discussions were all of the “what if” type: What if we could catch a ride on a truck on its way back to Austria? What if we got a travel permit to go to the vicinity of the border? And so on. None of them had a realistic chance of being translated into action. Still, my father obtained the name and address of the Viennese business associate of a friend of his—just in case. The friend wrote a little note, saying, “Do everything possible to help the bearer of this note.” Then he signed it and gave it to my father to safeguard for me, if and when I should need it.
I knew where I would go if I did leave: Of course, it would be America. Or, as the Communist regime put it, “imperialist, money-grubbing America.” The more scorn they heaped on it, the more desirable America sounded. America had a mystique of wealth and modern technology; it was a place with lots of cars and plenty of Hershey bars. In addition, there was a more pragmatic consideration. Manci's sister, Lenke, and her brother-in-law, Lajos, an aunt and uncle I'd never met, lived in New York City. Manci was positive they would take me in.
My parents didn't have a lot of confidence in Lenke and Lajos. Just after the war was over, we had received a package in the mail from America. It was a big tin filled with flints for cigarette lighters—thousands and thousands of them. In her accompanying letter, Lenke expressed her hopes that my father would come back alive and explained that she was sending the flints as a way to help him get started in business again. My father had laughed contemptuously: “Does Lenke want me to stand on a street corner and sell these?” The box of flints had disappeared someplace, but my parents' doubts about Lenke remained.
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