Death in Budapest

Soviet might decreed that Budapest should die. Free Budapest refused to die.

After a week of unleashed terror, the new government of treacherous Janos Kadar was still unable to control the situation. Fighting had died down to sporadic outbreaks as surviving Freedom Fighters went underground. But the country's railroads, factories and mines were at a standstill, the city of Budapest without light, heat, transport, communications or food, with thousands of unburied dead lying in its rubble-filled streets and fires burning in hundreds of buildings. At week's end, in a desperate attempt to gain popular support Janos Kadar went to the length of consulting deposed Premier Imre Nagy.

Corpses on the Bridges. As soon as Russia switched to violent repression, a thousand tanks had rumbled into the city and at every cross street they were drawn up with their backs to each other in protective circles, each tank able to fire down a different street. Batteries of heavy Soviet artillery were set up on Gellert Hill, and H.E. shells were poured into buildings where resistance was spotted. But the rebels were not without resource. Said Gyula Petoki, who escaped: "During World War II the Germans had made doors in cellars between houses so that people could move around during air raids. When the war ended the doors were bricked up. But we remembered them and ripped them open again so that we could go from house to house." The surviving security police (AVH), creeping out of their lairs, were hungry for revenge. Soon there were rebel corpses hanging from the Danube bridges. In their mouths paper money was stuffed, and across their bodies were signs: "These men fought for capitalists."

In front of their flimsy barricades the rebels put pictures of Stalin, Lenin and Molotov, saying: "They will have to shoot their own leaders before they get us." On one side of the Hungaria Korut lay a row of wounded rebel fighters, on the other a first-aid station. Every time a Red Cross man crossed the street he was brought down by Russian fire. Other Red Cross men spun ropes across the street. The wounded tied the ropes to their legs and were dragged to the first-aid station.

Telephone lines between Vienna and Budapest went dead next day, but Radio Rakoczi, identified by Radio Free Europe monitors as a mobile rebel station, became a regular station, gained in strength, and reported the stirring battles of the "Seventh Patriots." Two Russian tanks were set on fire by youths with gas bombs in Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Street. On Izabella Street grenades thrown from windows scattered a squad of marching Russian infantry. A few minutes later tanks and artillery came rolling down the street, shot up the whole neighborhood. In one house the Russians found the 13-year-old son of the porter with an open clasp knife in his hand. They smashed his head with rifle butts.

"Unflagging Violence." Budapesters reaching the Austrian border say that the critical day was the day (Nov. 7) the U.N. debate on Hungary was postponed. Said o'ne: "Up to that time people had been watching from rooftops hoping to see U.S. planes arriving. After that everybody just quit." Some 1,500 rebels holding out in the ruins of the Royal Palace high on Buda Hill surrendered a highly defensible position. After a moving appeal for help from President Eisenhower the day after election ("If during his presidency he would stand by the oppressed, a blessing shall fall on him"), Radio Rakoczi said its last word: "Soviet tanks are attacking . . . The battle continues with unflagging violence . . ."

The violence was mostly Russian. A dispatch brought by courier from a Western embassy reported: "The situation in Budapest is terroristic. Soviet soldiers are stealing and looting everywhere. They get into private homes and apartments on the pretext of looking for partisans and arms and then loot everything. Civilians are being stopped by Soviet soldiers on the street. The soldiers take from them all watches and jewelry. Civilian wounded are being taken to Rokus Hospital, which is very much overcrowded. Dead from the wards are thrown into the hospital courtyard. Wine cellars all over the city are being broken into by Soviet soldiers. Many soldiers are wandering around dead drunk."

Remembering the World War II rape of Budapest by Red army soldiers, Hungarian women obliged to go out seeking food for their families disguised themselves as old hags. On one street in Pest lay the nude, violated body of a pregnant woman. The Soviet commander brought in a field gendarmerie called "R troops." The R men set up house guards, block inspectors and kangaroo courts empowered to execute within 24 hours any Hungarian found guilty of "murder, arson, looting," or concealing arms. The orders were signed by a Major General Grubennyik.

Against this background, Kadar's Radio Budapest played dance music, interspersed with appeals to "progressive youths and mothers not to allow gangsters to enter their homes and fire from windows." Reflected one announcer: "How brutal and inhuman it was that in past days simple party men were attacked because they were party men." But as the week went on and "progressive" Hungarians did not respond, Radio Budapest's tone became hysterical. "If you don't go down into the pits," it told coal miners, "the workers cannot go to work, no bread will be baked, there will be no electrical current." Four days after announcing that peace had been restored, Kadar's Minister of Trade Sandor Ronai pleaded: "Let us put an end to the fighting . . . Let us start work in the factories and fields. Let us begin to build a free, independent, socialist Hungary." At Pecs in south Hungary, miners dynamited the prized uranium mines.

Kadar's last resort was to starve Budapest out of hiding. Food was offered, in exchange for surrendered arms. The rebels, who had done no looting during their days of pride, now began looting shops and department stores. Food trains halted by the Russians outside Budapest were hijacked. Hundreds of radio sets were taken from one factory, presumably so that the rebel underground could listen to the outside world. Monitors reported the faint voice of a Hungarian radio "ham" calling: "Give us news! Say something! Give us news. We ask for news ..."

Guilt & Innocence. Among the thousands of refugees from the Soviet terror was a 68-year-old Englishwoman whom rebels had released from seven years' solitary confinement in a 4 ft. 6 in. wide, fungus-ridden AVH cell. Said onetime lecturer and translator Dr. Edith Bone: "I was a 'secret prisoner.' No one in the world knew about me except the secret police. There are many thousands, perhaps millions, living, rotting like that in Iron Curtain countries." Explained Dr. Bone: "I was innocent [of the charge of being a British spy] but I was also guilty. I had been a Communist and I had helped build the machine of which I was the victim. That is why I am almost glad to have shared the sufferings of the many, many thousands more innocent than I."

As an epitaph for the (estimated) 20.-ooo dead of Budapest, a Hungarian in Vienna quoted a phrase from Virgil: Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor, which translates: "Some avenger will some time arise from our bones." The question was, when?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.