A Chosen Few (26 page)

Gyula could not understand why this nice old lady had cursed at him. He had done nothing wrong. He had just been keeping some bullies from picking on a fat boy. He told his mother what had happened and asked why the woman had cursed at him.

Zsuzsa explained what a Jew was. Then she explained that her family had gone to Vienna and come back to Budapest to flee the Nazis, and that the Nazis had put his grandmother in the ghetto, and that the Arrow Cross had been about to shoot her by the Danube when she hid her in the hospital. And she told Gyula
about his grandfather, and how he had been taken to Auschwitz and killed. Then she had to explain what Auschwitz was and how he was killed. Then she told him that his father was a Jew also, and that he had escaped to France, and she told him about his fighting with the Resistance.

Hours later, six-year-old Gyula was changed. He took to saying openly in school that he was a Jew. And he angrily denounced children who used the word
Jew
as a curse. He could not stop thinking about the things he had learned, about the deportations and Auschwitz. When he was eight years old, he resolved that he would be a filmmaker and make movies about the Holocaust.

T
HE
G
ADÓ;S LIVED
in Újpest. To them, the essential fact remained that the Red Army had saved them. Both Béla and his wife joined the Communist party. As a lawyer with Red Army experience and a party member, Béla soon became a judge in the Hungarian Army. But at the time of the Slansky trial, Hungarian Jews were being removed from prominent places, and he was among the Jewish officers who were thrown out of the military. Nobody told him that it was because he was a Jew. Like many other Jewish officers, he was dismissed with no explanation at all. Eventually, the most prominent Jew, Matyas Rakosi, was removed as head of government and replaced by Imre Nagy, who was charged with cleaning up the party.
Cleaning up
meant expelling Jews, even some of his own close friends.

Béla Gadó’s son, György, who had been rescued in his hiding place by his father and the Red Army, had also become a party member. But he was growing angry about what was happening to the party and the country, and increasingly he said so to other party members, which was a risky thing for a civil servant to do. Soon there came a restructuring in government that left no job for him. After nine months out of work, he realized his civil service days were over, and he became a schoolteacher.

Many Hungarians were getting angry not only about the abuses of power but about the economy, which was lowering Hungary’s living standard. Under these pressures, Nagy turned out not to be Moscow’s man. He made the economic policy less rigid, allowed a small degree of private initiative, and released political prisoners, including those accused of Zionism. In doing so, he pleased some Hungarians but not the Soviets, who removed him from power in
February 1955, just as a few years earlier they had removed the populist Władysław Gomułka in Poland. Matyas Rakosi was returned, and Hungarians grew angrier. Encouraged by a Polish movement that came so close to open revolt in October 1956 that Moscow had to bring Gomułka back, a popular movement in Hungary started openly demanding not only the return of Nagy but free elections. Hoping there was a choice between the two demands, Moscow rehabilitated Nagy.

The concession was a tactical error, one that the Soviets were to make again. Spurred on by their small victory, the Hungarians pressed for more, demanding the removal of Soviet troops, democracy, and free speech. Nagy himself pressed further demands on Moscow, such as release from the Warsaw Pact, and neutral East-West status. Austria, Hungary’s historical partner, had successfully negotiated such an arrangement the year before.

Once all demonstrations were banned, a huge spontaneous rally filled the streets of Pest. The police opened fire on the demonstrators, which turned a protest into an uprising. The well-organized working class joined the rebellion. “Revolutionary committees” were set up to take control throughout the country, and as the uprising increasingly became an open rebellion, Hungarian soldiers were called out. But the troops only chatted and commiserated with the rebels. The Soviets called out their own troops, but there were not enough of them in Hungary to contain what was now a nationwide armed rebellion.

In October 1956, György Konrád was editing a new literary magazine, which by chance had been scheduled for publication on October 27, the day of the outlawed demonstration. He had finished his studies that summer, and he and his classmates had been inducted into the military. Their training included not only instructions on the use of weapons but lectures by officers on abstract notions such as “the nature of the enemy.” Konrád would listen to these lectures with his mouth slightly twisted in his ironic smile, but the “nature of the enemy” lecture proved to be too much for him and he exploded in great heaves of laughter. Soon he was declared an “anarchist” and thrown out of the army. This was the same army from whom his university colleagues obtained weapons a few months later, in October 1956. Konrád, not wishing to take part in a shooting war, stayed home for a few days after the illegal demonstration. But since it did not wind down and was too interesting to miss, he decided to wander over to the campus and around town.

At the university, rebels had stacks of boxes. There were boxes of apricot jelly from the far right-wing Otto von Hapsburg, and boxes of light weapons from the police. Somebody had sent cans of corned beef. When György arrived at the campus, it was all being distributed to the young revolutionaries. “Who wants a submachine gun?” someone shouted. Konrád raised his hand and was handed the weapon.

It was amusing to walk around Budapest wearing an armband and holding a submachine gun at your side. “I carried it like an umbrella,” he said. He did not want to shoot anyone, but he did have some things he wanted to do. He visited the various publishing houses, this tall young man with a mop of curly brown hair leaning on a submachine gun, and asked to see the director. He was always ushered into the director’s office immediately, and the director always readily agreed that writers should have far greater artistic freedom. A submachine gun, it seemed, was a useful tool for a writer.

But it also had some disadvantages. A small elderly woman pulled on his arm and said, “Young man, please come here.” Without waiting for him to answer, she dragged him down the street, over to where a group of women were standing and pointing up at a building.

“There on the third floor is an AVH man,” one woman said. The AVH was the despised internal police. Then all the women started shouting at once.

“What do you want?” Konrád finally shouted over their voices.

The small elderly woman looked at him as though he were an astonishing simpleton. Then she shouted, “Shoot him!”

“No, no. I’m not going to shoot him.”

“Of course. He’s AVH. We have him cornered,” she said, trying for a conspiratorial tone.

“No, no.”

“Why not? You have the gun!”

Konrád tried to explain that although it was true that he was carrying a weapon, he did not shoot people. He tried to calm the women. But one of them shouted, “If you won’t shoot him, I will go find someone else to shoot him.”

“All right,” said Konrád. “Take me to him.” The woman led him into the building and up to the third floor, where they found an unarmed man crouching in terror. Konrád pointed the submachine gun at him. “All right,” he said. “Get up and start walking.”

While the women cheered, he marched his prisoner out of the building and down a quiet street to shoot him. The man explained that he was from the AVH, but he kept insisting that he only played in a band. This brought the same mischievous smile to Konrád’s face that had caused the army to declare him an anarchist.

“What instrument do you play?”

“Tuba,” was the shaky-voiced reply. And Konrád laughed as he marched his prisoner safely away from the angry women.

“I think you’d better find a safer place to hide,” Konrád said, shaking his head as the man ran off. He wasn’t going to shoot a tuba player.

Konrád went home and decided he should get rid of the submachine gun. But the next morning, November 4, when he went to return it to the university, there were Soviet tanks on the street—entire armored columns that had been brought in from somewhere. People kept pulling him into doorways and warning him not to get near any major streets with that submachine gun. He could find himself standing in front of a Soviet armored division with nothing but a submachine gun. He returned home and dropped off the weapon, and then went back to the university, unarmed, only to find the campus wedged in with large steel clanking Soviet tanks. The university rebels were sitting around with their weapons. They certainly weren’t going to start shooting at this many tanks. By the end of the day, the Soviets told them to give up, or the university would be leveled. They gave up.

I
N SOUTHERN
P
EST
, in Ferencváros, the shooting started on October 24. A tank rumbled into firing position in front of the Gazdags’ building, firing with an enormous
boom
down their little street. At the end of the street were rebel-held barracks, which answered with the steady
pop-pop-pop
of machine guns. The tank responded with
booms
so large, they shook the windows, which had to be opened to keep from shattering. For six days the fighting prevented anyone from leaving the Gazdags’ building, and they had been caught with nothing to eat but potatoes. There was not even anything to put on the potato. Gyula’s grandmother baked them by the rackful for three meals each day. On October 30 the shooting stopped, and Gyula’s grandmother went out and bought food and spent the quiet day cooking and preparing for when the fighting would start again.

Sunday morning, Gyula was sleeping in his bed. At six o’clock he was awakened and given some new books that had been wrapped for Christmas. These Jewish atheists celebrated Christmas. Then he was led to the bomb shelter that had been set up in the basement of the building in preparation for World War III. Gyula had spent his childhood dreading World War III, the inevitable showdown with the Americans that could happen at any time. All buildings had to have bomb shelters where the residents could sit out the nuclear holocaust.

The fighting grew heavier—more than just one tank and a few machine guns. There was a war up there, not with the Americans but with the Soviets. But for nine-year-old Gyula, this was the best time of his whole childhood. The children of the building spent the entire day in the basement playing. Each family set up beds in the cubicle used for their belongings. The whole family was there. No one went to school. No one went to work. And making it even more exciting, they sat around all day by candlelight. And when the parents got dull and started debating, the children could just roam from cubicle to cubicle and find other children with whom to play. To Gyula, this seemed some sort of model lifestyle.

His parents sat on the bed and talked about leaving Hungary. But Zsuzsa was adamant that she was not going to spend any more of her life moving. She had started in Budapest, fled to Vienna, then back to Budapest—it was enough. She was staying here, come what may.

G
EORGE
L
IPPNER
was also nine years old, and he also was hiding with his family in the basement of their home in Újpest. But he wasn’t enjoying it. The family spent a night in the basement when the shooting was particularly violent, and when they came up in the morning, they found that two crosses had been painted on their door. Looking outside, they found similar markings on all the homes of neighbors of Jewish origin. These neighbors, like the Lippners, did not practice Judaism or talk about it. Nevertheless, somebody had known which doors to paint. George had no idea what Jewish practices were, or the difference between one kind of Jew and another. But now he understood what his parents had been telling him: It was dangerous to be a Jew in Hungary, and he was scared.

But another nine-year-old boy, Andras Kovacs, did think it was
fun.
Kovacs
, like
Konrád
, was changed from a Kohen name in the last century. Andras’s father, Imre, was a Sachsenhausen survivor with many relatives who didn’t survive. Living in the sixth district in central Pest, not far from the traditional Jewish area, they had many Jewish neighbors. This was also a convenient location for the uprising. Only a few yards from the Kovacses’ building was a barricade, and neighborhood people would go home and shower or eat or rest and then go back to the barricades. One young man in their building went to the barricade faithfully every morning at eight o’clock. Andras remembers it as “a sort of comfortable revolution.” His parents seemed confident that soon United Nations troops would arrive and Hungary would be declared neutral—the Austrian solution. But one day, as Andras was walking in the street with his mother, two rebels raised their arms in fascist salutes and greeted each other, “
Sieg heil
,” and then his mother started to be frightened.

György Gadó, a schoolteacher at the time, enthusiastically participated in the demonstrations. In fact, he was one of the party dissidents who had been attending meetings for a year leading up to this rebellion. But when the shooting started, he backed away. He saw that there were really two factions in the rebellion. One wanted to reform Communism and make it live up to democratic egalitarian ideals. The other wanted to resurrect Horthy’s fascist Hungarian state. Gadó feared the latter would triumph if the Soviets backed down. Although in later years he would modify this view, at the time he concluded that the Soviets were the only safeguard Hungary had against fascism.

Even György Konrád, while involved in the rebellion, had noticed that it had some worrisome elements. When it first erupted and Konrád was trying to put to bed his new literary magazine, he had to work over constant shouting both on the street and in the building. At one point someone in the building from an office near his shouted, “Jewish murderers!” Konrád later heard similar comments on the street. Konrád’s wife sat on a committee of schoolteachers that began talking of purging the teaching staffs of Jews. Konrád believed that the rebelling Communists would in the long term lose out to a conservative element. But he thought that the moderate wing of the conservative movement would gain control.