Hungary: Freedom's Choice

(Editor's note: Following are excerpts from an article published in TIME magazine on July 1, 1957.)

The atmosphere in Budapest on October 23 was something no one who was there will ever forget. The weather was cold and gusty, and there was a light fog that softened the contours of the fine old buildings of the city. The gatherings at the statues of Petofi and General Bem were not the only ones. Infected by a kind of quiet gaiety, people were walking all over the city, singing in a subdued way. Among them was Ferenc Kocsis, no Petofi Club Communist, but a talented young film worker.

A friend had called Ferenc that morning and told him there was going to be a demonstration. "Well, this at least is something," said Ferenc, and passed the word along. With 80 other film workers, Ferenc pooled funds and bought some red-white-and-green ribbons to wear as arm bands, and took a bus into Budapest. They fell into line with thousands of other workers, students and cadets who had been waiting for this opportunity to blow off a little steam.

"At the head of the column were flags," remembers Ferenc. "An old woman waving a pair of scissors ran up. She reached up, grabbed a flag and cut the Red star out of the center. It was a tremendous moment."

The procession reached the West railroad station where an old man stood by the curb playing a tarogato, an ancient instrument like a clarinet that has a sad sound. He played the famous Hungarian revolutionary song which ends:

Long Live Hungarian Freedom!
Long Live Our Native Land!

The demonstrators took up the refrain and roared it across Budapest. Says Ferenc: "It echoed off the walls of the city. I wept unashamedly and so did everyone else. There were no Communists any longer. We were Hungarians, and we were ready to die."

The crowd, by this time 300,000 strong, began converging in Parliament Square, chanting, "Imre Nagy to government!" When Imre Nagy appeared, he was cheered, but when he began his speech with the salutation, "Dear Comrades," he was whistled down. Nagy told them the historical situation was complicated and everyone should go home and wait for developments. The whistling started again, and Nagy, no judge of historical situations, asked, "Why do you whistle at me?" Someone shouted, "We do not whistle at you, but at your words." There was a long, dramatic silence and then Nagy asked everyone to sing the national anthem, leading the singing himself.

At this high point of patriotic emotion, messengers came with the news that Gero was talking on the radio. Ferenc Kocsis went with part of the crowd to Radio Budapest, where the AVH were throwing tear-gas grenades. He saw a young boy -- "just a little fellow with an open shirt and an old jacket, no overcoat and no hat" -- pick up one of the grenades and throw it back. The AVH panicked, and the mob surged forward. Ferenc heard a burst of machine-gun fire. There was a sudden silence and then a roar went up, soft at first, and then like thunder. Says Ferenc: "I saw, being passed back over the heads of the crowd, a dead woman of about 45. I found myself screaming with rage. I was like an animal." A people's wrath is a terrifying thing. That night, the next day, and for many days afterwards, the people who had suffered so much under the AVH pursued the AVH men, flushed them from their hiding places, shot, garroted, and hanged them by the heels from trees and lamp-posts.

When Ferenc went out to Kilian barracks to get a rifle, he was told that it was more important for him to record what was going on in film. The director of his film company refused to give him a camera and film, but Ferenc broke into the warehouse, commandeered both. From then on, until November 3, he and his cameraman recorded the battle. He took pictures everywhere, in the streets, from the cellars, from speeding vehicles.

They had 12,000 feet of film in the can by the beginning of November and sent it to the laboratory, by that time under rebel control, for processing. Some of the rebel leaders wanted it sent out to the West to be developed, but Ferenc insisted on its being done under his supervision. He curses himself for that decision. On November 4, the day the Soviet army came charging back into Budapest, one of the first places they captured was the film laboratory.

Ferenc awoke on November 4 to the sound of heavy Russian artillery. Hearing that the rebels were handing out weapons at the Piarist school, he went there and collected a rifle, two hand grenades and 40 rounds of ammunition. He took five gallons of gasoline from his father's garage and went to look for someone to fight with. Says he: "At the corner of Baross Street and the Great Ring, I went into a restaurant and found eight Freedom Fighters. They looked all right, so I joined them." Together they barricaded Baross Street and cut out an escape route in the cellar of the restaurant. "It was a funny time," says Ferenc. "The owner of the restaurant and everyone else had left, leaving his wine bottles on the shelf. Several were empty, but beside them was a stack of money, the exact price of each bottle."

The Freedom Fighters filled the empty bottles with gasoline and corked them with table napkins, making what they called "benzine flashes." About midnight a woman reported that there was a Russian tank by itself in Jozsef Street. Ferenc and an apprentice Freedom Fighter (aged 13) went out to get it.

Ferenc and the boy entered a house at the corner of the dark street and worked their way across rooftops and down ladders until they came to the house before which the tank was parked. Says Ferenc: "I was very frightened. Here I was with a 13-year-old boy and a bottle of gasoline." Ferenc put a handkerchief in the mouth of the bottle, tipped the bottle up to soak it with gas, set the handkerchief alight and dropped the "benzine flash" on the rear end of the tank. Says he: "An enormous flame shot up, and the whole street looked like day. There was a terrible explosion, and the front part of the roof started to cave in. The boy and I ran to the chimney at the back of the roof. Russians on top of the roof across the street from us -- I hadn't even seen them - started shooting. I said to myself, 'This is death' and felt pretty calm."

Ferenc and the boy got away. At the restaurant Ferenc took a big drink of the restaurant owner's wine, left him some money, went home and slept for 36 hours.

Ferenc Kocsis was not quite sure why he acted the way he did. His father had been grabbed by the Russians after the war and forced to work in arctic coal mines until his health broke down. "Some nights," Ferenc recalled, "he would wake us all by shouting in his sleep. 'No! No! Don't beat me!' and 'Set me free!' But my father never said anything in public. He stayed out of politics, and he bore his hatred in silence. That's the worst kind of hate, you know." Husky Ferenc had shouldered his way through the Communist bureaucracy just the same, and had dreamed of becoming a motion-picture director. On October 23 he had acted out of sheer impulse, emotion, and it was with the same feeling that he one day decided the revolution was over, and beat it for the Austrian border. Last month in Vienna he was ashamed of this decision, declaring that he wanted to go and carry on the fight. Said he: "What else can a good Hungarian do?"