Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1956moy.001

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                                                                              ╚January 7, 1957

Man of the Year:The Hungarian Freedom Fighter

Freedom's Choice



    The world entered 1956 with a full complement of great men:
national leaders, statesmen, philosophers, artists and
scientists, many of whom, pursuing their legitimate vocations,
would be remembered among the great names of the epoch. But the
man who put his stamp on this particular year -- the Man of the
Year -- was not on the roster of the world's great when the year
began. Nor could anyone have guessed his identity, even when the
year had run four-fifths of its course. Yet by year's end, this
man was seen to have shaken history's greatest despotism to its
foundations.

    The ultimate consequences of his action could only be
assessed in the future. But the effect upon European political
and military alignments was already stupendous. He had actually
lowered, by some 80 divisions, the combat potential of the
world's most menacing army by showing that its colonial
conscripts could no longer be relied upon. The Kremlin's current
irresolution owes much to him. So does Communism's great loss of
prestige around the world. Bulganin and Khrushchev, because of
him, could not now expect to be received at Buckingham Palace or
make the same kind of laughing-boy junket through Asia, and all
over Western Europe, disillusioned Communist sympathizers turned
away in nausea. Destroyed also was the 1984 fantasy that a whole
generation could be taught to believe that wrong was right, or
could be emptied of all integrity and curiosity. But his greatest
triumph was moral: he demonstrated the profound and needful truth
that humanity is not necessarily forever bound and gagged by
modern terrorist political techniques. Thus he gave to millions,
and specifically to the youth of Eastern Europe, the hope for a
foreseeable end to the long night of Communist dictatorship.

    The Man of the Year had many faces, but he was not faceless;
he had many names, but he was not nameless. History would know
him by the face, intense, relentless, desperate and determined,
that he had worn on the evening of Oct. 23 in the streets of
Budapest; history would know him by the name he had chosen for
himself during his dauntless contest with Soviet tanks: the
Hungarian Freedom Fighter.

    The Special Quality. Hungarians are not very good plotters.
The art of conspiracy -- so well understood, practiced and
detected by the Russians -- would have been self-defeating in
their struggle. What the Hungarians, a people of a special
heritage and a unique language, did have was an overpowering
common impulse, spirit or emotion, which suddenly united all
classes against their enemy without the necessity of planning or
leadership. The emotion had its origin in shared sufferings
under the Russian police state, but it was made strong and
enduring because it was tempered by that impracticable and, in
Marxist terms, most despised of qualities, romanticism.

    The restless and articulate Hungarian intellectuals who
sparked the revolt of Oct. 23, mostly young Communists, were not
thinking in terms of Lenin, but of the Hungarian patriots who
revolted against the Habsburg monarchy in 1848. The street and
rooftop fighters, who took over the struggle from the
intellectuals, performed their self-appointed tasks with a valor,
pride and gallantry that is found only in the revolutionary
traditions of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Then, as their
strength was exhausted in the battle against modern steel, the
fight was taken over by the stolid nerveless men of the
factories, inspired by utopian ideals of a democratic workers
state. The Man of the Year was an amalgam of all these men and of
all their qualities.

    Did Hungary's Freedom Fighters hope to win? The answer is
that, unlike the Poles before them, who infiltrated the party
apparatus and to an extent controlled their break from Moscow,
they did not pause to think that far ahead. Their motto might
well have been that of another great romantic, William of Orange:
"One need not hope in order to act, nor succeed in order to
persevere."

    Who were these men and women, and in some cases children, who
so acted? Among the thousands who made Hungary's revolution, it
was possible to see, in a few individuals, those qualities and
characteristics that made the whole thing credible.

Janos Feher

    Janos Feher was one of the score of young intellectuals who,
without being aware of it, set the stage for the Oct. 23 revolt.

    There was nothing particularly chauvinistic about Janos. His
father, a mason, was the village socialist in the hamlet where
Janos was born 26 years ago. What Janos got from his father was
not patriotism but a thirst for knowledge. He was a thin, blond
boy whose Roman nose was never out of a book. He joined the
Communist Party at the age of 16, and this got him a scholarship
to Budapest University.

    The rigors of Marxist education -- the interminable
indoctrination lectures, the slanted subjects -- soon
disillusioned Janos, and he became one of that considerable group
of discontented students who have sprung up in all Soviet
countries. He wrote a novel about village life and was severely
rebuked by the party for attempting to sabotage the People's
Democracy. He and some other students wrote and performed a sharp
satire on the wreck of Mt. Olympus (i.e., Russian Communism) and
were investigated by the AVH, the Hungarian secret police. But
the police did nothing to them because the students and
intellectuals enjoy a special place in Communist regimes,
providing the reservoir of skill and talent on which the
bureaucracy continuously draws. A friend remembers Janos as
saying before the revolt: "The workers and the peasants
hate the regime. The workers know we lie, and so they hate us
too. But the truth is we hate ourselves for lying."

    The Russians had a political youth organization called DISZ
to keep an eye on young intellectuals like Janos, but nobody took
it seriously. One evening last summer, Janos and three friends
met up with the top Moscow-trained DISZ leader, drunk and
convivial in a restaurant, and one of Janos' friends suggested
that what DISZ needed was a social club where young Communists
could sit around, drink tea and play chess. A few days later,
DISZ opened the Kossuth Club at its headquarters on Republic
Square. Janos and his circle sent out word: use the club.

    As Budapest's young Communist intellectuals crowded into the
Kossuth Club, another suggestion was made to DISZ: Why not form a
discussion group, strictly within the club, of course? The
discussion group quickly became the hottest thing in town. It was
called the Petofi Club.

    Both clubs were named after Hungarian revolutionaries, which
suited the Russian book, but neither the Russians nor their
Hungarian stooges seemed to realize that the names of Kossuth and
Petofi were dangerously charged with patriotic and nationalist
sentiment. In September 2,000 young Communists crowded into the
Petofi Club to hear a discussion on the Communist-controlled
press. The meeting had been packed with old hard-core Communists
and AVH men, but nevertheless the debate was free and furious.
Janos and his friends left feeling that they had scored heavily
against the system.

    Janos dreamed of a still larger meeting that might finish
with a demonstration in Parliament Square, demanding that Imre
Nagy, who had been Premier during the "new look" period after
Stalin's death, be reinstated. But the Central Committee got wind
of their plans and suppressed the Petofi Club. Janos despaired:
"We are too young to be followed by the people. We are unknown.
We must start organizing and think in terms of years of
underground work." Janos had been excited by the news from Poland
of Gomulka's successful defiance of Khrushchev, and sensed that
there was a corresponding force waiting to be released in
Hungary.

    Forbidden to meet as a discussion group, a number of Petofi
hotheads gathered together at the monument of Sandor Petofi on
the morning of Oct. 23. Before a group that grew in size every
minute, a young actor, holding a volume of Petofi's poems,
recited a poem famous in the 1848 revolution. Many onlookers
wept, and by unspoken consent it was decided to go to the statue
of General Bem, the Polish general who led the Hungarians and was
crushed by the Russians the following year. Without orders from
anyone, the crowd formed in ranks six abreast, crossed the Chain
Bridge to the west bank of the Danube.

    Janos Feher, slight, intense, with his shock of unruly hair
and Roman nose, remained aloof from this excitement. "It's too
early," he warned his friends. During the afternoon he stood by
impassively as the crowd, still orderly and unled, came finally
to Parliament House. It was Communist Party Boss Erno Gero, just
returned from a visit to Tito, who touched off the fuse. In a
radio speech, Gero accused the people of "provocations." Surging
toward Radio Budapest, the crowd demanded the right to be heard.
The AVH guards began shooting.

    When Janos heard of the trouble, he sprang to life. He went
down to Kilian barracks and got himself a rifle. A few hours
later a burst of AVH machine-gun fire killed Janos Feher on a
roof across the street from Radio Budapest.

Ferenc Kocsis

    The atmosphere in Budapest on Oct.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 Nov. 3, he and his camera-
man recorded the battle. He took pictures everywhere, in the
streets, from the cellars, from speeding vehicles.

    Cursed Film. They had 12,000 ft. 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 three 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 Nov. 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 Nov. 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 Jozsel 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 Koscis 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 public,
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 Oct. 23 he had acted out of sheer
impulse, emotion, and it was with something of 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 back and carry on the
fight. Said he: "What else can a good Hungarian do?"

Peter Szanto

    The Budapest which Ferenc Kocsis left behind was a ghost
city. Streetcar lines were torn up, pavement stones had been
piled into barricades, great buildings had been reduced to
rubble, and fires still burned in others. There was not a whole
pane of glass in the city. Nor was there a single Red star to be
seen, or a Soviet monument. Even the boots of the gigantic statue
of Stalin had been smashed to bits. The monstrous leonine head,
spat on and befilthed, had long since disappeared.

    Somehow this seemed a perfectly natural background for Peter
Szanto. Short, powerfully built, with a freckled face and a mop
of disarrayed red hair, Peter was a product of Budapest's war-
battered slums. He was one of those people, men, women, even
children, who came up from nowhere to carry on the freedom fight
after many like Janos Feher had died, and some like Ferenc Kocsis
had left.

    A truckdriver who worked 96 hours a week to keep his wife and
two small children from starvation in a one-room apartment. Peter
had his own view of Communism. Says he: "You need a special kind
of character to be a Communist and rob the workers." Peter saw
the Communist bosses riding around in big cars, bawling out the
workers for being lazy, but it never occurred to him to join the
Communist ranks. "If I'd been a Communist, I would have been a
traitor to my buddies. Anyway I would have had to go to a lot of
meetings, and I didn't want that. I hate politics."

    Peter had skipped his morning meal to meet the last
installment on the furniture. He was feeling surly. When a friend
told him that a demonstration was in the making, he was against
it. "But then I didn't like this way of life, and I was mad and
so I said I'd go along." Peter was among the crowd at Parliament
House, and later he heard the AVH shooting people at Radio
Budapest. When somebody said get some arms, he went along.

    At Kilian barracks there was such a big crowd that Peter was
about to quit and go home when someone called for a truck driver,
and he came forward. Peter drove "a tall colonel who seemed to be
in charge" to an arms depot, called the Lamp Factory, where they
loaded cases of rifles and machine guns. The revolutionary fever
caught Peter up at this point, and he was swept into the battle
for Radio Budapest, shooting from the rooftops.

    Bread & Sweat. Reporting back to the tall colonel, who turned
out to be Colonel Pal Maleter (later Defense Minister in the ten-
day government of Imre Nagy), Peter at last ate some bread and
tea. "Guys were sitting around everywhere. Many were sleeping on
the floor." Sweating it out, Peter had time to think about the
consequences of what he had done. He decided to go home. He told
his wife he had been working all this time. But when he heard the
official radio call the Freedom Fighters "counter-revolutionaries
and fascists," he knew there would be reprisals, and he returned
to the barracks, determined to fight it out. At the barracks,
with everyone expecting the worst, the tall colonel told them
that they were not counter-revolutionaries but only people who
wanted truth and freedom. When the Communist radio announced that
zero hour for surrender had passed, and then extended the time
limit, everyone suddenly started shaking hands and patting people
on the back. "We knew we won."

    But later Peter Szanto, full Fighter, fought in the battle of
the revolution. Reaching the barracks, the colonel ordered
complete quiet. The tanks came close to the barracks wall, but no
one stirred. Some infantry appeared and shot up the building, but
the Freedom Fighters did not return the fire. Finally there were
20 tanks, some 75 infantrymen, a truck, and an armored car
outside the barracks. "Colonel Maleter came and looked down,"
recalls Peter Szanto. "he picked up a small nitroglycerin bottle
and threw it at the truck. The truck disappeared in one big roar.
Then we all threw nitroglycerin bottles and benzine flashes and
used machine pistols on the infantry. It was a fine trick. We
killed the infantry, got the truck, the armored car, and four of
the tanks in about five minutes."

    After that, morale at the barracks was sky-high. When
citizens called up to report the presence of Russian tanks or the
whereabouts of the AVH, the Freedom Fighters forayed out to do
battle. A week later the Soviet army returned in strength and
tried to blast the Freedom Fighters out of Kilian barracks. Peter
Szanto was one of the last to leave. He came out through a hole
in the back wall after a delegation of local people had pleaded
with the Fighters to stop the battle because the neighborhood was
in ruins.

    When he reached home, Peter learned that the AVH had been
around asking questions about him. His wife had said that he was
at work, but at the truck depot he learned that they had already
checked there. Tough little Peter Szanto knew that he was a
wanted man. He is a wanted man today.

Lazlo Szabo

    Before the Russians came back in tenfold strength, Budapest
had its famous five days of freedom. There was heady talk of
quitting the satellite Warsaw Pact and proclaiming neutrality.
The romantic Hungarians had gone too far: back came the Russians
in ruthless array. Out went Nagy, in came thin-lipped Quisling
Janos Kadar. The Russian tanks and infantry were now too much for
the street fighters. This is where the Hungarian revolution might
have ended but for factory workers like Lazlo Szabo, foreman of a
textile mill at Vac, near Budapest.

    The first outbreak in Budapest, back on Oct. 23, had created
great excitement in Vac. Lazlo hurried home from the factory. "A
big argument started right away," he recalls. "I said a great
change is coming and that we must do something about it. My
father-in-law disagreed. He said everyone should lie low, or the
AVH would get us. One of my wife's brothers-in-law said, 'It is
madness to turn against Russian power. It will crush you.' Then
my wife, who is better educated than the rest of us, said: 'Well,
I am sure that if we start something, the West will come to help
us. It will give them a chance to intervene, and it will show the
world that our representative at the U.N. and the Russians are
lying when they say the Hungarian people are contented. What has
happened to us? Have Hungarians become cowards?'"

    Next day Lazlo Szabo joined demonstrations which tore down
the
Soviet monuments, cut the Red stars out of the flags, and freed
political prisoners in the Vac prison.

    Lazlo and his friends heard Radio Budapest, in rebel hands on
Oct. 27, tell all factories to set up workers' councils. Lazlo
was one of 14 elected by secret ballot at his mill. "I thought to
myself, 'My God! What is happening? Are we really practicing
democracy?' I felt like crying."

    "There were happy meetings everywhere," says Lazlo.
Everything went well until the day that the Soviet army attacked
again. The workers got 6,000 rifles from the Hungarian army, but
when 37 Soviet tanks armored cars suddenly descended on Vac,
there was no resistance.

    The Russians had no food, and the Vac people gave them bread
and a little meat, for which the soldiers were grateful. Says
Lazlo: "Our people were not afraid of the Russians, and talked to
them. Some of the Russians thought they were in East Germany and
that they would soon meet American 'fascists' who had invaded the
country. Other troops thought they were in the Suez Canal zone.
Our people explained what was going on and what the Hungarian
objectives were and what the Russians had done in Budapest. There
was one captain who listened to all of this. He got redder and
redder. We thought he was angry at us. Suddenly he threw his hat
down and said: 'Bulganin and Khrushchev would rape their own
mothers!' He was very angry, but not with us."

    The Black Flags. From Budapest came orders from the new
quisling government: back to the factories. About 60% of the men
in Lazlo's mill showed up. But when they heard that the Central
Workers' Council in Budapest had begun a general strike, the Vac
workers struck too. A mass meeting of 5,000 demanded the
reinstatement of Premier Nagy and the withdrawal of the Soviet
army. The AVH rounded up members of the Vac workers' council. In
answer, workers carrying black flags demonstrated silently,
demanding their return, and the leaders were returned. "The
strike," concludes Workers' Council Leader Lazlo Szabo, "is the
ultimate weapon."

    It is the leather-coated Hungarian worker, slow to anger, but
now sullenly planting his ill-shod feet on his native ground, who
is winning concessions, if not the freedom the intellectuals
dreamed of, from the Russians. But Lazlo Szabo is not happy. His
pretty wife dared to go to Budapest and has not been heard from
since. Friends say she was last seen on her way to the West
station to try to get a train to Vac. The West railroad station
is one of the points where the Russians assembled Hungarians for
deportation.

    Lazlo Szabo, Peter Szanto, Ferenc Kocsis, Janos Feher --
these are not their real names -- are, each in his own way,
representative of those anonymous thousands, many of them dead,
who fought for their country's freedom against the most brutal
tyranny on earth. Taken together, they epitomize the Hungarian
Freedom Fighter, the man who made history leap forward in 1956 --
the Man of the Year.