home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- <text id=89TT1658>
- <title>
- June 26, 1989: Catharsis In Hungary
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
- June 26, 1989 Kevin Costner:The New American Hero
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- WORLD, Page 38
- Catharsis in Hungary
- </hdr><body>
- <p> A pyramid of funeral wreaths lay beside the wooden coffins in
- Heroes' Square. There, last week, more than 200,000 mourners
- gathered in downtown Budapest to bury the Stalinist ghost in
- Hungarian history. Church bells tolled, and the people sang the
- Szozat, the emotionally charged hymn of the nation's repeated
- triumphs over foreign domination.
- </p>
- <p> It was a proper tribute for Imre Nagy. He was Hungary's Prime
- Minister in 1956, when Soviet tanks stormed into Budapest to crush
- the tumultuous uprising that for a moment seemed to promise freedom
- and democracy in one of Moscow's East European satellites. Nagy and
- four of his top aides were executed in 1958 after a secret trial
- and buried in an unmarked grave. Earlier this year, their bodies
- were exhumed for a formal, cathartic reburial. "Never again should
- such a terror occur," Miklos Vasarhelyi, Nagy's former press
- secretary, told the crowd. "We hereby close once and for all a
- tragic, painful epoch to be able to open a new page in the history
- of our nation."
- </p>
- <p> After the speeches, the coffins were reinterred in the
- Rakoskeresztur cemetery in the same plot from which they had been
- exhumed. A sixth coffin was lowered empty into the ground in
- symbolic memory of more than 200 other Hungarians who were executed
- in the terror that followed the uprising.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-