The Bridge At Andau Part 2

"From the age of sixteen," he says, "I was a devoted communist. My parents were starving peasants and one day I stumbled upon the writings of Karl Marx. His ideas struck me like a whip and made everything clear. Then, in 1946, a communist talent-searching party came to our village and heard about me.

"They talked with me for a long time and were amazed that I knew more about the theory of communism than they did. They said, 'You are exactly the kind of man we want.' They arranged for me to go to school, but the teacher said I already knew enough, and I was taken right into the party as one of the youngest members.

"I made a rather great career," Peter says in excellent English. "I was trained for foreign service ... that's the best plum of all, and from the age of eighteen I was exhibited as a prize communist youth. I served for several years on the central committee for all communist youth organizations. At the age of twenty the organization decided that I had pa.s.sed the tests for foreign service, and from then on I was known as a young man who might eventually be sent overseas. I had everything I wanted."

The life of such a young man was most appealing. He was given spending money, allowed to read foreign books, kept informed of what was happening in the world, and given a large clean place in which to live. Since Szigeti was one of the first sons of peasants to accomplish so much, he had particular privileges, and it was apparent that all this would continue indefinitely, so long as he kept in the good graces of the AVO.

But when the revolution against communism came, Peter Szigeti not only joined it. He led it. How this happened is difficult to explain.

"It started, I think," he reflects, "when I first realized the tremendous gap that existed between the promises the communists made when they were trying to gain power, and what they actually did when they had it. Communist slogans always sound good when the reds are trying to take over a nation."

Szigeti, an acute young man, looks like the stereotype of a communist. He has piercing eyes, eyebrows that meet far down the bridge of his nose, a wiry build, a sharp tongue, a dedication in his entire manner. Unfortunately for his career as a communist, he also has a sense of humor.

"I began in secret to make lists of the lies we told the people. First, 'Capitalism works by chance, but communism works by plan.' You would be amazed at how hit-or-miss our programs were. Whole areas would go without food because we made a wrong guess. Plan! We didn't even study the available figures.

"Second, 'Capitalism grinds down the worker, communism exalts him.' I quickly learned that the very worst thing to be in a communist state is a worker. It's better to be a dog. The worker gets nothing but big promises. I always told workers, 'You are the saints of communism.' But I noticed that it was people like me who kept hold of the goods and the food.

"Third, 'Capitalism has no soul, but communism brings to everyone a richer life.' The fact is that communism presses a man into an ever-narrowing world. It drives you into a petty, confined little Russian world. Hungary's once vital connections with all of western culture were destroyed. We had to read Russian books, see Russian plays, study Russian philosophy. The worst crime communism committed in Hungary was the confinement of our great, free, searching soul.

"I could go on for hours repeating the discoveries I made, and I used to laugh at them. But there was one"-and Szigeti's lean face grows very hard-"about which I could never laugh. We told the people of Hungary, 'You are blood brothers to the great Soviet Republic of Russia. Together we will stand against the world.' But I saw that it was not a brotherhood in which we were involved, but slavery.

"In the riots Hungarians shouted, 'Give us back our uranium. Give us back our diesel engines. Give us back our food.' These were not empty cries. These were the truth."

Peter Szigeti's hands clench as he recalls the cynical betrayal of his people, their delivery as bound slaves to the Russians. I was so impressed by his testimony that I have taken great pains to doc.u.ment what he said. So far as I can tell, from hundreds of interviews, the following facts are true.

"Take a workman, like one I know. He works 331 hours a month. For this he gets 1,053 forints. That's about $21 a month American money at the actual rate of 50 forints to the dollar. Now a suit of clothes costs him 980 forints. That's nearly a month's pay. Suppose we take an American worker who gets time and a half for overtime. If he worked 331 hours a month, he'd make around $700. That means that under communism his suit of clothes would cost him about $680. I understand American workmen can buy them for about $50.

"Under communism a young couple cannot live unless each works ten hours a day. The price structure is kept so high that they can afford nothing, even with such slave hours. As a communist leader I was able to make my purchases at special stores where the reduction was sometimes seventy per cent. The working people ate little and wore less.

"But again it was the economy of the nation itself that made me first question communism. Our country was being used as an indecent experiment to strengthen Russia; I cannot recall a single decision that was ever made in terms of Hungary's good. With our productive capacity and our hard work we ought to be able to provide our people with a good living. We used to, when we knew less and worked less. But now everything goes to Russia."

It was this gloomy discovery that drove Peter Szigeti to some hard thinking ... still in the loneliness of his own mind, for he knew no one to trust.

"I first looked at the AVO. It had numerous organizations, each checking on the other. Then a supreme AVO group checked on the setup and it was checked by the Russians. I wondered why, in a scientific world, so much suspicion was required.

"Then I looked at communism itself and I saw that it was an organization of gangsters banded together to protect themselves and to get the good things of the nation into their control. I never saw a single unselfish act by a communist.

"Finally I looked at the life of fear we led and I concluded, 'Life under communism has no hope, no future, no meaning. Yesterday, today and tomorrow are all lost!' The day I decided that, I joined the Petofi Club."

In 1848 the Hungarians revolted against their Austrian masters, and during a series of b.l.o.o.d.y engagements their spirits were kept alive by the poems of an inspired young man, Sandor Petofi. He became then, and has remained, the beacon light of Hungarian patriotism and the symbol for all who seek freedom. He led a heroic life on the battlefield and wrote a series of poems which exactly mirror the Hungarian patriot's yearning for freedom. Therefore, when a dedicated young communist like Peter Szigeti decided to join a club named after Sandor Petofi, it was a milestone in his life.

The Petofi Club in Budapest was definitely Marxist, and its members were communists, but they believed that what Hungary needed was a liberal, Hungarian communism divorced from Russian domination. Specifically, they wanted Hungarian wealth to stay in Hungary, and secondly, Soviet secret police to stay in Russia. Members.h.i.+p was composed of poets, playwrights, novelists, artists, actors and a few leading communist philosophers. Often the members were in their sixties; some were promising youths. They were not a daring group, but they did have access to a publication which dealt honestly with major questions. This was a literary magazine published by the Writers' a.s.sociation, but all the writers who controlled it were secretly members of the Petofi Club, and they made their journal so exciting that its 70,000 edition was s.n.a.t.c.hed off the newsstands as quickly as it appeared. There were, however, mainly convinced communists in the Petofi Club, and it could not possibly be considered a reactionary group.

In the summer of 1956, when Peter Szigeti joined the club, discussions of the economic and moral ruin of Hungary under communism were drawing to a head. Holding to a philosophical rather than a revolutionary line, the Petofi men maintained an incessant pressure on the government, and as they talked they began to convince themselves that some radical change was necessary.

Says an older Petofi Club member, "In my travels through the countryside I discovered to my sorrow that I had lost the capacity of enlisting the interest of young people. They were not reactionaries. They were not fascists. But they expected me to say something powerful and honest about their problems. I began to ask myself, 'Have we older communists failed to give any kind of leaders.h.i.+p?' Out of respect for myself as a philosopher I started to speak critically of the tragedy in which Hungary was engulfed. And the more I spoke, the more I felt the thrill of having young people drawn toward me. In this way they forced my re-education. On one memorable night at a meeting in the city of Gyor, I allowed myself to be cross-questioned for hours, and gradually I was driven into a position where I had to admit to myself-if not to the students-that our present system was bankrupt."

It was with such minds that Peter Szigeti now found himself in contact. With increasing awareness of the revolutionary position into which these quiet men were forcing him, he continued to a.s.sociate with them. Ironically, they held some of their most provocative meetings in the building of the communist youth organization, with AVO men on the next floor.

By mid-October, 1956, it was apparent to all Petofi Club members that some kind of change was inescapable. Hungarian communists would have to break away from Russia, and they would have to liberalize their government so completely as to make it a liberal socialist state rather than a communist one. Peter Szigeti was one of the first to acknowledge this openly.

"I was ready for the revolution," he says. "I was even ready to launch it."

On October 23, while the university students were revising and polis.h.i.+ng their list of grievances, the braver spirits of the Petofi Club were producing their own demands, and to Peter Szigeti fell the task of putting them in good written form. "We proposed measures which would have liberalized Hungary and made it a decent place in which to live." The government, of course, refused to take the Petofi proposals seriously.

It was with cold satisfaction, therefore, that Szigeti heard about the riots at the radio station and at the offices of the Szabad Nep. "We offered them a peaceful way out. Now there'll be war."

He was therefore expecting trouble toward noon on the twenty-fifth when he joined an immense crowd that had begun shouting freedom slogans in front of the great neo-Gothic Parliament building. "The people won't leave this time without some kind of a.s.surances from the government," he mused.

No officials appeared, so he idled the morning away studying the square. "I could see the AVO men with machine guns on the roof of Parliament. To the north more guns lined the top of the Supreme Court building, and right above where I stood the offices of the Agricultural Ministry were bristling with guns. I remember thinking, 'After the defeat the AVO men took at the radio building, they won't wait for trouble today. They'll start it.' " And although Szigeti could not see them from his position at the back of the crowd, along the foot of the Parliament building stood a menacing line of powerful Russian tanks manned by crack Russian troops, whose officers were beginning to wonder if their men had not come to like the Hungarians too much, after long tours of duty in that hospitable land.

In spite of the menacing guns, people began calling for Imre Nagy, to whom they wished to present various pet.i.tions. But whenever those behind, like Szigeti, tried to push forward, those in front came face to face with the Russian tanks and pushed back. There were no cries, no menacing gestures, but nevertheless, out of the blue October sky, an AVO sharpshooter atop the Supreme Court building grew nervous and fired a single shot into the crowd.

With fantastic ill luck this bullet hit a baby in the arms of its mother and knocked both the dead child and the mother onto the pavement. In wild grief she raised the baby high in her arms and rushed toward a Soviet tank. "You have killed my child. Kill me." Her anguished protest was drowned by the sound of AVO guns firing more shots into the crowd.

It is absolutely verified that the tank captain, who had grown to like Hungarians, raised his cap to the distraught woman and then turned to wipe the tears from his eyes. What he did next made a general battle in Budapest inevitable, for he grimly directed his tank guns against the roof of the Supreme Court building, and with a shattering rain of bullets erased the AVO crew stationed there. Now even the Russians were fighting the AVO men.

Peter Szigeti was standing near the Ministry of Agriculture buildings, on the opposite side of the square from the Supreme Court, and he could see on the faces of the AVO men stationed above him the horror that overcame them when they realized what the Russians had done. They were more horrified when they saw the Russian tank commander revolve his guns toward them, and with a nest of heavy machine guns they started spraying bullets haphazardly into the defenseless square. They had to fire directly over Szigeti's head, and he could hear the bullets screaming past.

More than six hundred citizens fell in those terrible moments, and after that everyone knew that this fight of the AVO men against the people of Budapest would know no truce.

Proof came when an ambulance, which had been stationed in Bathory Street to the south, rushed its doctors toward the dying who cluttered up the square. No sooner had the doctors moved into the crowd, trying to drag the wounded to safety, than the AVO men cut them down with bullets.

Peter Szigeti, who from the year 1946 had been a fair-haired boy of Hungarian communism, who had reaped the riches that the dictators.h.i.+p offered, and who could logically aspire to the highest posts, saw this ma.s.sacre of the doctors with overpowering revulsion. In a kind of senseless rage, something he had learned never to indulge in, he began screaming at the AVO men above him, "a.s.sa.s.sins! Dogs! Swine!"

Then, seeing a Russian soldier who had moved away from the line of tanks and who was not firing his rifle, he rushed up to the man and begged for the weapon. The Russian hesitated a moment, then saw the increasing mounds of bodies in the square, and, acting on the spur of the moment in defense of a people he liked, handed Szigeti his rifle.

The chosen young man of communism, unable to stomach it any longer, hefted the rifle to his shoulder and started blazing away at the AVO men in the Ministry of Agriculture.

3.

At the Kilian Barracks

When communism faced its first great test in the satellite countries, it found that young people whom it had indoctrinated-like Josef Toth-had turned against it. Next it discovered that once-dedicated intellectuals whom it had pampered with promises of high position-like Istvan Balogh and Peter Szigeti-had not only rejected it but had also taken arms against it.

Russian leaders must surely have been depressed by such evidence of long-range failure, and committees must now be searching for excuses to explain away this major psychological defeat at the hands of those whom the system had reason to trust. But the Kremlin dictators must have been shaken with a mortal fear when they heard how the trusted soldiers of communism reacted when the red system came under attack. For years the red armies had been given special consideration, special pay and special attention from communist commissars. Here is how the soldiers defended communism in its moment of peril.

The city of Budapest, where this test took place, provided a dramatic setting. It is located on the banks of the Danube, some miles below the point where that historic river makes its sudden ninety-degree swing to the south, so that when the river cuts Budapest in half, it is running north and south, not east and west as it does for the remainder of its course.

Long before Roman legions first penetrated to this lonely outpost, a small trading community had grown up on the west bank of the Danube, and it was this inconspicuous village that expanded into a small but notable Roman establishment. Here hot mineral waters gushed out of the ground and allowed the Romans to build fine baths, followed by theaters and s.p.a.cious public buildings. Thus Buda, on the west bank, became an outpost of civilized Europe. Long after the fall of Rome had called away the legions, and in spite of the inevitable decline of the baths and the buildings, Buda remained a kind of lonely outpost, always tenuously in touch with Europe.

Later, on the east bank of the river, the little village of Pest grew up, and its function was to provide a trading center for the great plains that stretched away eastward toward Asia. For centuries these two settlements stared at each other across the Danube, each expressing a gentle contempt for the role played by the other. Buda was a patrician settlement built on lovely hills and marked by fine trees. Pest was a rustic trading post on the great Hungarian plain. It had little beauty to commend it. Buda, for its part, was an ancient city with narrow streets, houses dating back a thousand years, and historic castles, while Pest was content to be a thriving commercial city with factories, power and wealth.

Ultimately the two communities joined to form the capital of Hungary, where in the nineteenth century a vivid social life grew up which challenged and in some ways surpa.s.sed that of Vienna. Budapest and Vienna were natural rivals. Each was capital of its half of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and they were only a hundred and seventy miles apart. Good trains connected them, as did the famous pleasure boats of the Danube, which drifted down from Vienna to Budapest laden with rich food and orchestras. Men and women went to Vienna to display their importance, to Budapest to have a good time, and soon the city was known as the little Paris.

Citizens of the dual monarchy delighted in comparing the two capitals. Budapest by common consent had much the lovelier women and the livelier parties. Vienna, on the other hand, was more sedate, and its cultural life, in the formal sense of opera, concert and theater, more ill.u.s.trious.

Budapest was held to have a better climate, more tasty cooking, finer dancing, more natural vivacity, a wealthier aristocracy and a more oppressed citizenry. Vienna was more religious, had better music, richer desserts and more officials. The architecture of the two cities was about equal, but no one was ever known to claim that Vienna had the natural beauty of Budapest.

Marriages between the better families of the two cities were common, and no stigma attached to the Viennese who was lucky enough to catch the rich daughter of some Hungarian n.o.bleman; but because of the superiority of Viennese opera, theater and museums, Austrians always tended quietly to consider their Hungarian neighbors as country cousins. Actually, in the middle years of the last century Vienna was the rather stuffy imperial center which maintained the pretensions of ruling the Austro-Hungarian empire, whereas in truth Budapest was the scintillating source from which new ideas, new creative impulses and the effective rulers of the empire came. Hungarians were apt to remark, "A sensible man lives in Budapest when he's young and dies in Vienna when he's old." To which the cla.s.sic Viennese reply was, "Asia begins three miles east of Vienna."

After World War I, Hungary and Austria were split and Budapest became the capital of the larger, more dynamic and potentially wealthier of the two halves. It might have developed into the major capital of Central Europe had not World War II brought about its partial destruction by Russian forces who were attacking German troops that had occupied the city. (It is interesting to observe that Russian propaganda invariably refers to this action as "the Russian liberation of Budapest," whereas the British-American a.s.sault on Vienna, which drove out a large number of Germans with less material damage to the city, is always called "the American destruction of Vienna.") Under communism the city was rebuilt and resumed its role as a magnificent capital. Anticommunists would be ill advised to ignore the considerable real gains made in Budapest during the first days of communism. Schools and universities were thrown open to the children of peasants, good apartments were made available to those who could not previously afford them, and for a while the benefits which communism is supposed to provide seemed attainable. There were good theater, sparkling ballet and excellent music. Budapest watched new buildings go up, imposing monuments to Russian soldiers, a big, rugged statue of Stalin and a new bridge, dreadfully ugly but serviceable.

Budapest was a unique city, handsomely distributed over the hills of Buda and the plains of Pest. It was dominated by the beautiful Danube, which is probably loveliest at this spot, and whose inviting banks were the center of the city's social life. It was also unique in another way, for it was cut into three concentric segments by three handsome concentric circular boulevards. There was the tight little inner boulevard which started haphazardly in Buda, crossed the Danube on a fine bridge, swung around a tight circle in Pest, and scurried back across the Danube on a second bridge which deposited it in the heart of Buda. There was also a very s.p.a.cious outer boulevard which accomplished the same journey, but its two bridges were miles apart.

The pride of Budapest was the middle boulevard. It started behind Gellert Hill, which dominated Buda, and after making a wide swing among the other hills of Buda, crossed the Danube on the Margaret Bridge and then formed one of the main thoroughfares of Pest, where it was called in turn Lenin Boulevard, Jozsef Boulevard and Ferenc Boulevard, until at last it came back across the Danube on the famous Petofi Bridge, named after the Hungarian poet, ending in Moricz Zsigmond Square, of which we shall hear a good deal later.

These three circular boulevards thus cut Budapest into a kind of target board, like those used for dart games. Communication was aided by other straight, broad streets which radiated out from the center of both Buda and Pest. Three of these straight streets became famous during the battle for Budapest: Stalin, Rakoczi and Ulloi. They were all in Pest, where the major fighting occurred, and as one might expect, where these fine streets crossed the middle circular boulevard there was bound to be trouble. We have already seen that at the corner of Rakoczi Street and Jozsef Boulevard, where the offices of the newspaper Szabad Nep were, one of the first riots occurred, with the destruction of the newspaper building, the burning of the communist bookstore and the humiliation of Stalin's statue.

Farther down, the middle boulevard crosses broad Ulloi Street, and on the southeast corner stands the ancient Kilian Barracks, a rugged brick-and-plaster building four stories high, with walls more than four feet thick. Here, in prewar days, when the barracks was known as the Maria Theresa Barracks, lived the selected soldiers appointed to the defense of Budapest. Under communism, the barracks housed a large administrative staff of tested officers and served as a processing center for recruits from the Budapest area. It was staffed by a small guard of crack soldiers, and although it could in an emergency house about 2,500, it customarily held only about 400, plus members of the labor battalion, who were not armed. It housed no heavy guns or tanks.

On October 23, a delightful, h.e.l.l-raising sergeant named Laszlo Rigo occupied room 19 on the second floor of the Kilian Barracks. I think anyone would instinctively like this twenty-two-year-old Hungarian farm boy. His friends called him Csoki (Little Chocolate Drop), because his face was unusually tanned. He had dark eyes, heavy eyebrows, wavy black hair which he used to comb in public, a very large mouth and white teeth. He looked like a tough young kid trying to be Marlon Brando, but he spoiled the attempt by periodically breaking into joyous laughter. He had a good time in life and was so lean and muscular that he was always ready for a fight.

Around ten o'clock that night young Csoki was wasting time in the museum park, hoping to meet a pretty girl, when he heard shots over toward the radio station. Thinking some soldiers might be in trouble, he hurried over to find that AVO men in the radio building were firing at the crowd.

"Get away from there!" a stranger shouted, pus.h.i.+ng Csoki back toward the museum area. When he recovered himself, he started once more to explore the situation at the radio building, but a fresh volley pinned him in a doorway in Brody Sandor Street and he thought, "I better get back to the barracks and get some guns."

At that point he did not know on whose side he ought to fight, or even what the sides were, but he felt instinctively, "If anyone's going to shoot at AVO men, I'd like to be in on it."

It was only about four blocks to the barracks, and he ran at top speed and shouted, as he leaped up the stairs to the second floor, "There's a big fight on at the radio building. The AVO are shooting people."

He dashed into his room, rumpled things up a bit looking for whatever weapons he could find, and suddenly stopped when he heard a suspicious sound in the hall. Poking his head out gingerly, he saw a man in plain clothes point a pistol at the head of a soldier who was trying to grab him. The civilian fired and the soldier dropped dead.

Sergeant Csoki-his nickname is p.r.o.nounced as if spelled Chokey-ducked back into room 19, slammed the door and thought, "That must be an AVO man!"

Quickly he grabbed an armful of grenades, pulled the pin on one and, crawling along the floor, opened his door gently and pitched the grenade at the gunman. There was a shattering explosion as the sound of the grenade echoed back and forth along the hallway. Running to the fallen gunman, Sergeant Csoki rifled his pockets and found that he was Major Szalay of the AVO. Shouting at the top of his voice, he warned the rest of the soldiers, "The AVO are trying to take over."

The soldiers instantly mobilized for an AVO hunt, and had they started a few minutes later, Kilian Barracks would have been lost, for they intercepted some hundred and fifty AVO men moving in to take over the headquarters and the ammunition it housed. There was a furious fight, for the AVO men were highly skilled in rough tactics, but in the end Csoki and his companions beat back the a.s.sault.

"We killed a good many of them with grenades," the sergeant says. "Some were captured, and if anybody recognized them as particularly bad, we beat them up. Most of them escaped."

Csoki had reason to hate the AVO, for during his army career each unit he had served with had contained several AVO men, and they had instinctively distrusted his jovial att.i.tude toward life. "You've got to be serious when you're a communist," an AVO man warned him. He was not yet a communist, but since he wanted to become an officer, he knew he would have to join the party. So he had held his temper and done what the AVO men told him. Now he was glad to see some of them dead in the hallways.

At this point the Kilian Barracks was infiltrated by a different kind of intruder. Hordes of civilian fighters, driven off from the a.s.sault on Radio Budapest, pushed their way into the barracks, crying, "There's a great fight on. We've got to have arms."

The Kilian officers were naturally distrustful of all civilians-it was their job to keep civilians in line-so they rejected the pleas and ordered the citizens out, but one elderly man with blood on his face said sternly, "The AVO are killing us."

A boy wormed his way through the crowd and caught Csoki by the hand. "The AVO have big guns on the roof," he pleaded.

Still the officers refused to issue guns, until a soldier in uniform ran up, shouting, "It's a very big fight. We've got to have some guns."

Csoki and some of the enlisted men shouted, "Let's give them guns!" And under this pressure the headquarters staff yielded and handed out machine guns and ammunition.

When this was completed the crowd withdrew and the men of Kilian were free to contemplate the course they had launched upon. There was no elation, no childish celebration over their defeat of the AVO. "We knew the Russians would attack us in the morning," Csoki says, "and our officers said, 'When they come, they'll come in tanks.' "

This likelihood did not scare the men because, fortunately, the Russian leaders of the Hungarian communist army had taught its men a favorite Russian trick. Said one burly officer, "You can stop a tank even if you have no guns. You do it with gasoline bombs." And he was thoughtful enough to show the Hungarians precisely where a tank is most vulnerable. "If you stand here," he had explained, "the tank's guns can't reach you. Then throw your c.o.c.ktail in here, and the tank will burn out."

So all that night Csoki and his companions made gasoline bombs. They took bottles, filled them with gasoline and capped them tightly. Then through a small hole in the cap they forced eight inches of cloth tape, which would serve as a fuse when lit by a match just before the bottle was tossed onto a tank. No one in the barracks had any illusions. This was going to be a bitter fight.

At four o'clock that morning the first Russian tank appeared. "Here they come!" a lookout on the fourth floor shouted. "Tanks!"

He was wrong. It was not tanks, but only one. And it was not a tank proper, but a heavily armed reconnaissance car, with machine-gun hatches, plate armor and six rubber-tired wheels. Coming through the darkness-lit only faintly by accidental lights from nearby houses-the armored car seemed more like a boat wandering inland from the Danube. But it was a deadly boat, manned by Russians who were determined to put down any possible rebellion at the Kilian Barracks.

As it drew near the barracks, coming down Ulloi Street from Calvin Square, Sergeant Csoki and six silent soldiers stood in the darkness of the barracks roof, waiting tensely with gasoline bombs ready to be lit and thrown. It was strange, in a way, that they should be there. The soldiers had conducted no formal discussion: "Shall we fight the Russians?" Officers had made no fiery speeches: "We will drive the Russians out of Budapest." There had only been an unspoken, universal understanding: Everyone hates AVO men, Russians support the AVO men. Therefore the Russians are as bad as the AVO men, therefore if you fight one, you've got to fight the other. As for defending Russia, or communism, no one even thought about that.

Sergeant Csoki, waiting breathlessly for the Russian reconnaissance car to come beneath him, whispered to his men, "Now they get it!" At the last unbearable moment they lit their fuses, held the bombs for a moment, then pitched them into the black night air.

In the marvelous arcs of sputtering flame they dropped toward the reconnaissance car. The first bomb hit the pavement of Ulloi Street and exploded like a giant night flower blooming suddenly from the asphalt. It must have blinded the Russian driver, for the car lurched toward the wall of the barracks, where it absorbed in quick succession three bombs, which set the entire vehicle ablaze.

Like a foundering boat now, it staggered down Ulloi Street beyond the barracks, where its own gasoline tank exploded. This was the first recorded Russian casualty.

Sergeant Csoki expected that Russian pressure would increase with daylight, and he was right, for at nine o'clock on the morning of October 24 the battle for Kilian Barracks began in earnest. In the next two hours fifteen Russian reconnaissance cars a.s.saulted the barracks, but with little luck.

"We couldn't understand why the Russians didn't use tanks," Csoki says. "Because we murdered the cars. You see, we had a good position across the street, too. There was a block of houses and inside the square formed by these houses there was a big moving-picture house, the Corvin Cinema. Some of us got on top of this Corvin block of houses, and my men stayed on the two top floors of the barracks. With practice we would pitch our bombs right into the cars, and inside of two hours we had destroyed nine of them."

One car, keeping far to the western side of the boulevard, dodged the bombs and unloaded round after round of heavy fire into the barracks, and many soldiers were killed.

"Blow up that car!" everyone shouted, and a rain of gasoline was showered at it, but the driver was most skillful and dodged his car to safety. From its new position it lobbed more fire into the barracks, and there were more demands for revenge, but no one could hit the car, and after expending all its ammunition, with terrifying results, it waddled down the boulevard, leaving many dead Hungarians in its wake.

In the silence that followed the end of the Russian attack the soldiers of Kilian met and took a solemn oath: "If one of us seems about to surrender to the Russians, we will shoot him." Csoki says, "It was very quiet when we said this, because we were thinking, 'If a car can do so much damage, what will a tank do?' " They had not long to wait for an answer.

But when the tanks did arrive, the young men in Kilian had on their side a tested leader of enormous courage. Csoki first saw him on the roof at Kilian, a whip-thin man with a brown belt across his chest and a Russian-type fur cap outlining his deeply etched face. It was Colonel Pal Maleter, a soldier with a wild, heroic background. He had first been an officer for the fascist Horthy but had drawn away from such dirty business in disgust, becoming, in 1944, a leader of the underground fight against the n.a.z.is in Hungary. He emerged from this experience something of a national hero and was carted off to Moscow by the Russians as the typical Hungarian army man fighting for communism. More than any other Hungarian soldier, he was petted and pampered by the Russians, but now, when he had seen them driving their tanks against his own people, he had come of his free will to Kilian Barracks to take command.

Sergeant Csoki smiled at his grim, jut-jawed visitor and said, "Lots of gasoline on this roof."

Maleter studied a few of Csoki's bombs and said, from deep experience gained in Russia, "The fuses should be longer for tanks."

"You think they'll send tanks?" Csoki asked.

"Soon," Colonel Maleter said. This brave officer, who was to play so striking a role in the revolution, looked down the silent avenues and said, "They'll come up here, Sergeant. Be ready." And he disappeared down the steps.

But before the first tank arrived, Kilian Barracks received yet another kind of visitor. Tough young kids from all over Budapest, hearing of the battle, insisted upon joining it. Carrying old guns, handmade bombs, even swords, they streamed into the barracks as if reporting for duty. At the same time another large group of would-be defenders took up positions in the Corvin Cinema block, just across Ulloi Street, and these recruits were to be of crucial importance in the fight ahead, for some brave young mechanics dashed from the cinema into Ulloi Street and began dismantling a Russian vehicle that had not been completely destroyed. From it they managed to salvage a high-velocity ant.i.tank gun and a quant.i.ty of ammunition. Hauling the gun through an archway leading into the movie house, this gang of desperate young men shouted, "Somebody fix it. Then bring on the tanks."

The situation at the barracks was now this. The building stood at the southeast corner of Ulloi Street, one of the major arteries radiating eastward from the Danube, and Ferenc Boulevard, a segment of the middle circular boulevard. Across Ulloi Street, on the northeast corner of the intersection, stood the block of houses which hid the Corvin Cinema; but in the middle of the block, and cutting right through the houses, was a big archway from which the defenders could fire at the Russians. Throughout the grim fighting which followed, determined soldiers ran back and forth across Ulloi Street, at great risk, to a.s.sault tanks from whichever side of the street offered the best advantage.

The upper floors of the barracks were manned by Sergeant Csoki and men like him. The roof of the Corvin was staffed by daring young civilians with stacks of gasoline bombs. And in what was to prove a masterful tactic, the cellars of each building were jammed with wild-eyed kids of twelve to sixteen, each burning with desire to destroy a Russian tank. Obviously, Ulloi Street was going to be tough negotiating, even for a well-armed Russian tank.