East Europe: An Eyewitness in Hungary
Fryer, Peter
Half-way through the morning the barrier was lifted and a car came through and drew up in front of the customs house. Inside were German Red Cross men and a German journalist. The car was full...
...A.V.H...
...my heart was too full to do more than tell the people that the British people had not yet any reliable news of what was happening in Hungary, that I would make it my business to tell them as speedily as possible, and that I was sure that as soon as the news spread medical aid would be on its way from Britain, too...
...A deputation from the revolutionary committee was interviewing her husband to demand that Stefko be handed to the people...
...They spoke to me about the A.V.H...
...Some had little bunches of flowers on their breasts...
...They turned what could have been the outstanding example of people's democracy in Europe into a grisly caricature of Socialism...
...It was a feeling such as hangs over a British mining town when a pit disaster draws crowds to the pit-head...
...Already in a coffin, lightly shrouded, lay the corpse of the eighteen-month-old baby...
...They intended to leave the supplies at Magyarbvar and then try to get through to Budapest to see what was needed there...
...They took us in slow, silent procession along an avenue of plane trees to the little chapel and mortuary in the town cemetery...
...His head turned wildly from side to side and there was spittle round his mouth...
...They asked me what the West was doing to help, and some asked outright for arms...
...And I have no hesitation in placing the blame for these terrible events squarely on the shoulders of those who led the Hungarian Communist Party for eleven years—up to and including Erno Gero...
...Nothing could now restrain the crowd, and they rushed to the army barracks to pour out the story to the soldiers...
...There was a boy of six or so...
...something had happened at the town of Magyardvar, ten minutes drive along the main road to Gyor...
...But I was forced to...
...It was a secret police which in the last few dreadful days turned its guns on the people whose defenders it was supposed to be...
...There had been about 80 wounded brought here, of whom eleven had died, and about 80 had been taken to the hospital at Gyor...
...Some women were crying...
...The average wage in Hungary before the revolution was between 900 and 1,000 forints a month—say £25...
...For many years I had opposed, in what I wrote and said, and in my heart, the crimes of British imperialism in the Colonies...
...Next day Hungary disappeared altogether from the Daily Worker's front page...
...In Hegyeshalom village, a few minutes away, adults stared at our car and children waved...
...Interpreters were provided, and we faced a crowd of several hundreds: soldiers, workers, students and wom en...
...Take down the red star," they roared...
...The car was full of food and medical supplies...
...They pushed with all their might at the double gates, burst them open and surged in...
...It expressed their desire for an end of Soviet occupation, for the removal of the Soviet symbols that had been thrust down their throats in place of bread, for the silencing of the empty slogans that had been dinned into their ears in place of truth...
...A few minutes later the director was forced to give in, and we • At the official rate of exchange, 600 forints is worth about £18, at the tourist rate rate of exchange £9...
...In everyone's button-hole there was a scrap of red, white and green ribbon and, pinned with it, a scrap of black ribbon...
...The answers I received to these points carried complete conviction...
...The revolutionary committee received us with great courtesy...
...we passed many more coming away, having identified kinsfolk or sweethearts or friends, or having stood in homage to dead workmates or fellow-students...
...Another was captured and lynched and the other two were wounded and taken to the hospital...
...Reactionaries...
...They climbed the wire fence and spat at him and shouted "murderer...
...I am the first Communist journalist from abroad to visit Hungary since the revolution started...
...The people had been promised a better life, and were prepared to cooperate to the full to achieve it...
...After eleven years of "people's democracy" it had come to this: that the security police was so remote from the people, so alien to them, so vicious and so brutal that it turned its weapons on a defenseless crowd and murdered the people who were supposed to be masters of their own country...
...But the crowds spoke also to me of their lives in this small industrial town, of the long years of grinding poverty, without hope of improvement, of their hatred and fear of the A.V.H...
...What happened to the officials...
...The need for plasma and other medicaments was desperate if lives were to be saved and so was the need, said the director's wife, to end the tumult outside...
...They were no longer an instrument of the working people but an instrument of the State...
...But life grew worse instead of better...
...had been set up after the events of the previous day, and was in continuous session, mainly organizing food supplies and arranging contact with the similar committee at Gyor, the county town...
...At Magyarbvar on October 271 vowed that in the future I would oppose with equal passion and energy crimes committed by those who called themselves Communists, crimes which besmirched a noble and humanitarian cause...
...It was the upsurge of a whole people, in which rank-and-file Communists took part, against a police dictatorship dressed up as a Socialist society—a police dictatorship backed up by Soviet armed might...
...This was not an expression of their desire for the restoration of capitalism...
...There was a general movement in the direction of the hospital, where an immense crowd had gathered, clamoring for Stefko to be brought out to them...
...then the screams of the wounded...
...headquarters, in the course of which one of the detachment's four officers was killed...
...The mourners made way for us and gently pushed us to the very front, so that we should see and know and tell what we had seen...
...I made a point of questioning every one who claimed to be an eyewitness of the atrocity...
...If after eleven years the working people, goaded beyond bearing, Iook to the West for succor, whose fault is that...
...There was no feeling that the town and its factories belonged to the people, or that the Party was an organization of the people, despite all the propaganda about Socialism...
...It was soon over...
...One of these had died during the night, and the other, Lieutenant Stefko, was still lying there...
...Mick Bennett insisted on reading me a long extract from a resolution of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party...
...Most of the committee members were former members of the SocialDemocratic Party, who for one reason or another had dropped out of political activity since the Communist Party and the Social-Democratic Party were merged in the Hungarian Working People's Party in June 1948...
...Lieutenant J6zsef Stefko, two machine-guns hidden behind the windows of the headquarters pumped bullets into the thickest part of the crowd...
...It has been an organized and planned effort to overthrow by undemocratic and violent means a Government which was in process of carrying through important constructive measures...
...When we had listened to this story, the revolutionary committee insisted that the German and English journalists go out on the balcony and address the crowds, and then visit the cemetery to see for themselves the victims of the atrocity...
...I get 700 forints a month," said one...
...The day after I had sent this dispatch they were reading only about "gangs of reactionaries" who were "beating Communists to death in the streets" of Budapest...
...In particular, I sought to make absolutely sure that the demonstrators did not carry arms, and that the arms they ultimately obtained were given them by the soldiers...
...We told him to go home and stay there for a bit...
...The reply was a hoarse word of command, the rattle of machine gun fire, the mowing down of those in the front ranks...
...The paper admitted in passing that "some reports claimed that only identified representatives of the former security police were being killed...
...The townfolk knew from personal experience that the propaganda in Szabad Nep and on the wireless was so much hypocrisy...
...But after the merger of the two parties the people's own creative initiative, their desire to build Socialism, was stifled...
...From the disjointed phrases, we learned that a demonstration had been fired on the previous day by men of the secret police...
...All told more or less the same story...
...I only get 600," said another.* They were illdressed, the women and girls doing their pathetic best to achieve some faint echo of elegance...
...There was not even an initial burst of firing into the air, or over the people's heads...
...Much of the rest of the dispatch was never received in London because the call was cut off after twenty minutes, and the first ten had been taken up by three different people giving me contradictory instructions as to the "line" I should take...
...I should be interested to know what J. R. Campbell, editor of the [London] Daily Worker, or Mick Bennett, assistant editor, or George Matthews, assistant secretary of the Communist Party, who suppressed the dispatch I wrote about Magyarovar, would have said to the people of that town if they had been in my place...
...No one smiled...
...This was no counter-revolution, organized by fascists and reactionaries...
...The Hungarian tricolor and the black flag of mourning flew side by side from almost every house...
...There were eighty dead and between one hundred and two wounded...
...No warning was given, no Riot Act was read, for Hungary does not have a Riot Act...
...I had had enough of resolutions...
...Ten minutes afterwards only a few people were left outside the hospital...
...Their only weapons were red, white and green flags, and occasional rough posters bearing the two fundamental demands of the national uprising: "End the Russian oc cupation" and "Abolish the A.V.H...
...They were beasts, brutes, animals who had sold themselves to the Russians...
...Half-way through the morning the barrier was lifted and a car came through and drew up in front of the customs house...
...Men and women, students and workers, children and even an 18-month-old baby were among the victims...
...But the readers of the Daily Worker were not to be told the truth...
...At the command of A.V.H...
...They were neither consulted nor drawn into the administration of their own affairs...
...The firing went on for four minutes, and some of those wounded were shot again in the back as they tried to crawl away...
...The German journalist and I were admitted into the hospital, where we met the director's wife and a Frenchspeaking woman who had volunteered to help with the nursing...
...The crowd, a good-humored one, drew near the A.V.H...
...Hungarian Revolution appeared in England under the imprint of Dennis Dobson Books, Ltd., which holds copyright and with whose permission this chapter receives its first American publication in DISSENT...
...The German said simply that medical help was on the way from West Germany...
...They reared and trained a secret police which tortured all —Communists as well as non-Communists—who dared to open their mouths against injustices...
...men also threw hand grenades...
...His head was bandaged...
...The twenty members of the revolutionary committee were all local men...
...They began to speak of the preceding day's events...
...As fascists...
...Without hesitation the soldiers broke open the armory and gave the people weapons...
...none could be called an emigre...
...The trade unions were a farce—dominated by Party puppets, and existing not to protect and improve the wages and conditions of their members but to "mobilize" them in the struggle for higher production...
...I must have spoken to well over a hundred people that day alone...
...They called themselves Hungarians and they mowed our people down without hesitation...
...The purchasing power is probably about £12-£14, but it should be remembered that rents are generally speaking lower in Hungary than in Britain, while clothing, quality for quality, is much dearer...
...Some were Communists, but rank-and-file Communists, not officials...
...We must see the bodies of those who had been murdered...
...The party secretary was a bully, but he was not a criminal...
...All were obviously workingclass people...
...It • This article constitutes Chapter II of Hungarian Tragedy, a first-hand report of the Hungarian Revolution by Peter Fryer, at the time the Budapest correspondent of the London Daily Worker...
...I did not want to hear any more or see any more...
...There were girls who could not have been more than sixteen...
...This was the story the revolutionary committee told me, and the old Socialists among them, men who remembered what it had been like before the war, were the most vehement and passionate in their denunciation of the "Socialism" that had been foisted upon their fellow-citizens in the past eight years...
...It has been eight years of hell," they said...
...There was a fierce battle for the A.V.H...
...I wrote this under the immediate impact of a most disturbing and shattering experience, but I do not withdraw one word of it...
...As the crowd saw the stretcher approaching they sent up a howl of derision and anger and hatred...
...the dried blood was still on the clothing...
...They were unarmed, and at that stage they did not want arms...
...In Magyarovar the streets were packed, and the car was at once surrounded by people who tried to talk to us in German, English and French...
...Counter-revolutionaries...
...I should like to know...
...Soon we were speeding through the Kis Alfold, Hungary's Little Plain, a countryside of harvested fields as monotonously flat as my native Holderness, and that was the only comforting feature of this plunge into the unknown...
...By Friday the whole town was in ferment, and at about 10 o'clock in the morning the people poured out of their houses in a spontaneous demonstration...
...The bodies lay in rows...
...If the Americans are guilty of seeking to foster counter-revolution with the Mutual Security Act, surely the Rikosis and the Geros are a hundred times more guilty for providing the soil in which seeds sown by Americans could grow...
...Hundreds went with us...
...I did not want to believe what they told me, but their stories tallied in every important detail...
...On Wednesday and Thursday the word had spread round the factories and streets of the fighting in Budapest...
...He was carried close enough to me for me to have touched him...
...They were entirely peaceful—except that wherever they saw a red star they tore it down...
...headquar ters where a huge red star stood out against the sky...
...They did not know what, but it was reported that many were wounded...
...For several hours I stood at the entrance to the cemetery, hemmed in by a gigantic crowd, a succession of interpreters coming forward to translate through English or French...
...I wrote later in my first, unpublished, dispatch: After eleven years the incessant mistakes of the Communist leaders, the brutality of the State Security Police, the widespread bureaucracy and mismanagement, the bungling, the arbitrary methods and the lies have led to a total collapse...
...On it lay Stefko, wearing a blue shirt...
...Magyar6var, its population of 22,000 almost entirely workingclass, had elected a town council with a Socialist majority in 1945...
...He was fully conscious, and he knew quite well what was going to happen to him...
...There was an air of tremendous tension in the town as if some terrible natural calamity had taken place...
...Magyar6var was a poor town, its poverty made no more bearable by the veneer of Socialism: the red star, the slogans, the portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Rakosi (until recently) , the expression elvtdrs [comrade], and the compulsory May Day demonstrations...
...They took the body and hanged it by the ankles for a short time from one of the trees in the Lenin Street...
...Entrance allowed only on official business," said a notice at the Party headquarters...
...I have tried to keep the promise to tell the truth I made that day as the black flag hanging from the Town Hall balcony flapped in my face and the faces of people stricken by a grief beyond words merged into a blur in my eyes...
...I had seen where eleven years of terror and stupidity had led Hungary, and I wanted to tell the readers of the Daily Worker the plain unvarnished truth, however painful it might be...
...Would they have addressed them in the lofty, omniscient tones of the Daily Worker editorial of the day before, the day this abominable mass murder took place: What has happened in Hungary during these past days has not been a popular uprising against a dictatorial Government...
...The stretcher was flung to the ground, and the crowd was upon Stefko, kicking and trampling...
...saw a stretcher carried by four men appear out of a hut in the hospital grounds...
...Singing the Hungarian National Anthem, they marched through their town in the first spontaneous demonstration since 1945...
...I did not know what to say...
...And when they were taken to see the dead, as I then was, how would they have described them...
...It was here that I got for the first time reasonably accurate figures of the number of wounded...
...Would they have insulted their grief with warnings about "counter-revolution," or delivered a little homily about "White Terror...
...His legs were covered by a blanket...
...Some faces were set and stern, others were contorted with weeping, and I wept myself when we reached the chapel and the mortuary...
...The Party bosses ran the town by issuing orders...
...Where could the people turn in their poverty...
...But there were not many people about...
...Relations of those he had murdered were, they told me, foremost in this lynching...
...a crowd had gathered outside the hospital and was demanding that he be handed over to them for summary justice...
...But first would we go to the revolutionary committee, which was in session at the Town Hall...
...I for one do not regard these as counterrevolutionaries...
...There were 5,000 people in the demonstration, including old men and old women, young girls from the aluminum factory, women with their babies in their farms and schoolboys...
...I begged for a place in the car and they agreed to squeeze up and take me...
...We shan't Ieave a single one of those swine alive —you'll see...
Vol. 4 • April 1957 • No. 2
