The Five Days of Freedom

For five frantic days Hungary was free.

From beleaguered Budapest on Tuesday the news flashed that the Soviet tanks were pulling out. Shouted the jubilant announcer: "For long years past this radio has been an instrument of lies. It lied day and night. It lied on all wave lengths . . . From this moment those who mouthed the lies are no longer . . . We who are now facing the microphone are new men." It was the voice of the people of Hungary in that hour: a great burden had been cast off.

The first to see the unfamiliar face of freedom were the young rebels. Their weapons at the ready, their faces filthy with the grime of battle, their clothes often blood-caked, they stood along the arteries of battle leading out of the battered city, happily jeering the departing Soviet tanks as they rumbled sullenly by.

Tank Smashing. Only a few hours before, desperate battles had been fought at the Maria Theresia barracks, at the Communist Party headquarters, and at the steel mills at Csepel island. With their heavy 76-mm. guns, the Soviet tanks had attempted to blast the rebels out of their hiding places, but the "incredible youngsters" had evolved their own technique for dealing with the mighty 26-ton tanks. First they would fire on the tanks from upper-story windows, then as the big T-345 rumbled up, their great guns elevated, a small boy would leap out of a doorway, fling a pail of gasoline over the tank's engine compartment and leap back to shelter. As the tank took fire and its crew scrambled out of the turret, the young Tommy-gunner firing from the windows above would mow them down. An alternate system was to slosh a bucket of gasoline across a street and throw a match in it just as a Soviet tank plunged past.

Freedom Fighters. Now, as they began to realize what had happened and what they had done, the faces of the rebels were lit with a kind of ecstasy. There were vigorous blond students and tough-looking workers among them, but many seemed pitifully young. A correspondent noted a boy who could not have been more than ten years old holding himself at the ready with a rifle as tall as himself. Beside him was a 15-year-old girl with a submachine gun and a forage cap on her head. Grey with the fatigue of four days' ceaseless fighting, almost falling from exhaustion, they solemnly welcomed the foreigners: "We greet you in the name of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters!" Some carried machine-gun ammunition belts slung around their shoulders, and out of almost every pocket and above every inch of belt protruded hand grenades. Their striking resemblance to the classic revolutionaries of the Russian Revolution--which had occurred decades before most of them had been born--was not altogether accidental. Piped one 13-year-old veteran: "All us kids were trained in the party."

Under the wan October sun, Budapest had the appearance of a city ravaged by a full-scale war. The streets were choked by rubble and glass, dangling ends of streetcar cables and the uprooted cobblestones and raveled steel of barricades. The air was full of the fine, powdery dust of shell-chipped brick and mortar. Soviet dead in scores lay in grotesque postures beside burned-out and still smoldering hulks of tanks, armored cars, self-propelled guns. Men in white coats moved from corpse to corpse sprinkling snow-white lime which transformed the dead into marblelike statuary. Where possible, rebel dead had been laid side by side and covered by the red, white and green flag of Hungary; but in one side street a woman wept alone over the body of her coal-miner husband. In another street, a rebel fighter lay in the sun, a wreath of autumn leaves on his chest. The revolution had not yet counted its dead, but a cursory estimate put the total at 15,000 (including 3,000 Soviet soldiers) and twice as many wounded.

The Hated AVH. In the crowded hospitals surgeons and nurses worked the clock round, with anesthetics and medication in desperately short supply. Calls for medical help had gone out to Vienna and Geneva, and convoys of medical supplies had already crossed the border from Austria. But planes bringing supplies from Belgium and Switzerland were turned back from Budapest airport by the Russians. Among the wounded being tenderly treated in the hospitals were many young Russian soldiers. They had been variously told by their commanding officers that they were putting down a revolt inspired by fascists, by Stalinists, and by Western imperialists.

Premier Nagy had disowned the city's 10,000-man Communist security-police force, and the Russians had pulled out leaving the hated AVH men to their fate. Most of them had found temporary ratholes. In a huge concrete bunker below Communist Party headquarters, some 200 were said to be hiding out with political prisoners as hostages. Scores hung from trees and lampposts.

The revolution uncovered terrible evidence of AVH cruelty. On a wooded hill in Buda, in a bright new housing development reserved exclusively for ex-Premier Rakosi and his comrades, rebels found a villa with a built-in torture chamber and prison cells, one padded and soundproofed, another equipped with a powerful lamp beamed on a chair. The rebels remembered having seen closed automobiles driving up to this house at night. At Gyor, in the provinces, Western newsmen were shown an AVH headquarters with tiny 2 ft.-wide standup torture cells, and a secret crematory for victims who did not survive AVH treatment. In the same modern building were technical facilities for monitoring all telephone conversations in western Hungary, including a score of tape recorders working simultaneously.

Realizing that they could expect no mercy, the AVH men fought desperately. But the rebels were merciful to the AVH men's families. At one house, where an AVH group was making a last stand, rebels stopped the shooting for a few minutes while the infant son of an AVH man was passed through a window and taken out of range.

The crowd was still nervous and trigger-happy, and newcomers were astonished at how many hands would come out of pockets clutching hand grenades when the cry "Panzer" went up, as a T-34 rumbled into a street, or when a few shots hammered through the air from no one knew where.

Wonderful Hour. Savage reprisals did not outlast the first tense hours of freedom. More typical of anti-AVH demonstrations was the ancient lady dressed in mourning, carrying in one hand a huge black flag the size of a bed sheet and in the other a little bunch of white asters, who marched at a funeral pace three miles to the AVH School for Communism. Naturally the AVH had long since departed, but the old lady had a wonderful hour tossing framed portraits of Lenin and Stalin and clouds of Communist propaganda out of the windows.

A quieter atmosphere, but one which could scarcely be called normal, gradually descended on Budapest. Old women with brooms began sweeping at the doorways of blasted buildings. Rebel work teams searched abandoned vehicles for salvaged weapons. A man with paint pots went from tank to tank painting over the Soviet red star with the Hungarian Republican emblem. A couple of rebel tanks tried to shoot the huge red star off the flagpole of Parliament House, but failed.

There was also fun to be had pulling down Soviet war memorials. High on Gellert Hill, antlike figures swarmed around Sculptor Szigmund Strobl's i soft, statue of Freedom, a graceful woman guarded by the bronze statue of a Russian soldier. Slowly the crowd, pulling on lines attached to the soldier, rocked the statue back and forth, until he tipped forward on his face. There had been no looting in the city thus far, but to walk abroad at night was to hazard being shot at (see PRESS) or stopped by some tough young rebel and made to show identity papers.

Thursday, All Saints' Day, was for the first time in a decade an occasion for joy. Peasants brought food to the city and refused to take money for it. They pressed bread, vegetables and even live ducks and geese into the arms of astonished shoppers. Old peasant women taking food to the hotels and hospitals were offended if their gifts were not accepted. The city was aglitter with candles. Where the massacre which had sparked the revolution had taken place, one thousand candles formed a circle. Everyone who passed knelt for a brief moment.

Democracy's Return. Small newspapers representing political parties long believed defunct suddenly appeared. The old National Peasant Party, the Smallholders Party, and the Social Democratic Party each found its voice. Out of the disorganized Communist Party a new Hungarian Socialist Workers Party with national Communism as its aim was formed by Party Leader Janos Kadar. A Christian "front" was in formation. As if by a miracle, old party leaders appeared. Bela Kovacs, sturdy Smallholders secretary, recently released after nine years in Soviet prison camps, joined the government because "we must establish national unity." The Smallholders' exiled leader Ferenc Nagy had come as far as the border, but had been turned back to Switzerland by the Austrians. Tough old Ferenc Farkas, onetime National Peasant Party leader, bobbed up. Social Democrat Anna Kethly, ailing as a result of long imprisonment in Russia, was on her way back (with a supply of newsprint) when her way was barred by Soviet tanks.

At first the rebels, flames of a spontaneous combustion, had shown no sign of political organization, but now they began throwing up scores, perhaps hundreds, of local and district organizations. There was the Patriotic Peoples Front, the Hungarian National Committee, the Revolutionary Committee of Hungarian Intellectuals, the Hungarian Revolutionary

Youth Party, the Revolutionary Defense Committee. Already there was a "revolutionary personality" in the shape of tall, blond Major General Pal Maleter, an ex-Horthy-regime soldier who had deserted to the Russians and been parachuted back to Hungary during World War II. Like tens of thousands of other Hungarian soldiers (some said just about the entire Hungarian army of 150,000), he had thrown his lot with the rebels. He made a hero of himself by leading the stubborn defense of the Maria Theresia barracks.

All over Hungary, little radio stations were roaring their revolutionary announcements, getting into the wrong frequencies and conducting debates from channel to channel.

What had come over Hungary, without anyone quite realizing it, was democracy.

To continue holding down the premiership, new Premier Nagy was forced to yield to the pressures of the new parties, to promise free elections, to acclaim neutrality, and, above all, to insist that the Russian troops be withdrawn, not only from Budapest, but from Hungary. Thus he called in Soviet Ambassador Yuri Andropov, renounced Hungary's membership in the Warsaw Pact, and put his case to the United Nations. His first Cabinet was made up of Communists, with four exceptions. At week's end there were only three Communists, including himself, in the government; the Cabinet portfolios were distributed among three non-Communist parties, with General Pal Maleter in the key post of Defense Minister.

Negotiation. The Russians called for a meeting to discuss "technical details of the withdrawal of Russian troops." While seven Russian generals sat down with Defense Minister Maleter and Hungarian Army Chief of Staff Kovacs, rumors that had been flying around Budapest gained strength. Soviet forces were pouring into

Hungary from Czechoslovakia, Rumania and the Soviet Union. It was said that Budapest was ringed with Soviet steel and the loyal Hungarian air force had been driven from Budapest airport. The Soviet generals explained that these were merely precautions taken to protect returning Soviet personnel, swore that Soviet forces would be out of Hungary "in three weeks."

All day long the Russians had been ferrying Soviet passengers out to Soviet planes at the airport, among them, it was reported, Russia's First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan and such wanted Hungarian notables as ex-Premier Hegedus and AVH Boss Piros. But, as the reports of Russian troop movements firmed, as rebel center Gyoer was cut off from Budapest, as Czech radio stations jammed the rebel stations, the Hungarians suddenly knew that their worst fears were confirmed. They had been tricked.

From the moment that U.S. correspondents had begun coming into free Budapest the rebels had never ceased to ask, "When are the Americans coming?" During the middle of the fighting a Hungarian had lifted up his son so that the child might touch a U.S. flag on a correspondent's car. Again and again, innocent of world affairs, they had asked if arms would come soon from America. Said one: "If the Russians come back, we can't hold out forever."

The Russians were coming back, and many Americans were leaving Budapest. Sadly the Hungarians watched them go. They had no stake in the revolution; they were at peace with the mighty Soviet Union and hoped to remain so--Hungary's bloodshed was only a drop of what the world would suffer in a total war. The explanation was not one which Hungarians were in a mood to understand. A convoy of U.S. diplomatic women and children and civilians left Budapest for Austria. Correspondent after correspondent hit the road, swinging precariously through the roadblocks. Said TIME Reporter Edward Clark: "In the space of eleven days I have seen Hungary pass from a Soviet satellite state, through independence, to become an occupied country." But for five of those days Hungary had been wildly, hungrily free.

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