János Kádár—prime minister of Hungary—made a public appearance on August 20, in front of the six thousand farmworkers who gathered on a soccer field in Újpest, eighty-two miles away from Budapest, to commemorate the anniversary of the socialist constitution. I was there, on the same stage as Kádár, with the first delegation of Western observers that arrived in Hungary after the events of October.
For ten months Budapest had been a forbidden city. The last Western plane that took off from its airport—on November 6, 1956—was an Austrian twin-engine plane chartered by the magazine Match to evacuate special correspondent Jean Carles Pedrazzini, mortally wounded in the Battle of Budapest. Hungary has been closed since then and only opened its borders to us again ten months later due to the influences of the committee in charge of preparations for the Moscow festival, which managed to get the Hungarian government to issue an invitation to Budapest for a delegation of eighteen observers. There were two architects, a German lawyer, a Norwegian chess champion, and just one other journalist: Maurice Mayer, a diabolically likable Belgian, with a red mustache, a beer drinker and teller of stupid jokes, who began his career in the Spanish Civil War and was wounded in Liège during the German occupation. I didn’t know any of them. At the border, after the customs authorities examined our papers for three hours, an interpreter gathered us together in the restaurant car, made the introductions, and gave a brief welcome speech. Then he read the program for the next two weeks: museums, lunches with youth organizations, sporting events, and a week of relaxation at Lake Balaton.
Maurice Mayer thanked them for the invitation on behalf of us all, but let it be understood that we were not very interested in tourism. We wanted something else: to know what happened in Hungary, for certain and without political mythifications, and to comprehend the country’s actual situation. The interpreter responded that Kádár’s government would do everything possible to oblige us. It was three in the afternoon on August 4. At 10:30 that night we arrived at the deserted Budapest station, where a group of perplexed, energetic men waited, who escorted us for the whole two weeks and did everything possible to prevent us from forming a concrete idea of the situation.
We had not finished unloading our luggage when one of those men—who introduced himself as an interpreter—read the official list of our names and nationalities and made us answer as if we were in school. Then he invited us to board the bus. Two details caught my attention: the number of our escorts—eleven, for such a small delegation—and the fact that all of them had introduced themselves as interpreters despite the fact that the majority of them spoke no language other than Hungarian. We crossed the city through somber, deserted streets, saddened by the drizzle. A moment later we were at the Hotel Liberty—one of the best in Budapest—sitting at a banquet table that took up the whole dining room. Some of them had difficulties managing the cutlery. The dining room, with a mirror, large chandeliers, and plush red furniture, seemed made out of new materials but with antiquated taste.
During the course of the meal a disheveled man with a certain romantic disdain in his gaze gave a speech in Hungarian that was translated simultaneously into three languages. It was a brief, absolutely conventional welcome followed by a series of concrete instructions. He recommended that we not go out on the streets, always carry our passports, not speak to strangers, leave our key at reception each time we left the hotel, and remember “Budapest is under martial law and it is therefore forbidden to take photographs.” By then there were seven more interpreters. They moved with no objective around the table, talking to each other in Hungarian, in very low voices, and I had the impression that they were frightened. I was not alone in that appraisal. A moment later, Maurice Mayer leaned over toward me and said, “These people are scared to death.”
Before we went to bed they collected our passports. Tired from the trip, but not sleepy and a little depressed, I tried to see a piece of the city’s nightlife from the window of my room. The gray and crumbling buildings of Rakoczi Avenue looked uninhabited. The limited public lighting, the drizzle falling on the lonely street, the streetcar that grated past amid blue sparks, all contributed to creating a sad atmosphere. When I got into bed I noticed that the walls of my room still showed signs of the impact of projectiles. I couldn’t sleep, shuddering at the idea that this room lined with yellowish wallpaper, with old furniture and a strong smell of disinfectant, had been a barricade in October. That was how my first night in Budapest ended.
In the morning the view was less somber. Prepared to outwit the vigilance of the interpreters—who wouldn’t arrive until ten—I put the keys in my pocket and walked down the stairs to the lobby. I didn’t take the elevator, because it was located right in front of the reception desk and I wouldn’t have been able to leave without being seen by the manager. The revolving glass door opened right onto Rakoczi Avenue. Not just the hotel, but all the buildings on the avenue—from the floral pediment of the station to the banks of the Danube—were covered in scaffolding. It’s difficult to avoid the sensation created by a commercial avenue whose crowds move among wooden skeletons. A fleeting sensation, for I barely took two steps outside the hotel before someone put a hand on my shoulder. It was one of the interpreters. In a cordial manner, but without letting go of my arm, he guided me back inside the hotel.
The rest of the delegation came down at ten, as planned. The last one was Maurice Mayer. He entered the dining room in a splendid sports jacket, with his arms wide open, singing “The Internationale.” With an exaggerated effusiveness, still singing, he embraced each and every one of the interpreters, who hugged him back with a disconcerting joy. Then he sat down beside me, tucked his napkin into his collar, and nudged me with his knee under the table.
“I’ve been thinking since last night,” he said under his breath. “All these ruffians are armed.”
From that moment on we knew what to expect. Our guardian angels accompanied us to museums, historical monuments, official receptions, jealously preventing us from any contact with people in the street. One afternoon—our fourth in Budapest—we went to see the beautiful panorama of the city from atop the Fishermen’s Bastion. Near there is a church that had been converted into a mosque by the Turkish invaders that is still decorated with arabesques. A group of delegates detached ourselves from the interpreters and went inside the church. It was enormous and tumbledown, with high, small windows through which shone streams of yellow summer light. On one of the front pews, sitting in an absorbed posture, an old woman in black was eating bread and sausage. Two interpreters came into the church a moment later. They followed us in silence through the naves, without saying anything to us, but they made the woman leave.
By the fifth day the situation had become untenable. We were utterly fed up with visiting old things, historical monstrosities, and with feeling that the city, the people who lined up to buy bread, to board the streetcars, seemed like unreachable objects on the other side of the glass windows of the bus. I made the decision after lunch. I asked for my key at reception, where I told them I was very tired and planned to sleep all afternoon, then I went up the elevator and immediately down the stairs.
At the first stop I hopped on a streetcar, not caring where it was going. The jammed crowd inside the vehicle looked at me like an emigrant from another planet, but there was no curiosity or surprise in their gazes, rather a distrustful reserve. Beside me, an elderly lady in an old hat with artificial fruits was reading a Jack London novel, in Hungarian. I spoke to her in English, then in French, but she didn’t even look at me. She got off at the next stop, elbowing her way through the crowd, and I was left with the impression that was not where she should have gotten off. She was frightened too.
The driver spoke to me in Hungarian. I let him understand that I didn’t speak the language, and he in turn asked me if I spoke German. He was a fat old man with a beer drinker’s nose and glasses mended with wire. When I told him I spoke English, he repeated a phrase I couldn’t understand several times. He seemed desperate. At the end of the line, as I was getting off, he handed me a little slip of paper with a phrase written in English: “God save Hungary.”
Almost a year after the events that stirred the world, Budapest is still a provisional city. I saw extensive sectors where the streetcar tracks have not been replaced and which are still closed to traffic. The crowds, badly dressed, sad, and concentrated, stand in endless lines to buy basic necessities. The stores that were destroyed and looted are still being rebuilt.
In spite of the boisterous publicity the Western newspapers gave the events in Budapest, I hadn’t believed the havoc wreaked was so terrible. Very few central buildings have their façades intact. I later learned that the people of Budapest took refuge in them and fought for four days and four nights against the Russian tanks. The Soviet troops—eighty thousand men ordered to crush the revolt—employed the simple and effective tactic of parking the tanks in front of the buildings and firing straight at them. But the resistance was heroic. The children went out into the streets, climbed onto the tanks, and dropped flaming bottles of gasoline inside. Official information indicates that in those four days five thousand people were killed and twenty thousand injured, but the substantial damage leads one to think that the number of victims was much higher. The Soviet Union has not supplied any figures of their losses.
Dawn broke on November 5 over a destroyed city. The country was literally paralyzed for five months. The population survived during that time thanks to trainloads of provisions sent by the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies. Now the lines are not so long, the grocery stores are beginning to open their doors, but the people of Budapest are still suffering the consequences of the catastrophe. At the lottery ticket kiosks—which are a source of revenue for the Kádár regime—and at pawnshops—which are owned by the state—the lines are longer than the ones at the bakeries. A government official told me that, in effect, the lottery is an inadmissible institution in a socialist regime. “But we can’t do anything else,” he explained. “It solves one problem for us every Saturday.” The same thing happens with the pawnshops. I saw a woman lined up in front of one of them with a baby carriage full of kitchen equipment.
Fear and distrust appear everywhere, in the government as much as in the general population. There are quite a few Hungarians who lived abroad until 1948, and they and their children speak all the languages of the world. But it’s difficult for them to speak to foreigners. They think that these days there cannot be a foreigner in Budapest who is not an official invited guest, and that’s why they don’t dare risk a conversation with any of us. Everybody, in the street, in the cafés, in the tranquil gardens of Margaret Island, distrusts the government and its guests.
The government, for its part, feels that dissent continues. On the walls of Budapest there are notices written with a broad brush: “Hidden counterrevolutionary, fear the power of the people.” Others blame Imre Nagy for the October catastrophe. That is an official obsession. While Imre Nagy suffers enforced exile in Romania, Kádár’s government daubs the walls, publishes pamphlets, and organizes demonstrations against him. But all the people with whom we’ve managed to speak—workers, employees, students, and even some communists—are waiting for Nagy’s return. At dusk—after having traveled all over the city—I found myself at the Danube, in front of the Elisabeth Bridge, dynamited by the Germans. There was the statue of the poet Petofi, separated from the university by a little square filled with flowers. Ten months earlier—on October 28—a group of students crossed the square shouting for the expulsion of the Soviet troops. One of them climbed the statue with the Hungarian flag and gave a two-hour speech. When he came down, the avenue was teeming with men and women of Budapest singing the poet Petofi’s anthem under the bare autumn trees. That’s how the uprising began.
Half a mile or so beyond Margaret Island, in the lower Danube, there is a dense proletarian sector where Budapest’s workers live and die all on top of each other. There are some closed taverns, warm and full of smoke, where customers drink huge glasses of beer amid that sustained machine gun rattling that is conversation in the Hungarian language. The afternoon of October 28, those people were there when word came that the students had started the uprising. Then they left their glasses of beer, walked up the bank of the Danube to the little square of the poet Petofi, and joined the movement. I went to those taverns at nightfall and discovered that despite the military regime, the Soviet intervention, and the apparent tranquility that reigns in the country, the seed of the uprising is still alive. When I entered the bars, the rattling turned into a dense buzz. Nobody wanted to talk. But when the people are quiet—out of fear or prejudice—you have to enter the washrooms to find out what they’re thinking. There I found what I was looking for: in among the pornographic drawings, classics now by all urinals of the world, there was Kádár’s name, in an anonymous but extraordinarily significant protest. Those notices represent a valid testimony on the Hungarian situation: “Kádár, murderer of the people,” “Kádár, traitor,” “Kádár, the Russians’ attack dog.”
November 15, 1957, Momento, Caracas