It was frightening sitting in the back of the truck on the dark and rainy night. It was November, 1956, and I was four years old. I was balancing on a big green canvas knapsack. There were no seats on the back…
EXPECTATIONS The summer and fall of 1956 were full of excitement and expectations in Hungary. Matyas Rakosi, “Stalin’s Best Disciple” resigned from the Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party, euphemistically named the “Hungarian Workers’ Party,” in July .The month of August…
I had my summer vacation in the Tokaj region at my uncle’s farm in the summer of 1956 with nary a thought or whisper of anything brewing in the country. Coming back to the big city in September, I was getting settled…
I was just 9 1/2 years old when the revolution took place. I was living with my mother and grandmother in a flat in Angyalföld. My grandfather had passed away 2 years earlier. My father had divorced my mother shortly after I…
I was in my senior year at Wesleyan University when the Hungarian Revolution broke out. We students were transfixed by the news, and professors who knew about Hungary were in great demand, with impromptu teaching seminars, years before the “teach-in” became an…
My name is Tibor Sarkady, or if you wish, Sarkady Tibor. I was born in 1936 and as we near the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, I am approaching my 70th birthday. As I was growing up in Budapest, my…
It was the afternoon of Friday the 26th or Saturday the 27th of October–dates are a little unclear–and a dark, cloudy, almost foggy afternoon. Anton and I left the Legation as dusk was falling, so as to be home before dark, and…
PRE-1956 CHILDHOOD MEMORIES My father tried to escape to the West through the Iron Curtain in 1950, but he was shot on the Austrian border. After treatment in the hospital, the ÁVO (secret police) put him in solitary confinement in a narrow…
I was not into politics As a student of steel structures in my final year at the Eötvös Loránt Technical School, I was not interested in politics. I knew what you could and could not say outside the home, and adhering…
After the Second World War, the Communist regime in Hungary banned, among many other institutions, the scouting movement. Hungarian scouts reorganized in exile, first in Western Europe, then in other countries where Hungarians fled. Since 1951, Hungarian scout troops have been meeting…