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“When Stalin’s Torch lights up the sky, you have to hit the ground,” my father said. “Fall down. It’s a matter of life and death.” My father and I were crammed together with a bunch of strangers in a truck…
NOTE: This speech switches back and forth between Hungarian and English. Honorary Consul Koskenalusta, Representative Julie Hámos (my long-lost relative – unfortunately, in name only), ladies and gentleman, esteemed guests, warm personal greetings to all who have assembled here, in the…
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Summer During the summer of 1956, a Budapest streetcar conductor whose living conditions had been startlingly primitive even by those current-day standards – he lived in a one-room pantry cottage with several children – broke open a store that had…
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I was getting ready for school the morning of October 24, 1956, when my Grandmother informed me that school had been canceled due to fighting in the streets. The Hungarian Revolution started the night before. Although I was not sure…
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Barely twelve years old, I was still young enough to play hop-scotch; -yet old enough to understand what was happening.
The Revolution had electrified the entire country, young and old alike. On that day in school, on Budapest’s Váci Utca,…
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October 23, 1956, started out like any other day. Andy left for work from the Bukkos Creek of Szentendre in the sleepy hours of pre-dawn dark and arrived to the White Road tram station, another Budapest suburb, about two hours…
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It was a regular school day with a regular class schedule for Tuesday. As I did at the beginning of my schooldays, I wrote the date on my notebook. It was October 23.
In the morning my Mother talked about…
NOTE: This submission was created by using the online survey attached to this website. The survey consists of suggested questions to answer or ask family members to create a personal historic record of 1956 and discuss its effects on’56-ers and their family…
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Young Heroes of Budapest Our memories are fading like pages from an old diary. Our memories are fading, as fewer and fewer of us are still here to talk about them.
I remember what Marcel Proust wrote in his book,…
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After 2 and 1/2 years in political prison from 1951 to 1953, I was released on the Imre Nagy government’s amnesty. My husband, whose death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, was in Vac Prison, my parents had been deported…