[This is an excerpt from the autobiography of my father, Ervin Williger-Varnagy), who died in 2003. It was December 1956, and Bela Barsony, my mother Ily’s brother, and his wife Erzsi had just fled Hungary. This is how they went from Hungarian…
1956 was a very special year. In the first few days of January, an early morning streetcar derailed and plunged from the Margit Bridge into the Danube. A few days later, Budapest was shaken awake at daybreak by the earthquake…
A burst of gunfire shook the windows. It was midnight in Hungary, December, 1956. “Good God, curfew time lasts till seven in the morning. What am I going to do?” I shook my husband, John. Startled from his dream, he reached…
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 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…
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…
At work operating a drill How October 23rd started I can’t recall but I imagine it must have been like any other. At the time I was employed by the Small Engine and Machinery Factory (Kismotor és Gépgyár) located in Buda. I…
It has been 50 years since Russian tanks crushed the dream of a free Hungary. But it has not been long enough to forget. I was an artist. My job was to paint larger-than-life portraits of Lenin and Stalin. That…
On September 1, 1956, I was released from the prison of the communists. As I arrived at the train station in Budapest, my friend, Erwin Baktay, was on hand to meet me. From the station I went home to Szentkirályi Street. In…
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Precursor to history For me the Revolution started in 1955, when the members of the choir and the orchestra of the Liszt Academy of Music wanted to perform for the first time Zrinyi’s “Szózat” on the birthday of its composer,…