Now that the 50th anniversary of the Revolution and Freedom Fight of 1956 approaches, I reread the relevant books that through the years have found their way onto my bookshelves. I consider myself lucky to have lived to see the regime change…
I was a first year student at Kossuth Lajos Tudományegyetem in Debrecen, studying nuclear physics. Students from Szeged University came to our Univesity on the 21st and reported their 16 points for university autonomy and asked our support. Next day there was…
The Start of the Revolution I was 9 yrs. old and my sister Kathy was 8. We were doing our school homework on Oct. 23, 1956. My Mom came home from work, very excited, telling my grandfather, who was babysitting us, to…
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…
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…
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…
It started like any other ordinary weekday. Tuesday we awoke to a cool autumn morning in the 8-th district of Budapest, when I started to walk to school on Prater Street, which was next to the Corvin theater. We lived on Üllõi…
My address in Budapest was Petõfi Sándor utca 6. In 1956 I was 14 years old and had just started high school at the Közgazdasági Technikum. On Tuesday, Oct. 23, I got home about 2 pm from school and intended to do…
Much of Hungary’s twentieth century history – both tragic and inspiring – is reflected in the complex story of the Maléter family. Paul Maléter’s parents, Mária and Pál, came from families who knew each other well in the city of…