Confessions of a Hungarian Revolutionary

Imre Nemeth, fourth from right, was a freedom fighter.

Writer’s note: I finally was able to extract the story of my father’s involvement in the Hungarian 1956 Revolution on a sunny day in our tiny beach house on Camano Island in Washington state. It was 1998. My daughter had been pestering him, and he finally relented. When he started talking, I got out my notebook. What follows is his story. He now sits in a box in my garage. One of these days, I’ll take some of his ashes to the Danube River and sprinkle them at his favorite swimming hole off Margaret Island in Budapest. I posted this because I’ve seen so little written about the war, at least in English. This is just one man’s story, but it’s a piece of history important to our small refugee community that originally formed up in Seattle.

Apprentice electrician Imre Nemeth had been wiring a light switch in a tiny apartment pantry with his uncle. It was a day like any other, or so he thought. Work, eat, sleep. Repeat.

But this day would change his life and millions of others in the little Eastern European country. It was on Oct. 23, 1956 that he learned Hungary decided to kick the Russians out and stick a knife in Iron Curtain.

It was time. The cry for freedom was strong. But it was mostly young people like Imre who would repeat that cry and take up arms against Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a Cold War superpower that had occupied Hungary since the end of World War II.

Imre’s Uncle Istvan Nemeth, one of a dozen brothers in his oversized Catholic brood, was best known for being the one who got kicked out of the seminary for impregnating a woman he didn’t end up marrying. He was a humorous sort. Good for a laugh and a decent boss. He had begun taking Imre on side jobs for a couple of years.

The pair completed the small job and said their goodbyes. But as the 17-year-old Imre hopped off the streetcar to start his 2 kilometer walk home, somebody yelled: “Hallottad hogy tuntetnek radio?” Roughly translated it means: “Hey, did you see the demonstration by the radio station?”

Imre had no way of knowing what the next few hours would bring. While he and Istvan had been quietly working in another part of Budapest, the cultural and political center of Hungary, the seed of revolution caught fire.

Coming to a boil that day were the frustrations of a country that deftly avoided conflict in World War II until the waning days when its leaders no longer could stave off the rumblings of Russians on the east, the Allies in the west and the besieged Germans in the center. Hungary had arisen from that war beaten, poor and occupied by an emerging superpower bent on bending the rest of the world to a top-heavy derivative of Marxism.

Hungary had little choice but to sign a treaty with the Russians in 1945 that was supposed to last a decade. From Imre’s perspective and many others in the tiny Eastern European nation of about 10 million, by 1956 it was a year too long. They believed the Russians were sucking the factories and the country dry.

Grumbling had been going on for some time. In June of that year a half-dozen university students led by a member of the small Hungarian Air Force, a man named George Polyak, hijacked a Hungarian passenger plane, a well traveled DC-3, to West Germany and freedom. The news, although somewhat suppressed by the state-run media, sent a ripple through the Communist regime and the populace as the hijackers had hoped.

It was this creeping national discontent that spurred Nemeth that evening to act. A joke still on the lips of many Hungarians’ goes like this: “Hungary must be a really large country. The Russians still haven’t found a way out.”