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.”

When Imre heard of the excitement at the radio station that night, he immediately hopped back on a streetcar back to the Radio building. It was on a narrow street behind the Nemzeti, or national, museum in the heart of the city. A few hundred people were there when he arrived. They were protesting conditions and demanding more say in their government, then controlled by Premier Gero Erno, a Russian who represented everything Imre and like-minded Hungarians didn’t like.

Those in charge of the protest picked from among themselves who would deliver a list of 12 points demanding reforms, much as the famed poet Petofi did during the uprising of 1848 that led to the modern state of Hungary. However, once the students were allowed inside the massive double doors leading to the courtyard and the radio station, they were imprisoned.

“Everybody was waiting for them,” Imre said. “Then soldiers arrived.”

Tensions were high. The scene likely could have been diffused by more cordial treatment of the student envoy. But the actions of those in power and calling in soldiers set off the already angry group.

“We got hold of their rifles,” Imre said.

The soldiers were too few. The mostly young people surrounding the station disarmed the soldiers and got ahold of a Hungarian Jeep, called a Vipon, and used it to ram the huge double 4-inch-thick doors leading to the station and interior courtyard. The vehicle did little damage.

Imre said they later learned the soldiers on the opposite side had placed another Vipon against the massive doors to hold them in place.

Meanwhile, more people began to show up. Many were simply interested bystanders. But also arriving were firemen ordered to hose down the demonstrators.

But people cut the fire hoses.

“The firemen backed down and asked (the protesters) not to cut the hoses again,” Imre said. They cited safety concerns, he said. The din increased. More showed up.

“It escalated from there,” Imre said. “I wasn’t really aware of the time. Nobody was.”

The authorities attempted crowd control yet again. This time they enlisted the support of about 30 officer trainees from the Hungarian Army. One “officer kid,” as Imre described, was the leader and toting a rifle.

“We grabbed them,” he said. “They were outnumbered. They didn’t know what they were doing.”

Imre then positioned himself right across the street from the big doors in the middle of the action. Adrenaline heightened his senses, as it did many of those around him.

“Nobody thought it would go that far — for them to order the military there.”

At that moment, gunfire erupted. Imre said one of the machine guns was pointed directly at him from an elevated window of the radio building. Imre presented a perfect target. He stood on a large stone outcrop on the opposite building.

“I felt myself, and there were no holes in me,” he said. “But you should have seen the streets clear.”

(Many years later, my father and I returned to the spot where he stood during that conflict. The bullet holes remained. Judging from the pattern, it’s amazing he wasn’t the first to die in the conflict.)

There were few places to hide. Most of the residents along the two-lane street had closed the gates leading to courtyards that opened to their their homes, leaving only the poor cover of concrete walls and sidewalks. Those inside the multistory radio building continued firing and added exploding tear-gas canisters to the barrage.

The students threw the canisters back. Imre figured he threw back at least 80.

“When (a cannister) blew up in your hand it really hurt your elbow,” he said with a grin. “My clothes still smelled of tear gas when I came to the U.S. Same jacket.”

Night had begun to fall. Those in the radio building had extinguished all the lights and fortunately for the students, that stretch of street had not a single street light. Some of the more adventurous students scrambled up into an adjoining building under renovation that shared a common wall with the radio station.

“Those kids didn’t return,” Imre said.

At some point, Imre didn’t remember when exactly, the students suffered their first casualty. It was a young man who tried to pull a rifle away from one of the soldiers.

“It blew his upper jaw and placed it by his eye,” Imre said. “It just turned it out.”

The young man’s death further intensified feelings of the young would-be revolutionaries.

“They covered him with the (Hungarian) flag, and, my God, people went crazy,” Imre said. “Everybody wanted to throw a brick through the window.”

Most of the crowd soon abandoned the radio building and marched on Parliament, one of Budapest’s most beautiful structures along the Danube River. But tanks were waiting. They had encircled Parliament. Imre said he never found out if the tanks were Russian or Hungarian.

“(Soldiers) shot them into piles,” Nemeth said. “That’s where the bloodbath was.”

Imre avoided that conflict. He picked his way home, on the way spotting groups building barricades of cobblestones at strategic intersections throughout the city.

People became more vocal of their opposition to the Russians. No longer were the dissidents just students. Young workers increasingly joined the resistance, all looking for something to do. And somehow organization appeared. It wasn’t overt, but those who could took charge of everything from the building of barricades, gathering of a fighting force, collecting weapons and keeping the peace in the absence of a police force and the reviled secret police, known as the AVO.

Over the next couple of days, Imre found his way to Moricz Zsigmond Kor Ter, which literally means “circle square.” The square, not far from his family’s long-time home in peaceful tree lined Kelenvolgy, sat on the Buda side of the city and functioned as a major streetcar stop. It was where the 49 streetcar ran and one Imre saw every day.

The radio station quickly fell into insurgent hands and began broadcasting a call to those not working. This included most people since it appeared all but food service jobs were idled. The broadcasts asked every able bodied Hungarian to please join the militia and get organized. This was especially true of those in industry. And Imre, as an electrician in training, felt obligated to do his part.

“We ended up at the police department,” he said. “We were called to duty as workers, keeping stealing to a minimum and also so the people wouldn’t go wild and hang somebody.”

Hangings did occur. Secret policemen died at the end of a rope in a number of neighborhoods.

Imre found a way to help the resistance. The officers had gone, and workers were put in charge of various facilities. Imre brought his grandfather’s rifle, one Antal Rozsner used to fight in Yugoslavia in World War I. It had a long barrel, quite out of place amongst the more modern compact rifles and submachine guns that would be used in the conflict. “Very nice and accurate,” he said.

That gun and many others were brought to the police station. “We got weapons from everywhere,” he said.

Others found their way to the station. The original cops had run off. The new recruits came from all walks. Some were soldiers out of uniform. Most were young and eager. A loose organization formed, frequently with older soldiers and revolution-minded police officers taking on leadership roles. They were broken into groups.

These groups became the temporary constabulary and were dispatched to various disturbances to soothe tempers and keep people civil during what had become extremely stressful and turbulent times. During one of the more violent instances, a group began heckling a border guard dressed in the green of the AVO. This may have marked his death.

However in this particular instance, Imre and of the members of his small patrol convinced the crowd that while the soldier might be AVO, he did not belong the secret police. The border guard acted as regular soldiers, not spies who spirited people away people never to bring them back.

“He was trying to tell them he was just walking the border (as his orders specified),” Imre said. “We had to take care of that. (Once he was safe) we told him to get away.”

Meanwhile, the taverns throughout the city shut down. Owners dumped beer and wine into the gutters to keep the alcohol from Russian hands. Workers staged a general strike. Nobody trusted the Communist government, Imre said.

Meanwhile, nervous Russians still in the country began disarming Hungarian soldiers, afraid who they might side with.

Yet, the Hungarians routed the existing bureaucracy and quickly established their own government under Imre Nagy, a former bureaucrat imprisoned by the former regime. Pal Moliter, a colonel in the Hungarian army, was elected to head the new ragtag resistance force.

For awhile it looked as if Hungary would become independent of its Soviet overseer.

Imre spent that first night at home. His mother and father hardly appreciated his desire to get involved. His father told him the situation could be resolved peacefully if the Russians followed their own treaties and the United Nations would take over the problem and “tell the Russians to get the hell home.” Imre told them that would never happen.

He turned out to be right. After spurring revolution through avenues like Radio Free Europe and clandestine across-the-border forays with spies, the United States and the rest of Western Europe largely ignored the Hungarian struggle. The Cold War was in full swing and destabilization could ignite nuclear holocaust.

But the Hungarians had had enough. The entire country went on strike. The elder Imre Nemeth said: “I’m observing it but I can’t be on strike. Somebody has to feed the people.” He worked unloading railroad cars that brought freight from the surrounding countryside.

Imre Antal remembers his father getting increasingly worried about him. The elder Nemeth said: “I raised you to be a big ox, and some stray bullet is going to cut you down.”

Imre ignored his father’s wishes. The next day, he returned to the police station with Janos Szigeti, his best friend. They were eager and so excited they couldn’t sleep. Imre speculated that for this reason, they were chosen for a night patrol of seven members led by a police officer and a serious fellow who wore a long trench coat and a dour expression.

On one of his first assignments in the first week, Imre and Jancsi’s group was ordered to take out a Russian Pupueda, a bulky automobile. They were to capture the people inside. “They were carrying some orders,” Imre said.

The young freedom fighters, as they were called, waited near the entrance to an underground bunker, also a radio station and the purported AVO headquarters dug into Gellert  Mountain. They hid about a block away on Imre Herzeg Ut. Their orders were hazy. Shoot first, ask questions later was the rule. They hadn’t yet gained access to the bunker.

Imre’s father had worked on the excavation of that underground complex in the early 1950s as one of the head miners installing and blowing explosives to carve out the rock. He said the cavern they carved out was huge. Imre said he remembered his father having detectives following him for about six months during that time to see if he could be trusted. Evidently he could. He was never arrested.

Suddenly, a vehicle they identified as the enemy roared out. Imre’s group fired, but somehow the driver veered and dodged for an entire block and plowed through them despite a hail of bullets. “We shot out all four tires but the son of a bitch got away,” he said. “Now I know to shoot an engine first.”

Another of their missions involved tracking down AVO agents before they fled or were lynched by an increasingly hostile crowd. Some weren’t so lucky. Their beaten bodies were hung from trees and left there, spit upon by those who walked by.

Imre’s group worked at night, better to avoid public conflict. The man who led them was a stranger, but they did what they were told. “I didn’t even know where he came from,” Imre said of their leader. The second in command was an old policeman. They tracked down several agents. Others eventually found the AVO headquarters but not the dreaded buried jail where enemies of the state were taken, imprisoned and tortured.

Tracking secret police was his night job. By day Imre signed in at the former police station. He didn’t sleep much. They were excited, amped up on the concept of independence. Still, there was a lot of down time.

“It was so weird,” he said. “We weren’t doing much.”

Then one day at the police station, somebody fired at the guard outside. “We emptied the whole building across the street — 12 stories. After that, we didn’t post a guard outside. He was just inside the door. During down time, they played dominos upstairs waiting for the call that would take them through the heavily populated neighborhoods and narrow streets. Often it was to retrieve firearms and disturbances that arose because of them.”

On one occasion while on duty at the police station, Imre spotted a 15-year-old kid who lived near his home in Kelenvolgy toting a machine gun. “This guy, a former soldier, said: ‘Hey, kid. Where are you going?’ The boy said, ‘I’m going to shoot myself some Russians.’”

Imre told the soldier he knew the boy. They took away the gun.

With Jancsi on the second day at the square, Imre said his friend walked around with his own machine gun. He was quite proud of it, Imre said. However, Jancsi’s father wasn’t quite so impressed and took it away when the young man returned home to sleep one night.

Those early days in the uprising filled the nation with confusion and more than a little turmoil. Because of the strike and the breakdown in the government, the natural order of life changed. Euphoria gave way to the realization that new systems must be established. In Parliament, the new government re-established bureaucracy, freed prisoners and crafted new laws. The communists were shuffled out the door as bureaucrats prepared for life without a central government controlled from Moscow.

“Things were happening all over,” Imre said. “You had to find out who was making bread. They were selling it off the trucks.”

The stores had closed because of the strike and the unhealthy situation on the street. The Russians never really did give up total control of the city and initially sent out military patrols that would shoot at any gathering of people on the street. However, as the Hungarians seized more of the community and surrounding countryside, these patrols eased. But Russian patrols of foot soldiers gave way to trucks, usually full of a contingent of troops.

Often, the Russians weren’t hassled. Nobody shot at them. The revolution took on an almost surreal atmosphere. The Hungarians had targeted the Hungarian puppet government and those in the national military loyal to it. The better equipped Soviet soldiers were avoided.

Perhaps seven days after the conflict began, two Russian soldiers walked through Kelenvolgy selling a pair of Army boots to buy beer. Imre said he thinks they must have been hungry.

The week had been punctuated by very little real conflict but quite a few demonstrations. What little fighting there was drew Hungarians like flies. “The hell of it was, the Hungarians weren’t running away from bullets, they’re running toward them,” Imre said.

Because the growing scarcity of Russian power in the streets, namely military might, it appeared to the Hungarians that the Russians might be on the way out for good. But, as it turned out, the Soviet Army had only pulled back, waiting to strike.

Imre said only two days were the Russians out of Hungary.

One demonstration in particular stood out and illustrated that the Russians weren’t leaving. Four Russian tanks sat abreast at the western railroad station in Budapest. Imre stood in the middle of a crowd of thousands. Despite their fervor and anger, Imre said everybody was prepared to dart down another street so they wouldn’t get shot. And shoot into the crowd the Russians did.

The Bear showed its claws.

Nagy’s fledgling government pleaded with the United Nations but got no aid from the United States. So the Hungarians armed themselves the best they could, organizing little militias, like the one Imre belonged to, into a ragtag fighting force. They prepared for the worst. And the worst was street fighting, small weapons, Molotov cocktails and rocket launchers against tanks and the professionally trained Russian military.

Imre had met a girl right before the revolution at a reunion of his class. He took her that day to get child support from her estranged father. He walked with her back to her house then went home himself. The next day the soldiers came.

They drove tanks, troop carriers and brought large guns of every caliber. Thousands marched on the city.

Imre said the uprising, independence, coping with new-found responsibilities and his strange new role within the security forces lasted about a month. He said initially the Russians ceremoniously pulled out on the north side of the country toward Debrecen.

But the move was a feint. The Russian generals quietly brought in the hard-core veteran soldiers up from the south through Hungary’s historic rival Romania to quell the revolutionaries.

“We all waved at them when the soldiers left,” he said. “Bye, bye. Then all off a sudden they rolled in from the south. A new column of soldiers came in through Romania. One column left through the northeast. Another heavily armored came in through the southeast. They moved quickly. Fighting was going on over on the Pest side of the city but pretty far out.

“The Russians had taken all the key positions. All the forts, all the army barracks, post offices, everything was taken by them. The Hungarians were just on top of a few barricades, certain little pockets of resistance.

Meanwhile, life continued. The freedom fighters tried to blend in. Avoid notice. “I almost got shot because I had a center punch in my pocket while crossing a bridge,” he said. The jumpy Russian guard thought he might be an insurgent.

This took place three weeks, perhaps more into the conflict. Very close to the end.

That Russian soldier at the checkpoint on the Lanchid, or chain, bridge was nervous. He had orders to arrest anybody he believed to be affiliated with the uprising. The Russians had made significant advances at that point and had gained control of the city’s bridges over the Danube, cutting Buda from Pest. Imre and Jancsi, who were on a reconnaissance mission, looked innocent enough when they crossed, but the Russian soldier questioning them was unfamiliar with the electrician’s metal center punch. To him it looked as if it could be a weapon of some sort.

“He was pointing the machine gun at me,” Imre said. “We told him we were  going to see some friends on the Pest side.”

The center punch was used for marking holes in metal electrical boxes. In addition to his electrician’s training where he was in charge of 11 others, he did side jobs — for instance, installing doorbells and rewiring the ancient electrical systems of many homes for spare forints.

Imre said the Hungarians had nearly pulled off independence. Most of the city had returned to normal before the Russian soldiers returned with their tanks. Factories had started up again. Many of the people who fled across the border when it was first opened by the new democratic regime returned.

Hungary was their home.

Imre and Jancsi considered themselves tagalongs in the revolutionary effort. They weren’t soldiers but patriots, young and idealistic. “We took orders,” he said.

Imre had a few months to go before graduating from the electrical program and assuming a job that would have provided him a good living and opportunity for advancement. At the motorcycle manufacturer where he worked during his apprenticeship, Imre said workers in the basement had been making parts for guns, some under Swiss license. When the revolution broke out, those workers began assembling those guns for the resistance.

But everybody seemed to know their time was limited. Freedom would come at a cost. Organization to the coming Russian retaliation was scattered. Imre said one of his commanders at the square was an old officer, “about 50 and really skinny.” The man had just gotten out of prison after being jailed by the communists.

None of them was surprised when the Russians advanced street by street, shooting whoever stood in their way. Imre said he believes their advance began Nov. 22, five days before he and Jancsii made their escape into Austria. The Russians took over quickly.

The official commander of the Hungarian resistance, Pal Moliter, led the fighting, some of the fiercest, at Kor Ut, or street. The Russians bombarded Moliter’s position. After Nemeth escaped, his father went there to help clear rubble, find survivors and bodies and remove unexploded bombs. “They found a lot of young (dead) people there,” Imre said.

The advancing Russians didn’t take long before engaging the resistance. Imre wasn’t prepared.

“I was walking across the street at the tennis courts when I heard the bullets,” Nemeth said. He was on the Buda side of the city. In the square where the he and his best friend had been stationed. “Zingh. One of them hit my heel. I brought that shoe with me (to the U.S.). My future mother-in-law threw it away.”

The bullet hit him as soon as he stepped up from cover. The old soldier was nearby taking cover behind a concrete pillar covered with handbills. Neither was armed.

“He wanted a machine gun,” Imre said.

Nemeth ran. Then the Russians fired from a tank, and the detonation cut the pillar in half. The old soldier somehow survived by crouching as bricks and debris rained down in a shower of dust. The Russians continued to fire, knocking out all the streetlights and pummeling a little workers’ shack that had been used in making the many barricades around Moricz Zsigmond square. Nemeth said the Russian soldiers must have believed the little stove pipe coming from the roof of the shack was a hideout of sorts.

Nemeth delivered the old soldier’s message to others at the little command center he and his fellow revolutionaries had been using all these weeks. “I said, ‘They are coming,’ and showed them the bullet in my heel. Then, all of a sudden things started moving. (The other leader of the military group) said, ‘If we can get it there.’”

They hadn’t been prepared. His little militia hadn’t been equipped for armed resistance, just keeping the peace.

Nemeth returned to the old soldier, bringing news but no gun. The man was sweating. He had wanted an anti-tank rocket. The old man hadn’t wanted to leave his post. He didn’t want to retreat.

But the Russians weren’t overly aggressive at this barricade. “He says, ‘I don’t have any idea why it (the pillar) didn’t fall on me and why they shot so they didn’t hit me.’”

The barricade had been assembled in the early days of the conflict, and it prevented the tanks from coming any closer to the long, narrow multistory buildings at Moricz Zsigmond square that held Imre and the rest of the revolutionaries. The buildings themselves fanned out like spokes of a bicycle wheel from the square. Inside, the headquarters was pandemonium and fear. Outside certain death awaited anyone foolish enough to stick his or her head around the wrong corner.

The tanks sat just a couple hundred feet from the two buildings the revolutionaries occupied. They finally retrieved some guns, and the Hungarian fighters picked off any Russian foolish enough to sneak on foot within range.

Imre called the tactics used by both sides cat-and-mouse. The Russians had the advantage. They came in the middle of the night, during the day and whenever they thought they could catch the inexperienced street fighters off guard.

On guard duty that night, Imre sat atop a large metal garbage can without a lid so that every time he fell asleep, he would drop ass first into the can wake up.

“They were watching us. Waiting,” Imre said. “Then that night they shot us with every caliber they could find.”

The advancing Russians took no chances this time. Their ranks included many war-hardened veterans, not the young, green, untested conscripts the Hungarians initially chased off.

A column of Russian troops -- not far from the narrow alley where Imre stood guard -- spied people peering at them from windows of their apartments. These were civilians, curious. The Russians rounded up five from the building, lined them up on the street and shot them to death in front of a clothing store window. Their bodies crashed through the glass. Satisfied, the soldiers torched the store.

Nearby and one street away from Imre, two Hungarian soldiers who had gotten ahold of flame-throwers exacted revenge. Like many of their compatriots, they had been kicked out of their barracks — cut off from their weapons and banished to the streets by worried Russian commanders. The two had positioned themselves near a window in a basement apartment that gave them a good view of the street and waited. When two big Russian trucks packed with soldiers drove by their hiding spot and had to stop in a narrow side street because it was blocked by a barrier of cobblestones, they shot the liquid fire. Nemeth said none of the Russians survived. The trucks had fallen into a trap and had no way to turn around or back out in time.

The two Hungarian soldiers lived to tell the tale. They, like many of their guerilla-fighting brethren, had a pre-planned escape route. And they were quick. No sooner had they torched the trucks, gunfire erupted and blew the apartment in which they had been hiding to bits.

Bullets and firepower of all sorts rang constantly. Explosions from grenades mingled with tank cannon fire. Concrete from buildings cascaded into the streets. Dust and acrid smoke filled the air.

“It was like raindrops,” Imre said. “The bullets were falling. It was a weird sensation. You didn’t hear anything else but gunfire.”

At one point during the conflict, while Imre was on guard duty, a group of Russian soldiers came upon him in the alley. Jancsi said Imre fired his grandfather’s gun and “nearly cut the guy in half.” Imre would not corroborate this story nor would he talk of his grandfather’s gun. I can only imagine the caliber was unusual and getting ammunition was difficult. I also believe Jancsi, who later became my kerestapu or godfather, recovered his gun.

Both downplayed their roles in the fighting, which I attribute to trying to avoid blowback. Both wanted desperately to return home to their families. And as enemies of the state that would have been impossible.

Fighting also raged around Gellert Mountain, once a pristine park and national landmark that overlooks the Danube not far from Imre’s position at the square.

“I could see the fires,” Imre said. “Bullets were just flying down the street where I was.”

He said he was crouched behind a knee-high stone fence waiting for somebody to run by. “If somebody came down the street, it was either he shoots me or I shoot him.”

Imre was issued a short Russian rifle, which took five bullets. “It was a piece of junk,” he said. “We were issued 10 bullets. That’s all you needed.”

By daybreak, the Russians pulled back, careful to pick up their dead and wounded.

They left the Hungarian casualties, the five dead civilians, with the other debris.

“The next morning I saw their charcoaled bodies,” Imre said. “I recognized one woman’s husband. I don’t know how.”

Imre said the men were shot, thrown through the glass into the cleaned out clothing store and set ablaze.

“The screaming I’ll never forget,” he said. “They weren’t dead.”

The Hungarians lost no fighters that night at Imre’s square. The Russian’s lost a couple dozen because of the trucks and the guerilla tactics of the Hungarians.

The Russians retreated to their bases, and the freedom fighters went underground. Imre descended into the bomb shelter in one of the two narrow buildings he had guarded the night before. Residents of the building — men, women and children — had crammed deep into the recesses of the cramped room, most pushing deeper inside for safety. Imre found a somewhat unprotected spot near the door on a stairwell and tried to catch some sleep.

“Everybody was crammed in,” he said. “Everybody was trying to hide behind something so they wouldn’t get hit by a wandering bullet.”

When Imre awoke, he was the last of his fighting group of about 100 still around. Their commanders had told them to leave. They knew the Russians would return with overwhelming force. They’d heard of other encounters.

“We just abandoned the post,” Imre said. “We didn’t want the hand-to-hand combat that would kill everybody.”

They were surrounded by Russian troops, but like usual, the Hungarian resistance had left an “eger” route, or mouse run, that wasn’t patrolled. It was an escape route.

Imre heard a tank roll in sometime that morning. It had two boxes strapped to the sides, and the Russian soldiers filled them with their dead. When Imre returned to the site of the burned out trucks, he could find nothing but an unclaimed ankle or wrist. “So we don’t know how many died,” he said.

After a couple hours sleep, “this lookout said, ‘All clear,’ and I hoofed it,” Imre said.

The Russians had pulled back again. Imre said he didn’t know where, but he didn’t go looking. There weren’t many places to hide. He figured they parked the massive tanks in the bus depot or one of the forts. Meanwhile, the Russian soldiers made themselves scarce.

Imre said he scanned the streets that morning. Anything was suspicious. He had placed his rifle in a wooden box with all the other weaponry he could find — bullets, grenades — put it in the backyard of the building and covered it with a tarp. “I said, ‘Don’t let any kids near it,’” he said. However, he never returned.

He had to ditch any weapons to avoid arrest or getting shot at. Being seen with a gun meant certain death if caught by the wrong group.

The streetcars long since had stopped operating. Few cars navigated the streets as Imre picked his way home, trying his best to blend in and not look the part of a haggard revolutionary with a distaste for Russian soldiers.

Hours later, he collapsed in his parents’ small home next to the railroad tracks. Imre said he believes he slept for quite a while. He hadn’t caught more than a couple hours sleep in five days. During his stay at the square, the Russians would rush the Hungarian position and move back. His crew had very few weapons and nothing powerful enough to take out a tank.

Imre said more spectacular fighting occurred on Ferenc Kor Ut, another of the fortified pockets of revolutionaries, where the mostly young rebels used Molotov cocktails to take out tanks. They would toss the mixtures of flame and gasoline into the intake fans on the rear ends of the tanks. The fans would suck the fireball into the clanking metal machines and torch the operators. It was a hideous but effective method.

When I was young, he told me of a tiny boy who ran up to a tank and stuck two old German grenades in the big machine’s tread. The tank rolled over the boy but then blew up. It’s occupants were pulled out and killed by angry Hungarians.

Imre thinks he slept more than 24 hours at his parents’ house. His mother, Julianna, had to shake him awake. She fed him and he passed back out. Later, refreshed but groggy, he cleaned up and received one of his mother’s lectures.

“I told you not to go there, and you go there,” Julianna Nemeth said. “What’s the matter with you?”

Imre said his mother was worried. All mothers were worried. His father, although not part of the fighting, did his part by distributing food from the countryside to various vendors at the train station. He established new connections independent of the collapsed government-operated markets and helped feed the city.

Imre knew he might be forced to leave. He didn’t want to. His parent’s lush yard was full of flowers, trees and vegetables. After Imre awoke from his long sleep, he went to a friend’s house. The friend had taken bottles of wine from the taverns which had been cleaned out earlier to prevent looting and forfeiture to the Russian soldiers. Imre had picked up Jancsii and the two hooked up with Andras, who was maybe 20, and Francis, about the same age.

Andras had fought in one of the nastier battles, taking a stand with hundreds of others in the castle of Buda, an ancient stone-fortified battlement. Imre said the Russians lobbed endless heavy mortar and cannon fire at the castle’s resistance fighters. “A lot of things were on fire,” he said. What’s strange, Imre said, is that while this horrific fighting took place, those on foot could walk around these pockets of destruction and death relatively unaccosted.

“Reporters had a heyday roaming all over the place,” Imre said.

As they got a little drunk that night, Andras and Francis told them they planned to escape to the West that next morning. The realization sobered them all. Imre and Jancsii had to make a decision, and they did not want to go. They especially did not want to give in to the Russians.

But Imre and Jancsii were on a list. Their names had been taken down at the police station. Andras and Francis said they too were on a list and in danger. Initially, the idea had been those who joined the militias would get paid for their efforts when the new government took over.

An attempt had been made to scuttle all potentially incriminating records after the revolution’s success began looking bleak, but those efforts may or may not have been successful. Imre couldn’t be sure. A blond kid who he had never seen before at the police station took one of three known “emergency” personnel lists and stuffed it into his jacket. “I said, ‘Put is down, burn it.’ He said, ‘This list is as good as gone.’” Imre said his only alternative was to shoot the blond kid, and he said he didn’t want to.

On another occasion, this one at the square where the Russian soldiers were torched, one man began running around writing down names of Hungarian fighters the morning after the worst fighting. He was likely an informant who saw that the Russians would come out on top. His information would be rewarded.

It didn’t bode well. Names on paper meant AVO or worse, KGB.

And Jancsi was a prime suspect. He had walked home one night carrying his machine gun on the elevated railway tracks. Many saw him. High visibility meant identification and, if not immediate death from a Russian bullet, then later by the spies planted everywhere. “Kerestapu took a hell of a chance,” Imre said.

The pressure mounted in those waning days. Two days after Andras left, Imre and Jancsi decided they would follow. They brought Magdoline, Andras’ girlfriend, her mother and another young girl who wanted to meet up with her parents in Germany.

Andras they never saw again. He went to New Orleans with Francis. Magdoline married somebody in New Jersey. Broken hearted, Andras returned to Europe, settled in Germany, had a couple kids, left his wife and repatriated to Hungary. His wife later sent him his two boys.

Leaving Budapest, Imre and his group, now five people, bought luck with them. They opted to change trains right before theirs stopped at a service yard where Russian officials confiscated everybody’s paperwork (in those days an identification book was required at all times) and treated them as spies.

Their new train was heading south, a less direct route to the Austrian border. The route took it close to the Austrian border. They did not intend to escape through Yugoslavia, which already was known for turning refugees back to the Russians.

“The whole border was lined with tanks and men,” Imre said.

But escaping Hungarians sought out those spots they believed they could sneak through. The distance from where Imre and his group got off the train was about 14 kilometers. Many ran. Some made it.

“The ones who didn’t were marched up together and imprisoned. They were sent back to Budapest.”

On the second train, they met an old woman and her daughter. They carried two large suitcases and were on their way to Germany to meet up with the old woman’s husband. He had never met his daughter. Imre and Jancsi wound up carrying the suitcases.

Imre had only an attaché case, filled with his electrical textbook and other essentials. Jancsi brought nothing. He had told his parents he was going to work that day and didn’t want to arouse their suspicions.

After leaving the train in a small border town, the group went to a farmer’s house. There they were told to wait in the barn. Meanwhile, a man who was to take them to a safe border crossing collected others. At this point, there were seven in Imre’s group.

More people showed up with the guide, bringing the total to 16. The weather had cooled considerably and nobody was dressed for it. Just before taking off, they washed up at an outside well. As they did so, the farmer’s brother-in-law delivered more people, bringing to 45 the number who would make a dash for the border.

The farmer told them to follow a little wildlife trail. It passed through the fields, woods and farms. Along the way they passed workers slopping hogs in the early morning chill. They crouched while walking, stepping quietly to avoid being detected. Nobody could be trusted.

Ahead past the pigs and workers, they heard noises. Clanking. Immediately they suspected a Russian patrol. And there was no place to hide. The old farmer told them to avoid tall grass or anything but the freshly cut fields. “They are mined,” he said.

Ahead where the clanking had come, somebody said, “Stoi,” or stop in Russian. Everybody tensed.

However, they discovered the voice belonged to a couple of locals from the Hungarian border village. The men were in their 20s, joking around with the hapless refugees. Imre’s group was not amused.

“We almost beat the shit out of them,” Imre said.

Farther along they also met another guy who said the guides leading his group earlier that night had stumbled into a Russian patrol. The man said the guides had taken their money. Imre said he didn’t trust the man.

At the border, they came upon a Hungarian border guard armed with machine guns. The guards challenged them. Imre said all of a sudden, about 15 of the new members of the group drew machine guns and told the guards to stand down. They did. “I’m not going to give up my weapon,” one said.

The guards let them leave.

They also caught up with a gimpy civilian Imre said looked like another spy. They brought him along. They found another two men who had been hiding by laying underwater in a marsh breathing through reeds when Russian patrols passed. One came down with pneumonia.

The border had been cleared of all growth to prevent just such an escape. The dash through no-man’s land was about a kilometer long. By the time they crossed, group had grown to 150.

Imre said his group was among the last, at least at that part of the border, to cross into Austria.

“More came across but not many,” Imre said. It wasn’t easy. In many areas, Russians had secured the border. They shot those who tried to leave.

Imre’s group straggled into an Austrian village and found a baker who fed them lunch. “The Austrians were very nice,” Imre said.

In time, the refugees were loaded onto a train, taken to Vienna, then Salzberg. There they met the man with a hunchback. He had tracking AVO agents just a week earlier and affiliated with their militia.

He told them their leader, the old policeman who had been like a father to them, had been captured at his apartment, taken out and shot. Agents also showed up at both Imre’s and Jancsi’s houses looking for them not long after the two left.

In all about 200,000 Hungarians fled their country. The uprising resulted in the deaths of about 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet soldiers. Imre said the camp where he stayed had various tables set up representing countries willing to take refugees. He said initially he wanted to stay in Austria just to be close to home. But he couldn’t. The United States, Australia and Canada were options that most picked. He and Jancsi chose the United States and Seattle over Chicago, the other city accepting Hungarians. Imre liked the climate.

Jancsi died of cancer in the late 1990s. He had two children and lived in Seattle the rest of his life. Imre died in 2010. He also had two children and lived in Seattle most of his life. Both eventually returned to their native Hungary as tensions lifted. But it wasn’t the same. They were older. Hungarians called them the 56ers because their language had remained the same, no modern slang.