From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
Hungary, 50 Years On
Remembering a revolution an ocean away.
CLEVELAND--The Hungarian Revolution took place five long decades ago, but it lives brightly in the hearts of the 80,000 Hungarian-Americans who call Cleveland home. Many of them gathered here this past weekend to honor more than 50 members of their community who participated in the October 1956 uprising against Soviet tyranny or who witnessed it firsthand.
In the heady early days of the revolt, a 19-year-old Arpad Eder, for instance, helped to break out of prison Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, an outspoken Hungarian nationalist, who had been sentenced by the communists to life imprisonment for treason. When the revolution was crushed by the Soviets a week later, Cardinal Mindszenty fled to the U.S. embassy, where he remained for the next 15 years, until his exile in the West was arranged. Mr. Eder, for his part, was shot trying to flee to Austria. He was dragged unconscious across the border: "I only knew I was free when I woke up and heard nurses speaking German." He ended up being one of some 250,000 Hungarians who left the country once the revolution failed.
The "trail of tears" that Hungarian refugees followed was chronicled by James Michener in his novel "The Bridge at Andau" (1957). Charles Michener, a cousin of the late novelist and a former senior editor at the New Yorker, was on hand for the Cleveland event. "I heard the radio reports [in the U.S.] from Budapest as people were shot down," he told me. Though not Hungarian himself--he has moved back to Cleveland to write a book about his hometown--he has long been fascinated by the events of 1956. "It was at that moment many Americans fully grasped the evil of Communism."
The revolution started on Oct. 23, 1956, when a student protest suddenly won support from workers and from the Hungarian army units that were sent to disperse them. Within days, students and insurgents were hunting down members of the dreaded secret police and destroying Soviet tanks with Molotov cocktails. Prime Minister Imre Nagy pledged to withdraw Hungary from the Warsaw Pact. In fact, negotiations for a full Soviet withdrawal were going so well that Pal Maleter, the new Hungarian defense minister, was invited to a banquet with Soviet generals with a promise of safe passage. Instead he was arrested; Soviet tanks rolled in the next morning. All resistance was crushed by Nov. 11.
Many attendees at the Cleveland event are still bitter that the Western powers did not intervene. They deeply regret the revolution's failure. Still, they are proud of the resistance that Hungary offered. "We showed Soviet imperialism could be challenged," said Edith Juhasz, who recalled crawling through fields as a child to reach the Austrian border. "It was a delayed success," Rep. Tom Lantos (D., Calif.) told the gathering, "the spark for a later revolution that meant Eastern Europe has now found its home on the right side of history." Mr. Lantos himself, now 78, had left Budapest by the time of the revolution, having been saved from the Nazi roundup of Hungarian Jews by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.
The two-day commemoration here featured lectures, tributes, remembrances and three separate discussions for young people. Teacher Andrea Meszaros explained that the ideals that animated the American Revolution served as partial inspiration for the struggle against communism. Andrea Orszay, an 11-year-old member of the local Hungarian Girl Scouts (a special branch of the organization devoted to preserving their culture, in addition to the usual scouting activities), proudly displayed the pâpier-maché map of 1956 Budapest she had made.
The enthusiasm and unity with which Hungarian-Americans marked the 50th anniversary of the revolution stands in contrast to recent events in Budapest. Every day this week we have read of protests against the current Socialist government, whose prime minister has admitted lying to voters "morning, noon and night" about the state of the economy before the elections that his party narrowly won this spring. The government and the opposition had to stage separate commemoration ceremonies last Monday. One was marred when a group of antigovernment protesters seized an old Soviet tank that had been put on display and drove it at police.
But in Cleveland, unity prevailed, and appreciation for an earlier generation's struggles was the order of the day. "It's necessary to remember those who sacrificed for freedom," Janet Gecsy Brown, former chairwoman of the Ohio Board of Regents, told me. "The heroes of 1956 were fighting for the safer and more peaceful Europe we see today."
Mr. Fund is a columnist for OpinionJournal.com.
