RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=37321

Last weekend, Hungary marked the 60th anniversary of its famous 1956 uprising against the Soviet regime. The revolt, which lasted three weeks before it was quashed by Red Army tanks, was the first significant military conflict on European soil since World War II. The events echoed worldwide as the first crack in the Soviet bloc.

When it came to internal Hungarian affairs, the political story was complicated and remains so even today, since the leaders of the revolt against the Soviet communists were mainly idealistic Hungarian communists, who became mythical heroes to the country’s modern Right, and even the extreme Right.

The revolt broke out 11 years and four months after the end of the Holocaust, which in Hungary was perpetrated mainly by locals. The Jewish community was still very afraid of a rise in Hungarian nationalism. The revolt created a problem of loyalty for the Jews of Hungary, whom the Soviet Union had saved from Hitler and his collaborators. The fact that a few of the communist leaders were Jews just fueled the hatred of the anti-Semites.

Sixty years after the revolt, Israel Hayom spoke with some Jewish Hungarians who were there. They describe the tragedy of a generation trapped between Nazism and communism.

‘We woke up to the sound of tanks’

Eva Fahidi did not need the 1956 revolt to understand that sometimes life is an ideological lie. In 1936, when she was 11, her father took the whole family to church to convert to Christianity. He thought that converting would save them from further troubles in a country that had already passed sweeping anti-Semitic laws. Eight years later, the family ended up in a cattle car on a train to Auschwitz, with 14,000 other Jews from Debrecen. Two of Fahidi’s aunts survived the war, although one, a doctor, committed suicide two years later, unable to bear the memories.

Fahidi was dealt a bad hand, but she lives a happy life. She survived the Holocaust and never had children of her own, but she adopted the daughter of a friend who died young and now has grandchildren and great-grandchildren. If an entire generation in Hungary was condemned to a lack of opportunities under communism, Fahidi had great success in international trade. The dreams of playing the piano and performing on stage that were lost with her childhood came true when at age 91 she produced and performed in a stage adaptation of her life story, along with a young dancer. It has been a success in Budapest and in Germany. She still does sit-ups on a fitness ball in her living room — dancing professionally is demanding.

“Everyone will tell you that they were forced to become communists. I was a communist by choice. I returned from the camp, the communists beat the Nazis, and thanks to them we were alive. My aunt’s husband, who was a Jewish doctor who grew up in a very poor family, influenced me. I read ‘Das Capital’ [by Karl Marx] and everything,” Fahidi says.

But in 1956, after her husband was arrested and imprisoned, her eyes had already been opened. For a long time she did not know where he was, and he was only released when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died in 1953.

“My first husband was a communist in ideology who survived the Nazi work camps,” she says. “He was completely loyal, but the party always needed enemies. And after they were done with their real enemies, they looked for imaginary ones. They accused him of being bourgeoisie because he was Jewish. I’m ashamed to say that I was so loyal and even I suspected him when he was accused.”

She remembers the day of the revolt. “It was a nice day and everyone was happy. All of a sudden there was freedom,” she says with an ironic note.

“And in a matter of days, it was all right again to say ‘filthy Jew’ in the workplace.”

She also remembers the Russian invasion: “We woke up to the sound of the Russian tanks, and people understood that it was over.”

Then came the trials. Fahidi is angry that there were Jews among the hanging judges, who she says ordered the execution of minors, although not everyone agrees that happened.

Fahidi says that only in the past few years has she begun to lose her natural optimism. She believes something like the Holocaust could happen again, possibly to Jews, and possibly to someone else.

“The hate is so intense everywhere. Sometimes it seems to me as if the Second World War never ended,” she says.

‘Mom was waiting for Dad to come back’

Gyorgy Sandor does not love his native Hungary.

“There was anti-Semitic legislation here before Hitler,” he says. Sandor talks about Israel with boundless affection. He has visited a few times since the end of the communist rule in Hungary. Some of his family made aliyah in the 1920s.

“Israel is always changing and developing,” he tells us in his apartment, in the Zuglo quarter, which is crammed with books. But he made a good life for himself in Hungary. He worked as a journalist for a time and was an officer in the military. His anger toward Hungary did not keep him from being a good citizen. He proudly shows us a medal he received for outstanding service in the civil search and rescue unit. “We rescue tourists from caves,” he says.

“My dad died in the work brigades,” he says. The brigades were unarmed auxiliary units into which Jewish men were drafted, only to be worked and starved to death.

“We received notice that Dad had died. It was cold. Neither the Hungarian soldiers nor the Jewish laborers had proper [winter] clothing. So the Hungarians took [the Jews’] clothes, and they froze to death,” he says.

The Soviets saved Sandor’s life in a vaguely Kafkaesque manner. The family was hiding in a building marked with a star, a sign that it was a Jewish building. Every day, they went out to fetch water and look for food, returning to hide in the basement. A Russian shell destroyed the building, but the basement remained intact, so the Nazis who were looking for Jews to kill before their impending defeat never thought that anyone in the building was still alive.

One day, they saw a red flag waving on top of a building. Germany had surrendered. Russian soldiers were in the streets, looking for Germans. When the Russians reached the basement where Sandor and his family were hiding, they gave the family bread.

Sandor found a job and studied in the evening.

“I felt as if I was a communist. I’m still proud of that. But I was grateful to them.” He still regrets not living like his family in Israel, on a kibbutz. He also witnessed the achievements of the communists, and there were some in the early days: “They brought electricity to remote villages and taught people to read and write,” he says.

When the revolt broke out, Sandor was an officer in an artillery unit that was stationed in southwest Hungary. He joined the artillery because in those days, artillery required people with good mathematical skills to calculate firing angles. He was married and had a year-old son.

“The enlisted men ran off,” he says. All the officers were party members — a few because of conviction and the rest because it mandatory for officers. “All we wanted was to protect the ammunition, so it wouldn’t get into the wrong hands. We saw the rebels as kind of hooligans. At one stage, [the rebels] freed the prisoners, some of whom were incarcerated for political reasons but most of whom were criminals. So that’s what we thought of them — hooligans.”

He smiles when he is asked about the “Soviet invasion.” He says they never really invaded, because they had never really left.

Sandor says it’s good that Janos Kadar, Hungary’s communist leader who switched sides, went to Moscow, and effectively caused the revolt to fail, surrendered.

“He did the right thing. Otherwise, it would have been much worse,” he says.

He is probably right. The Russians were merciless in suppressing the uprising, and 3,000 Hungarians paid with their lives. Sandor was very worried about his wife and son. A few weeks later, he managed to get to Budapest. He remembers violating the curfew and facing Russian soldiers while wearing the uniform of the Hungarian army. They had permission to shoot him, but nothing happened.

When asked why the Jews of Hungary did not escape, to Israel, to Canada, to Australia, Sandor replies, “Mom was waiting for Dad to come back. There was no grave, only notification from the Nazis that he had died. Until her last day, she believed he would come back.”

Waiting for the Americans

Attorney Bessy Szekely, 68, grew up with a mother and father who had made it out of the Nazi camps. Her father talked about everything, and there was even a book about the Holocaust at home. Her mother never said a thing about it. If she was asked, she would cry. Szekely and her sister knew almost nothing about their mother’s life before the Holocaust, only that she had been observant. They eventually discovered that her first husband had died in a labor camp.

The mother gave her two daughters English names, Bessy and Dolly. She had been an English teacher and her accent in English was perfect. She said she had studied in England. The family avoided politics like the plague. Szekely’s father remained a bourgeoisie Jew, just as he had been before the war. After the revolt was put down and Kadar improved the political situation somewhat, the family managed to launch a small business selling fingernail polish. As a girl, Bessy was always told to watch out because she was a Jew, but not hide her identity.

They lived on Ulloi Boulevard, the route along which the Russian tanks rolled into Budapest. The day of the revolt and the rioting, Szekely’s mother was giving a private lesson to a pupil who lived some distance away. The family sat in the living room, afraid, and waited until the middle of the night for her to return. When she got home, they breathed a sigh of relief. For the next few days, the family remained inside out of fear. In the courtyard of their building, students were throwing Molotov cocktails at the Russians. They listened to reports on Western radio stations. In the years to come, those same stations would introduce them to the Beatles.

Like many Hungarians, Szekely’s father was certain that the United States would intervene in a few days. They feared a Russian invasion, but were also afraid that if the Russians were defeated, people would start attacking Jews. Given what they had seen before the time of the Russians, could they be blamed?

There was no American intervention, but one day a large vehicle pulled up and parked outside the building. The family was about to join the 200,000 Hungarians who fled the country during the revolt. Her mother and father talked about it. Her mother’s parents had been killed in the Holocaust, and the father’s parents were still alive. They decided not to get into the car.

Asked if she thinks it will be good for her grandchildren to stay in Hungary, Szekely says it might be better for them to leave. Hungarian Jews have no illusions about their country.

A champion after defeat

Agnes Keleti was one of the Jews who fled Hungary. After years in Israel, she has spent the last few years in Budapest. Even at 95, Keleti’s presence causes excitement in the cafe where we meet. The waitresses’ faces light up at the sight of her. A young mother asks the legendary gymnast to take a picture with her daughter.

Olympic sports are important here, and Keleti is more than the most successful Hungarian athlete in history. The champions of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics hold a special place in the collective Hungarian consciousness. Those Games, which were held in November-December, lifted the morale of the Hungarian people during the hard winter after the revolt was suppressed.

Keleti represents another reason why the Jewish community in Hungary remained large despite the attacks of the various dictatorships: It is a unique pool of talent. Hungarian Jews excelled in the sciences, the arts, and in sports, under whatever political system was in place.

After the Melbourne Games, at which Keleti won four gold medals, the most of any athlete in the world, she stayed in Australia, where her sister lived. She was already 35.

She says explicitly that “the Hungarians were the worst anti-Semites.” Keleti survived the Holocaust with fake identity papers. Her mother and sister were rescued by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, but her father was murdered in Auschwitz. She says that she always preferred rowing to gymnastics. She remembered rowing with her father. Last year, she would still go rowing on the river.

Why did she stay in Hungary? Keleti’s son, who is sitting next to her, challenges her: “Mom, I know you. If you weren’t happy here, you wouldn’t stay. Apparently you’re happy here.”

Keleti admits that might be true. She apologizes for not remembering everything clearly, but has brought a scrapbook, in which she wrote: “No one knows what’s happening. No one knows who will win. There was a rumor going around that the rebels were looking for Jews who were in the AVO.” That was the unit that sought out and executed Nazi murderers after the war.

Today, as always, Keleti is unwilling to discuss the issues of Hungary, Israel, and Judaism. “These things don’t matter to me. Humanism is my religion,” she says. She then proceeds to scold this writer, the photographer, her son, and the interpreter for not devoting enough time to sports. She shakes hands with the photographer, her junior by 64 years, and crushes his hand.

“Still strong,” she says with a mischievous smile.

A prison yard conversion to Judaism

Imre Mecs replies to the request to be interviewed with the words: “I see it as an obligation and a privilege to tell the readers of an Israeli newspaper about my Jewish comrades among the rebels.”

Mecs was given a death sentence to scare other students at the Budapest University of Technology (today Budapest University of Technology and Economics). He was saved thanks to his ties to a famous musician who knew his family.

In democratic post-war Hungary, Mecs became a senior politician in the left-wing Liberal Party. It’s important to note that the uprising did not take place between Right and Left. It was mainly a revolt of idealistic liberals, socialists, and communists against a foreign communist regime whose Jewish leader, Matyas Rakosi, defined himself as “Stalin’s No. 1 fan.”

The extent to which Hungarian society is divided on questions of history can be sensed in Mecs’ belief that the Jews were blamed for the revolt. The extreme Right in Hungary today accuses the Jews of being communists, and is erasing their huge role in the revolt.

“Five percent of the people sentenced to death after the revolt were Jews, even though [the Jews] were only one percent of Hungary’s population,” Mecs says.

He recalls the moment at which he “converted” to Judaism: “I was walking around the prison yard during the time we were waiting to be executed. One of the guards called me: ‘Jew.’ I said I wasn’t Jewish, even though I wouldn’t have been ashamed to be. He insisted I was Jewish.” His cellmate Istvan Angyal confirmed the “conversion,” saying: “From now on, you’re Jewish, and I’m going to call you Moishe.”

Mecs had always known Jews. His father was a doctor in Transylvania and half his acquaintances were Jewish. He remembers that the Jewish doctor who removed his tonsils, Arpad Lengyel, had been on a ship that set out to rescue people from the Titanic. He remembers his mother taking him to visit one of the safe houses that Wallenberg and other righteous gentiles established, where he saw Jews “living in fear and in crowded [conditions] and I understood what it meant to be Jewish.”

Mecs speaks at Jewish events, protests historical accounts, and takes care to commemorate the Jews’ role in the revolt. That has earned him anti-Semitic condemnation from the extreme Right.

Q: Why didn’t all the Jews leave Hungary after the Holocaust?

“You know, I thought about that a lot after Istvan Angyal was executed. What I would have done after the Holocaust in his place. He went to Auschwitz with his mother and sister. His mother was immediately killed. His sister was publicly executed for trying to escape, and he was forced to watch it. I thought, what would I have done? Would I have returned to Hungary to fight the people who had done that to me? Would I have emigrated to Israel?”

Q: The judges didn’t take pity on people who had been in Auschwitz?

“They didn’t take pity on minors, either.”

In the conversations they held in their cell, Angyal talked at length about the Israeli kibbutz.. Years later, when Mecs visited Israel as head of Hungarian Parliament’s Defense Committee, he felt obligated to close the circle and visit kibbutzim. It pained him to discover that they were no longer popular.

Mecs believes that the revolt had nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Jews served as commanders and were democratically elected to many posts. He says that rebels included members of the Arrow Cross Party, and the communist rebels would say that “if he lived now, Marx wouldn’t be a Marxist.” Apparently that was the difference between the rebels and the Hungarian general public. The rebels were idealists, whereas nationalist feelings and sometimes anti-Semitism were enough for the average supporter.

When he was released from prison after six years, Mecs saw a different Hungary. “Suddenly, the [Communist] Party had a million members. In the years after the war, Rakosi couldn’t expand the party, so he forced the Social-Democratic Party to merge with it.”

He still belongs to a group of veterans of the revolt who had been marked as unemployable.

“Most were Jews. We know how to live as a group, whose members helped one another,” he says.

“The older I get, the more I think about Istvan Angyal,” Mecs says at the end of the interview.

“There’s a hill next to Lake Balaton that we both loved. We talked about living there when we got old and dying looking at the sunset. I went there; the sun actually sets on the other side.”

‘Memory is of no use’

In his last letter, Angyal wrote to a Jewish friend, Istvan Eorsi: “Maybe in the future they’ll make heroes out of us so they can feel bad. If that happens, I ask that you protest! I don’t want to belong to a dirty part of history. Please forget me. There is no point in memory. Please live and laugh a lot. That’s how I want to live, too. Don’t let nostalgia and memory dictate your life. … If the end is painful, it’s only because I’m afraid it will be painful to my beloved.”

Angyal, who was born into a professional Jewish family and who went on to become commander of the Tuzolto Street unit in the revolt, was hanged. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the corner of the prison yard along with many other of the executed, and revolt leader Imre Nagy. The first thing free Hungary did in 1989 was to rebury them as they deserved. Angyal became the symbol he didn’t want to be.

We meet Eorsi’s son, Laszlo, at his absent-minded professor’s home. He is one of the main researchers at the institute dedicated to researching the events of the 1956 revolt. Eorsi Jr.’s biography is proof of how twisted life under communism was. He didn’t begin his studies until he was 34, preferring to work in construction and with troubled youth. “Who wants to belong to academia in a world that isn’t free?” he says. He represents a generation of Hungarians who left their ambitions behind.

His family has its roots in Szombathely, near the Austrian border. Many of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust. Laszlo Eorsi was a year old in 1956. His father was sentenced to eight years in prison for his part in the revolt that took place at the radio station where he worked. He served three.

“The Right and the extreme Right are definitely appropriating this revolt,” he says.

“It was a revolt of the working class and also idealistic communists, socialists, and liberals.”

Q: Does the communist period justify the Holocaust in the eyes of the extreme Right today?

“Absolutely. They see the Jews as responsible for both communism and liberalism.”

To a certain extent, Eorsi is fulfilling Angyal’s will. The latter’s picture hangs on the “Martyrs Wall” in the House of Terror Museum, a museum of national status dedicated to memorializing the crimes of the dictatorships.

“There are a lot of factual mistakes. But the worst [one] of all is that it portrays the communist period in a more chilling light than it was, and it was plenty chilling, and the fascist period as better than it was,” he says.

Q: Why didn’t the communists better inculcate the memory of the Holocaust? They were the ones who defeated the Nazis and could have glorified themselves.

“Good question. Maybe because the Russians defeated the Germans, and not the Hungarians. A lot of the Nazi members of the Arrow Cross Party were already members of the Communist Party.”

It’s hard to ignore the fact that the website of the museum, an institution that deals with World War II, doesn’t mention the word “Jews,” when the number of Holocaust victims was 200 times bigger than the number of people killed in 1956.