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They shot and robbed everything. They robbed everything - it’s not true that they didn’t rob. There was a man who could hardly walk because he had put so many coats on, I watched him from the window. But it is also true that a truck stopped at the corner with dead geese and they gave them away. But it wasn’t as people now tell all kinds of things. There were decent, nice, good-intentioned people, and there was a lot of riff-raff. A boy with a civic guard armband came up to visit us, he had a gun, and asked us how we were doing, because he was my husband’s colleague, but he wasn’t a counter-revolutionist at all. But this didn’t affect me, it didn’t affect anyone in my family. What does a survivor and her husband do? The first thing was that we checked how much food we had at home, and for how many days that was enough. When there was a lot of shooting, we moved the two children to the cellar to sleep there, and we pulled our bed out in the hall, because that’s safer, and we slept there, not in the room.
My husband had a tape recorder at home from his workplace, it was as big as a suitcase. We had a radio, and Orion, I think, it was a radio with a tuning eye, which picked up a lot of waves. We could hear the taxis on the radio, and if the machines of war transmitted on a band, we could hear that, too. My husband recorded the more interesting things on a tape, and he still has them. One time, when my husband wiggled the tuner we heard, a military plane was flying above Budapest, that the pilot, the voice of a young man, screamed: ‘Oh my God, what do I see?’ And he said in despair that they were throwing living people out of the window on Koztarsasag Square. Simply they threw them in the street. But they also murdered the regular soldiers on duty. [Editor’s note: The attack against the Koztarsasag Square hall of the Hungarian Democrat Party on the 30th October 1956 is still one of the most controversial and partly unveiled events of the 1956 revolution. The revolters supposed that the building was the anti revolutionary center of the broken up AVH and the party apparatus. One of their groups tried to deliver the rebels caught by the AVH, and they opened fire at them from the building, when the rebels started to assault the building. Nobody controlled the assault, the insurgent groups fought with the AVH men and the armed party functionaries in a spontaneous way. They occupied the building and the raging multitude lynched many defenders. (Gosztonyi Peter: A Koztarsasag teri ostrom és a kazamatak mitosza. „Budapesti Negyed”, 1994. 5. sz.; Ripp Zoltán: 1956. Forradalom és szabadsagharc Magyarorszagon. Budapest, 2002; Horvath Miklos: 1956 hadikronikaja, Budapest, 2003).]
My parents got hold of a loaf of bread, I don’t know from where, but and they came and brought it over. We fed the children, we were in the hall, the kitchen overlooked the courtyard, we heated it as much as we could. Combat cars patrolled the main roads, and if we went out we waited until the combat car left, and quickly crossed the street on the Korut. One time we really wanted to get some fresh air with the children. We had a motorcycle with a sidecar, and we went until the corner of Kertesz and Dohany Street, but there was a barricade there, so we came back. My husband went once to see what was going on on Ulloi Avenue, and he came back saying that Ulloi Avenue was in ruins, and the human remains were treaded in as the caterpillars went by. There was a combat car on the corner of Kertesz Street, it was there for quite a while. But there was one on the corner of the Korut and Jozsef Street, too, and when we already went to work, when life started again, but there were no streetcars or buses yet, a truck stood on the corner of the Korut and Jozsef Street, next to the gun-barrel of the combat car, we climbed on its plateau, and that’s how they took us to work.
My husband had a tape recorder at home from his workplace, it was as big as a suitcase. We had a radio, and Orion, I think, it was a radio with a tuning eye, which picked up a lot of waves. We could hear the taxis on the radio, and if the machines of war transmitted on a band, we could hear that, too. My husband recorded the more interesting things on a tape, and he still has them. One time, when my husband wiggled the tuner we heard, a military plane was flying above Budapest, that the pilot, the voice of a young man, screamed: ‘Oh my God, what do I see?’ And he said in despair that they were throwing living people out of the window on Koztarsasag Square. Simply they threw them in the street. But they also murdered the regular soldiers on duty. [Editor’s note: The attack against the Koztarsasag Square hall of the Hungarian Democrat Party on the 30th October 1956 is still one of the most controversial and partly unveiled events of the 1956 revolution. The revolters supposed that the building was the anti revolutionary center of the broken up AVH and the party apparatus. One of their groups tried to deliver the rebels caught by the AVH, and they opened fire at them from the building, when the rebels started to assault the building. Nobody controlled the assault, the insurgent groups fought with the AVH men and the armed party functionaries in a spontaneous way. They occupied the building and the raging multitude lynched many defenders. (Gosztonyi Peter: A Koztarsasag teri ostrom és a kazamatak mitosza. „Budapesti Negyed”, 1994. 5. sz.; Ripp Zoltán: 1956. Forradalom és szabadsagharc Magyarorszagon. Budapest, 2002; Horvath Miklos: 1956 hadikronikaja, Budapest, 2003).]
My parents got hold of a loaf of bread, I don’t know from where, but and they came and brought it over. We fed the children, we were in the hall, the kitchen overlooked the courtyard, we heated it as much as we could. Combat cars patrolled the main roads, and if we went out we waited until the combat car left, and quickly crossed the street on the Korut. One time we really wanted to get some fresh air with the children. We had a motorcycle with a sidecar, and we went until the corner of Kertesz and Dohany Street, but there was a barricade there, so we came back. My husband went once to see what was going on on Ulloi Avenue, and he came back saying that Ulloi Avenue was in ruins, and the human remains were treaded in as the caterpillars went by. There was a combat car on the corner of Kertesz Street, it was there for quite a while. But there was one on the corner of the Korut and Jozsef Street, too, and when we already went to work, when life started again, but there were no streetcars or buses yet, a truck stood on the corner of the Korut and Jozsef Street, next to the gun-barrel of the combat car, we climbed on its plateau, and that’s how they took us to work.
Period
Year
1956
Location
Budapest
Hungary
Interview
Gyorgyike Hasko
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