The Golden Door: The Hungarian Revolution

By Dresden Reese

The author graduated with Honors from Loyola
University of Chicago. She now resides in northern
California, enjoys two lovely daughters and a multifaceted
career as an artist/designer, educator and
mentor. I write to entertain and educate (mainly
myself after a tragic accident). Words entertain me and
conjure up pictures without ever uttering sound.
The accident gave me time to write on an old computer donated by the
editor of a local newspaper, and that is another story . . . . . . . . .
In 2006, the world silently celebrated the 50th anniversary of a rebellion
gone awry. It wasnt just kids games fought with sticks and stones against
Soviet tanks, it was bigger than that, it was Hungarys passion for life,
joy and vivre that erupted on that day, the 23rd of October, 1956.
The media barely gave the event fi ve minutes notice. James Michener
captured the saga in his book, Bridge at Andau. Without Micheners
documentation and independent research, I would probably have dismissed
this story as fi ction. At the end, the matron who shared her plight
and joy with me brought out a leather bound photo album fi lled with
post cards Olgi mailed from the free world to her mother behind the Iron
Curtain. Those dates, the pictures and words authenticate whats written.
The story documents the Cold War era, as well as contrasts Soviet
Communism with Americas democratic ideals. As one of my critics,
one of my students, puts it, the story teaches us to be thankful.
The Golden Door is truly a love story,
the love of a man and a woman and their passion for freedom.
Thank you in advance for choosing this book . . . . . . . . . ..

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 14, 2007
• ISBN: 9781462839186

Dresden Reese

Dresden Reese graduated with honors from Loyola University of Chicago. An educator, designer, mentor and writer who believes, within every young person there exists the potential to achieve untold glories! Several other books are in the making; Black Myths, White Lies BackLash/The Politics of Money.

Book preview

Copyright © 2007 by Dresden Reese.

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4257-5633-8

                   Softcover                                978-1-4257-5632-1

                   Ebook                                     9781462839186

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Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Bibliography

Endnotes

Image%20001%20-%20olgi%20pvi%20lipot.tif

b a s e d o n a t r u e s t o r y  .  .  . 

In loving memory of Lipot Csorgö, pictured in happier times prior to World War II, with his extended family along the sandy banks of the great Danube. After W. W. II, only Lipot and one sister survived. Lipot escaped to freedom; his sister did not.

Lipot pictured sitting-second from right, between his twin sisters.

With special thanks to Pulitzer Prize winning author, James Michener for his account of this tragic event, the botched Hungarian Revolution of 1956, published in 1957. In his book, The Bridge at Andau, Michener poignantly stated the plight of this parcel of land that had once dominated Eastern Europe. Michener also wrote that every refugee that escaped from this small satellite nation, controlled by the Soviet Kremlin, carried with him/her a story of epic proportions.

This is one of those stories… .

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Chapter 1

The Hungarian Revolution

On a frozen crystal clear evening in a faraway place, in the land of the midnight sun, a bewildered child clung to a gold soccer ball that dangled from a hefty gold chain fastened around the child’s neck; a gift from her beloved papa on her sixteenth birthday.

Papa! Mama! The child sobbed. She wanted to sleep, to scream, to crawl to safety beneath her parents’ bed as she had done since she was barely six and the Soviets first arrived on their doorstep in 1946.

She stared blankly at her bloodstained hands and jacket. Claudi, she whispered.

The Orient Express whistled as it raced across the countryside. The girl was fleeing, leaving everything she had ever known or loved behind, her dear mama and papa, and her beloved country. The darkened train surged across hills packed with snow, outside the countryside glistened in the moonlight. It was one of those fabled white nights, when the whole world seemed to be afire, lit by candlelight. Perhaps these mystical nights had fueled the countless rumored tales of Count Dracula and the vampires that supposedly inhabited her tiny homeland, Transylvania. No matter how gruesome the rumors, Olgi longed to be home snuggled next to her gentle parents instead of heading to the border of Germany. If she stayed in Budapest or returned home, they would shoot her dead like poor, dear Claudi.

Olgi Varga traveled alone on her first trip to Budapest. She would stay with her mother’s brother and his wife, Gabor Jacob who lived in Pest. Pest was connected to her sister city, Buda, by eight long bridges that spanned the vast blue (Danu) Danube River. Buda has stood on this high citadel since Roman armies constructed a town named Aquinum on its site two thousand years earlier.

In the Middle Ages, Buda had housed Hungarian kings within its formidable castle walls. The city later fell to the Turks who intermingled Buda’s architecture with Moorish accents. The tale of the two sister cities, Buda and Pest, was united as one in 1873 when it was named Budapest, the capital of Hungary, a country steeped in mystery and devoured by greed.

Olgi, as her parents, Maria and Zoltan Varga, called their only child had been introduced to Claudi, the daughter of her auntie’s next-door neighbor in Budapest. Both girls had just turned seventeen and graduated from school. When Olgi requested a visa to attend the upcoming celebration of Hungary’s Independence Day in Budapest on October 23, 1956, she was fired from her job of two and a half years, mixing perfume for a pharmacie.

The excited teenager became acquainted quickly with Claudi and her two older brothers, both handsome young men who attended the Soviet run university. The foursome would attend the Independence celebration together.

On this starlit night, October 23rd, 1956 Olgi accompanied Claudi and her brothers, Jozsef and Stephen to a student rally held outside the radio tower that stood atop the highest point in Buda, Gellert Hill. The students planned to request permission for brief minutes of broadcast airtime in order to read their written demands to the Soviets who had occupied their homeland since the end of the Second World War.

The students wanted essentials like more food, free speech and for the Communists to stop terrorizing the people. They carried no weapons. It was to be a peaceful demonstration, which started near the statue of Hungary’s greatest hero, General Joszef Bem from Poland. General Bem had liberated Hungary when he led a successful revolution against the Hapsburg Empire in 1848; his efforts separated Hungary from the Austria-Hungarian Empire.

Hungary’s latest revolutionary attempt was anything but successful, Soviet tanks appeared a half hour after Soviet forces turned out the lights within the square and throughout the city’s streets. Communist leaders had hoped this would persuade the students to return home; instead students rolled copies of Communist newspapers (propaganda) and lit them. Their handheld torches lit up the night as suddenly the students burst into song. They sang the Hungarian National Anthem, which had been banned since the Soviet Red Army had helped liberate Hungary from the fascists. Now, after the World War II armistice, only the Communist’s anthem could be sung within the Hungarian territories.

Thousands of young Hungarians assembled around the statue of General Bem, the parliament building, the Radio Tower and spread to other strategic places controlled by the AVO or AVH, Államvédelmi Hatóság the brutal secret police force of Hungary that reportedly was an external appendage from the Soviet Union. What the AVO lacked in numbers they made up for with Soviet military might. What the student group, that included the foursome; Claudi, Olgi, Stephen and Jozsef did not know, was that the radio station was a fortified garrison, which the Soviets planned to never surrender, not even for one brief broadcast.

Radio Budapest provided the Soviet’s with a throat hold on their satellite countries. They used it to broadcast endless hours of propaganda while trying to blank out messages from Radio Free Europe, popular music and modern ideology. If the Communists allowed one faction the right to dissent, what would follow? The damn could break that holds out the flow from the free world and its democratic ideals.

The crowd was composed mainly of children and a handful of intellectuals, remnants from the Red Soviet’s initial purge of intelligencia, which included the murder of the finest doctors, engineers, scientists and professors in the lands controlled by the Soviets. Since the Reds, as the Soviet faction was called, first acquired the Hungarian territories new names were added to the list of missing souls each week. If a neighbor borrowed a cup of sugar from a neighbor suspected of being a bad communist, their entire family could disappear, gone from their home by nightfall; thus sisters, brothers, fathers and mothers mysteriously vanished from their families. Small children were orphaned. It was better not to greet old friends, even family, on the street. One complacent word, a simple hello, might bring death to your door. Death came in the form of the Soviet Secret Police.²

Students did not openly read unless they read Communist approved materials. Students had no thoughts, openly, unless they were Soviet approved. Only Communist approved teachers were allowed to teach in Soviet schools and universities. This dogmatic Soviet regime bore no resemblance to the government outlined in the writings of Karl Marx and Engel.

As these students stood solemnly, while they awaited permission for their spokesmen to enter the radio station, tear gas bombs were tossed into the crowd. Two large spotlights were flicked on and AVO, or AVH secret police, began to take the names of students that had assembled that night. Frustrated, a few young Hungarian boys tried to break down the door to the radio station, while others threw rocks at the spotlights. A single machine gun, positioned on the top of the building began to fire.

Claudi stood shoulder to shoulder with Olgi in the crowd. Claudi was one of the first to crumple and fall, shot through the heart. Blood spurted from the child’s mouth as she gasped for her last breath of air. Snipers continued to fire wantonly into the masses that stood passively. Innocent children spattered in their own blood fell around Olgi’s feet. Stephen clasped Olgi’s hand and pulled her hastily backwards into the crowd and down the hill. When they reached the bottom, the crowd fanned out and funneled through alleyways or pushed along the streets of Budapest. Many children were simply trampled to death. There seemed to be Soviet tanks at every intersection, their guns lowered and pointed at the sea of students.

If a sniper fired single shots at the Soviets, the tanks would turn in the direction of that shot and return it with a volley of gunfire that would remove a whole floor from a building. This, in turn, mowed houses and apartments down, as the upper section of an entire building collapsed onto its lower section and the weight pulled the building downward, flattened by these brief staccato volleys of gunfire. Thousands were crushed to death, within seconds, within the decimated structures.

Empty, carnivorous trucks wheeled throughout the city as the AVO tossed the limp, lifeless forms of the innocent into them, like trash. Blood flowed from the trucks and left crimson trails. A huge pit was excavated at the cemetery reserved for the bad Communists as dead children were buried like slaughtered cattle with no headstone or marker atop mass gravesites.

Olgi saw arms, legs, and the twisted heads of the innocent hanging over the sides of trucks called in to clean up. Tanks rolled over children’s bodies. It was a terrible sight. Olgi did not know Budapest, and truthfully, did not remember how she got back to Claudi’s home that evening, but she never forgot the horror of that night!

Elsewhere, dissidents had toppled a bronze statue of Stalin sitting on a horse, while other students rioted at the Communist run Szabad Nep (Free Press). The students were tired of Soviet lies! Hungarians wanted the Soviets to stop stealing the food, uranium, aluminum and products they produced! Hungary had been a wealthy country before the Soviets took over, with more than enough food and money!

The students possessed no weapons, only gasoline and a few rifles they had lifted from single Soviet soldiers. A few brave souls wedged steel pipes or posts into the tracks of the massive tanks, halting them. Other children, some girls no older than Olgi and Claudi, lit gasoline soaked rags stuck in bottles filled with additional gasoline and heaved them into the tanks’ massive gun barrels or pried open the lids of the monstrous weapons and dropped the Molotov cocktails inside. What the Soviets possessed by sheer military might the students made up for in bravery and prowess.

Exhausted, Claudi’s two brothers and Olgi crawled up the steps to Claudi’s home. Many young girls and boys fell in the streets, casualties of the protest that night. Claudi’s parents and Olgi’s uncle were tuned to Radio Budapest when it fell silent instead of broadcasting the celebration and the students’ demands.

When they heard machinegun fire, Uncle Jacob shook his head in despair, We will never see our children again.

Olgi, spattered in her friend’s blood, spoke anxiously when she arrived alongside Claudi’s brothers at Claudi’s parent’s home.

Papa forgive us, the two brothers ran and cried on their father’s knee. I’m, I’m, so, so sorry, Claudi, Claudi’s dead. They apologized. No one remembered much of the details after Claudi fell. Their first impulse had been to escape.

I’m so sorry we left our fallen comrade, Olgi stopped, and then changed the word from the communist to the free world context, friend, our friend, lying on the ground.

Olgi choked on her words, then all three sobbed, Forgive us. Please, forgive us.

Dear children, there’s no time to cry. You can’t stay! Claudi’s father warned. We’re under martial law now. (Meaning: anyone found outside his or her home would be shot dead.) They’ll pick all of you up in the morning and you’ll be dead by the afternoon so go quickly, now, before they send troops to empty our houses of every student and child in Budapest!

The Americans will come! He vowed. We heard it on the radio!

(Radio Free Europe, had been started by the American CIA and was later turned over to the private sector that collected funding for the project that proclaimed freedom to oppressed countries behind the Iron Curtain in Communist-Europe.)

The voice of the novice revolutionaries cried out to America and the free world,

People of the world, help us . . . listen now to the alarm bells ring. People of the civilized world, in the name of liberty and solidarity, we are asking you to help . . . Listen to our cry.²

Citizens in Hungary did not understand why their tiny country had been handed over to the Soviets, while half