Nagy still believed, or at least hoped, that disaster could be averted. He was determined to convene the previously planned talks with the Russians about troop withdrawal. At the Parliament, the Russian delegates were received with full honors. Nagy received regular, and encouraging, reports from the talks. The Russians went over their withdrawal plans in detail, which included a festive military parade at which they expected to be cheered. The Hungarians in turn reported that they had ordered all of their tanks back to barracks and called upon all civilians to turn in their arms and ammunition.
In the meantime, however, János Kádár then inexplicably disappeared from Budapest. The Soviet Central Committee had summoned him to Moscow.
ULLMANN AND ERDÖS had been camped out at the Revolutionary Committee offices for several days, sleeping on some mattresses under a piano. Ullman had been urging workers’ committees to end their strikes because the revolution had succeeded and it was time to go back to work. When she learned of the Russians’ demand for a friendly send-off, she also had to explain to revolutionary committees in surrounding villages the need for cooperation. Optimistic about the news trickling out of the talks with the Russians, Ullmann and Erdös decided they could relax. Late in the evening, they climbed into a truck with some armed students and went home to get some rest.
SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT, Nagy received word at his office in the Parliament Building that a massive force was approaching Budapest. This time the Russians were much better prepared. Marshal Konev had assembled ten divisions for Operation Whirlwind, comprising 150,000 troops, 2,500 tanks, and accompanying air support that would crush whatever resistance the Hungarians might offer. At four a.m., he gave the code word “thunder,” and the shelling erupted.
Nagy knew there was little he could do. The Hungarian forces were no match for the Russians; they would be slaughtered. His deputy encouraged him to make a broadcast while there was still time. Nagy went down to the makeshift studio of Free Radio Kossuth inside Parliament and addressed the nation: “This is Imre Nagy speaking, the President of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian’s People Republic. Today at daybreak Soviet forces started an attack against our capital, obviously with the intention to overthrow the legal Hungarian democratic government. Our troops are fighting. The Government is in its place. I notify the people of our country and the entire world of this fact.”
After Nagy’s statement and as Soviet tanks rolled up in front of Parliament, Nagy’s longtime friend Gyula Háy, a playwright, arrived at the Parliament Building and dashed off another appeal to be broadcast: “This is the Hungarian Writers Association speaking to all writers, scientists, writers’ associations, academies and scientific organizations of the world. We appeal for help to all intellectuals in all countries. Our time is limited. You all know the facts. There is no need to review them. Help Hungary! Help the writers, scientists, workers, peasants, and all Hungarian intellectuals. Help! Help! Help!”
Russian tanks on the streets of Budapest after the second Soviet invasion. (© Hulton_Deutsch Collection / Corbis)
These were the last words heard over Free Radio Kossuth.
THE HUNGARIANS DID not stand a chance against the Soviet artillery, tanks, and jets. Key Army units were swiftly surrounded while they slept in their barracks, then awakened and persuaded to lay down their arms. The Soviets then concentrated on pummeling several strongholds occupied by the freedom fighters. This time the invaders were not at all concerned about collateral damage. When fired upon, the Russians often leveled buildings without any regard for civilians inside or nearby.
Completely outgunned and outnumbered, the Hungarians knew that resistance was futile, but many vowed to fight regardless. Their sole hope was to hold on long enough for the West to intervene. Desperate to get word of the battle for Budapest to the outside world, one eyewitness started up the Telex connection between the Szabad Nép newspaper office and the Vienna bureau of the Associated Press early Sunday morning:
SOS SOS SOS
YOUNG PEOPLE ARE MAKING MOLOTOV COCKTAILS TO FIGHT THE TANKS. WE ARE QUIET BUT NOT AFRAID. SEND THE NEWS TO THE WORLD.
THE FIGHTING IS VERY CLOSE NOW AND WE HAVEN’T ENOUGH TOMMY GUNS IN THE BUILDING. I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG WE CAN RESIST … HEAVY SHELLS ARE EXPLODING NEAR BY. ABOVE JET PLANES ARE ROARING …
WE NEED MORE. IT CAN’T BE ALLOWED THAT PEOPLE ATTACK TANKS WITH THEIR BARE HANDS.
WHAT IS THE UNITED NATIONS DOING? GIVE US A LITTLE ENCOURAGEMENT.
THEY’VE JUST BROUGHT A RUMOR THAT AMERICAN TROOPS WILL BE HERE WITHIN ONE OR TWO HOURS.
Americans coming. The same rumors and wishful thinking had circulated in the last hours of free Paris in 1940. All of the news correspondents who had entered Budapest had been asked the same question: “When are the Americans coming?” The rebels believed or had been led to believe, perhaps by broadcasts of Radio Free Europe, that the West would step in to help Hungary.
Of course, the Americans weren’t coming. There was no way President Eisenhower was going to risk a direct confrontation with the USSR and World War III over Hungary.
THE WORLD REACTS
The Hungarians’ hopes for UN intervention were equally in vain. Before dawn on Sunday in New York, when the Russian attack was a few hours old, the United States was able to force an emergency meeting of the Security Council on Hungary. US delegate Henry Cabot Lodge said, “If ever there was a time when the action of the United Nations could literally be a matter of life and death for a whole nation, this is that time.”
The Soviets argued that Hungary had fallen into the control of Fascists. After two hours of debate, the USSR vetoed a resolution censuring the attack on Hungary on the grounds that it constituted “interference with the internal affairs of Hungary.” That evening, the General Assembly took up an American resolution calling for the USSR to “desist forthwith from all attack on the people of Hungary and from any form of intervention in the internal affairs of Hungary” as well as “to withdraw all of its forces without delay from Hungarian territory.” Although the resolution passed 50 to 8, with 15 abstentions, it was merely symbolic, as the UN did not have the means to enforce it.
There was an international outpouring of sympathy for the Hungarians and outrage at the Russians. In an editorial entitled “Repression,” The Times of London said, “The Russians have given their answer, and the bitter tragedy of Hungary has risen to the height of terror and anguish. Can there be any other end but the extinction of liberty?”
No other capital, however, was more engaged in the Hungarian drama than Paris. Being home to many Hungarian émigrés, as well as a large base of Communist supporters, the revolution and the Soviet response inspired fierce emotions in Paris. Unlike many Communist parties elsewhere in Europe, the French Communist Party (PCF) had not welcomed Khrushchev’s February speech and de-Stalinization. Led by the staunch Stalinist Maurice Thorez, the PCF remained completely obedient to Moscow and expected the same of its rank and file. Thorez and the large-circulation Communist daily L’Humanité dutifully adopted the Soviet line that the Hungarian revolution was led by Fascists, and had to be crushed. In their statement published in L’Humanité the day after the invasion, the PCF applauded the Soviet Army.
The PCF and its leadership immediately became the target of anti-Soviet protests.
On November 7, a demonstration in support of Hungary was announced. By six o’clock that evening, a crowd of 30,000, including numerous members of the National Assembly and elected officials of Paris, had assembled at the Place de l’Étoile. They started up the Champs-Élysées behind French and Hungarians flags, and banners proclaiming “Liberate Budapest,” “Outlaw the Communist Party!” and “Thorez to the post!” [firing squad]. By six thirty, the head of the procession reached the Arc de Triomphe, where many laid flowers at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Several prominent figures were at the monument, including members of the government such as François Mitterrand, and former presidents of the council such as Paul Reynaud.
A group of young demonstrators broke off from the parade of delegations, and with cries of “Burn the PC,” they hustled toward the head office of the PCF. The first wave reached the building at seven thirty and quickly overran the small police force protecting it, but encountered about five hundred Communists in front of the building. The demonstrators and Communists fought on the sidewalk and in the stairwells. The building’s defenders showered the attackers with fire hoses. In twenty minutes, the ground floor was taken and the assailants began ransacking it, throwing furniture and documents into the street. A fire broke out on the third floor, and firefighters doused it while the many injured in the melee were attended to in nearby bars.
The protestors abandoned the PCF building and, singing “La Marseillaise,” rushed toward the nearby offices of L’Humanité. Alerted by telephone, defenders inside the building greeted the mob with fire hoses, bottles of acid, and other projectiles. The protestors plucked bricks from the street, hurled them through the windows, and armed themselves with pickaxes from a nearby work site. A small group reached the roof of the building and started a fire. Others tried but could not penetrate the printing room of the newspaper. A pitched battle unfolded in the street when Communist reinforcements from the Paris suburbs arrived on the scene. By the time calm was finally restored, thirty were wounded and three men, two Communists and one union worker, later died from their injuries.
The clashes further polarized the atmosphere in Paris. In L’Humanité, Communist members of the National Assembly characterized the protestors as “fascist arsonists and vandals” and painted the defense of their building in heroic terms akin to the time of the Resistance. In the Assembly itself, insults, threats, and anger were heard throughout days of debate on Hungary. Communist deputies were booed during voting and told: “You are the only communists in the world to insult corpses that are still warm.”
IT WAS VERY difficult for those inside Hungary to understand the United States’ inaction or the impotence of the United Nations. Pleas for help continued. On November 8, Camus received a telegram from a Hungarian émigré writers’ group. It contained the text of an appeal that was broadcast from one of the last remaining insurgents’ radio outposts:
POETS, WRITERS, SCHOLARS OF THE ENTIRE WORLD. HUNGARIAN WRITERS ARE ADDRESSING YOU. LISTEN TO OUR CALL. WE ARE FIGHTING AT THE BARRICADES FOR LIBERTY OF OUR COUNTRY, FOR THAT OF EUROPE AND FOR HUMAN DIGNITY. WE ARE DYING. BUT OUR SACRIFICE SHOULD NOT BE IN VAIN. AT THIS SUPREME HOUR, IN THE NAME OF A MASSACRED NATION, WE ADDRESS OURSELVES TO YOU, CAMUS, MALRAUX, MAURIAC, RUSSEL [SIC], JASPERS … AND MANY OTHER FIGHTERS OF THE MIND. THE HOUR HAS SOUNDED AND THE TIME FOR SPEECHES IS OVER. ACTS ARE NECESSARY. DO SOMETHING. ACT. THROW OFF THE HORRIBLE INERTIA OF THE OCCIDENT. ACT. ACT. ACT.
The appeal was published on November 9 in the liberal, left-wing newspaper Franc-Tireur. Since he was named specifically in the text, Camus felt obliged to respond personally. His reply was published in the next day’s issue:
Our Hungarian brothers, isolated in a fortress of death, most probably do not know of the immense outburst of indignation among all French writers. But they are right to think that speeches are not enough and that it is ridiculous to raise vain laments about a Hungary that has been crucified. The truth is that the international community … left Hungary to be assassinated. It has been twenty years already since we allowed the Spanish Republic to be crushed by the troops and arms of a foreign dictatorship. This great courage had its reward: the Second World War. The weakness of and divisions within the United Nations bring us little by little to the third world war, which is now knocking at our door. It knocks and it will enter if international law is not imposed for the protection of nations and individuals everywhere in the world.
Camus then proposed that all of those named in the appeal sign a joint letter to the United Nations General Assembly requesting that it examine “the genocide of which Hungary was now the victim” and that each nation vote for the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops and the liberation of detainees and deportees. The letter pledged that if the United Nations backed away from its duty, the signers would not only boycott the UN and its cultural organizations but also denounce it at every opportunity.
Camus also suggested that writers throughout Europe gather signatures of other intellectuals and forward those to the Secretary General of the UN. He pled that intellectuals should do all they could to stop the “butchery” in Hungary, and “to demonstrate to the world that besides our cruel and weak governments, and on top of the curtain of dictators, despite the dramatic collapse of the movements and traditional ideals of the left, a true Europe exists, united in justice and liberty, in the face of all the tyranny. The Hungarian fighters are dying today for this Europe. In order that their sacrifice not be in vain, we … owe it to them to demonstrate, day after day, our fidelity and our faith and to relay, as far as we can, the appeal of Budapest.”
Camus would fulfill that commitment by speaking often throughout the following year about the plight of the Hungarians.
Largely missing from the outpouring of public indignation and condemnation were, not surprisingly, the voices of Communists or their supporters. There were a few important exceptions. Sartre, who began 1956 by publishing a New Year’s greeting in Pravda to “our Soviet friends” and earlier had stated: “the Party has manifested an extraordinary objective intelligence so much so that it rarely errs,” now saw the error of Moscow’s ways. In an interview with L’Express, he declared, “I condemn absolutely and unconditionally the Soviet aggression” and “the intervention was a crime.” “The crime,” Sartre added, “was made possible and perhaps necessary (from the Soviet point of view naturally) by twelve years of terror and stupidity.”
Sartre announced, “Regretfully but completely, I am breaking my ties with my friends among Russian writers who are not denouncing (or cannot denounce) the Hungarian massacre. It is no longer possible to be friendly toward the ruling faction of the Soviet bureaucracy.” He added, “It is not and never will it be possible to re-establish relations with the men who are presently leading the French Communist Party. Each one of their phrases, each one of their gestures, is the end result of thirty years of lying and sclerosis.”
Sartre’s turnabout was, at last, some public vindication for Camus’s long-maintained condemnation of Soviet policies—views for which Camus had paid dearly. But Camus did not stoop to saying “I told you so.” He did not have to, and the tragedy unfolding in Hungary was no cause for satisfaction. Moreover, Sartre’s analysis of the causes of the Hungarian debacle was quite different from that of Camus. Sartre saw the Soviet action as a consequence of strategic blunders, weaknesses in Hungary, and outside forces rather than the inevitable terror of a totalitarian state, as Camus believed.
Sartre elaborated at length in his L’Express interview. He suggested that the “gravest fault was probably Khrushchev’s report [in February], for in my opinion the solemn public denunciation, with a detailed list of crimes of a sacred figure who represented the regime for so long, is madness when such frankness is not possible by a prior and considerable rise in the living standards of the population.” Sartre believed that Hungarians were as yet too backward for such candor and that it was a mistake “to reveal the truth to the masses which were not prepared to receive it.” Sartre also pinned blame on the West and the Marshall Plan.
Camus drew a simpler, unambiguous, conclusion. On November 28, at the grand Salle Wagram, various student organizations held a gathering in tribute to their fellow young Hungarians. In front of two immense French tricolor and Hungarian flags, a message from Camus was read:
The only thing that I can publicly affirm today, after having participated directly or indirectly in twenty years of our bloody history, is that the one supreme value, the last for which it is worth living and fighting, remains freedom … For ten years, we had to fight against Hitler’s tyranny and the right wing who supported it. And, for ten more years, we had to combat Stalin’s ty
ranny and the sophisms of its defenders on the left … You must know now that when the mind is chained, work is enslaved; when the writer is muzzled, the worker is oppressed; and that when the nation is not free, socialism liberates no one and enslaves everyone.
At the time Camus made his statement, the fighting in Hungary had largely ceased. Condemnations from the West were no deterrent to the Soviets. Nor was all of that French intellectual firepower and sympathy for the freedom fighters of any use against Soviet guns. By November 11, 1956, the last strongholds of resistance in Budapest had crumbled. More than 2,500 Hungarians had been killed since the start of the revolution, the majority of those during the second invasion.
What remained uncertain was the form that daily life would take in Hungary after the invasion, and whether any of the freedoms fought for and secured for a brief moment during the revolution might endure.
THE LAST MARCH
After the resistance was crushed, Kádár took over. His newly installed regime, dubbed the Revolutionary Workers and Peasants Government, had to deal with the aftermath of the invasion and govern the shattered country. There were several difficult challenges, including getting the people back to work (a general strike that had been called to protest the invasion had brought the country to a halt) and deciding how to deal with the revolutionaries.
Thousands of Hungarians fled the country at the outset of the invasion, and more were continuing to cross into Austria and Yugoslavia. Ullmann, however, felt obliged to remain in the country, as many students she knew had been rounded up and arrested in the course of the invasion. She would not leave while they were in prison. Moreover, she and her compatriots sought to salvage whatever they could of gains made during the revolution.
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