The Bridge at Andau

by James A. Michener

  Now a Hungarian marksman on a roof fired at the car with a rifle and hit one of the Russians. As the others turned their machine guns toward this roof to destroy the sniper, a fourth young man dashed out from Nepszinhaz Street and pitched his gasoline bomb into the car. But the bottle did not break, and the fuse was too long, so an alert Russian quickly tossed the bomb into the street, where it exploded.

  Grimly fascinated by this running battle, Zoltan Pal had trailed down the avenue, intending to watch, but in his excitement he got closer and closer to the actual fighting. He was half running when a young man who had suddenly appeared from a doorway thrust two gasoline bombs into his hands, whispering, “Light them and throw them.”

  Tucking one of the bombs under his arm, and lighting the other with a match, he increased his speed and dashed out into the boulevard while the Russians were firing at some other roof. With a wild side-arm motion, which made him stop for a moment in the middle of the boulevard, Zoltan delivered his bomb. At the same time two boys who could scarcely have been more than fourteen did the same. This time the bombs exploded, and the Russian reconnaissance car flamed up in a dazzling beacon.

  That night the Pals had much to talk about. Eva was terrified by the story of the bombing. But Zoltan said, “It’s going to be a major revolution.” Eva had seen urgent messages which proved the government was in panic. Each had heard, on October 24, the amazing announcement of Radio Budapest, now back on the air from improvised quarters, explaining why the Russian soldiers were fighting in the city, and each had been utterly nauseated by the statement:

  “Several listeners of the Hungarian Radio turned to us with the question to explain under what conditions and with what task the Soviet units are stationed in Hungary in accordance with the Warsaw Pact. On Tuesday, the enemies of our people turned the demonstration held by university youth into an organized counterrevolutionary provocation, and with their armed attacks endangered the order of the whole country and the life of the population. The Hungarian government, conscious of its responsibility in order to restore order and security, asked that Soviet troops help in controlling the murderous attacks of counterrevolutionary bands. The Soviet soldiers are risking their lives in order to defend the lives of the capital’s peaceful population and the peace of our nation.

  “After order is restored, the Soviet troops will return to their bases. Workers of Budapest! Welcome with affection our friends and allies!”

  Zoltan Pal felt that for the government to make such an excuse for using Russian soldiers to kill Hungarians meant that Erno Gero’s gang was in deep trouble and might collapse, but Eva, who sensed more keenly the great power of the communist party, was convinced that they would soon have the insurrection under control. “We mustn’t say anything the AVO could remember, don’t tell anyone you threw a bomb,” she warned. And most of her friends felt the same way.

  But when the radio claimed to be reporting from Kilian Barracks, at the moment when that bastion was undergoing a savage attack by a patrol of Russian tanks, “The city is quiet. One or two shots can still be heard on Ferenc Boulevard. The residents remain in their houses!” Zoltan could not contain himself.

  “One or two shots! They’re blowing up the city. I saw it this afternoon.”

  The miasma of lies, propaganda and utter nonsense in which Hungary lived under communism became unbearably clear when an unctuous voice on the radio announced that it would now tell the true story of what had happened at Radio Budapest the night before. “Eva!” Zoltan called. “Listen to this!”

  “The gravest events of Black Day, October 23,” the oily voice began, “took place at the radio station on Brody Sandor Street.”

  “He’s right about one thing,” Zoltan agreed. “They were grave.”

  “What really did happen? In the early hours of the evening when the enthusiastic and orderly group of students demonstrated near the Bern statue, the narrow street before the radio station also became crowded with young people.

  “The workers at the radio station welcomed them with the tricolor, placed on the balcony, and with applause. The delegation presented itself to the leaders of the station and declared their demands. They agreed on several points, but when these delegates stepped onto the balcony, the irresponsible elements, who were increasing in numbers, prevented them from speaking. Delegation followed delegation, and it became more and more apparent that there was no question of sincerely presented questions and of their fulfillment. The masses did not even listen to the delegates. Brody Sandor Street was resounding with fascist slogans. The first bricks flew at the windows of the radio building. The station’s car, which stood before the entrance with equipment to record the initial, still sober, demands of the demonstrators, was attacked; fire was set to another car.

  “When the situation degenerated to this point, the majority of the university students and young workers left in groups; but the masses did not disperse. New groups approached from the boulevard and later armed gangs arrived. Somewhere, the doors of a military barracks were forced open. It was from there they got their arms. The masses at this point forced the door of the radio station open, the guards tried to keep them back with a fire hose and at the same time to put out the fire in the burning car. But when they were unsuccessful, they were compelled to use tear gas. The situation became more and more tense. The windows of the station were broken. The mob passed through the iron bars of the studios facing Pushkin Street. They armed themselves with bricks from a building on Brody Sandor Street and caused extensive damage. Now the slogan was: ‘Occupy the Radio Station!’

  “The guards fired in the air and tried to frighten away the attackers with blanks. They tried everything to clear the radio building without using their weapons. They did not harm anyone seriously, but more and more shots were fired from the masses. First a major of the state security authority [AVO] was killed. Later on, during the first hours a total of six [AVO] found death. But the state security guards still did not fire.

  “There was a state of siege in the station, but broadcasting went on without disturbance. When two trucks of armed youth arrived from the direction of Gutenberg Square they occupied the houses opposite and around the station and opened fire on the studio; and it was only as a last step, after many guards were wounded and dead, that the order to return fire was given. The others, however, had machine guns and hand grenades and intensified their attack against the studio. The workers of the station, in spite of the hail of bullets, continued broadcasting to the last moment, and when the masses penetrated into the building the defenders saw to it that the provocateurs did not reach their target, that they did not silence the Kossuth Radio.

  “As you are hearing this, dear listeners, the program of the Kossuth Radio is slightly different from the schedule. But the Hungarian Radio, the Kossuth Radio, is still speaking. No counterrevolutionary hordes, not even these well-organized and determined counterrevolutionaries, could silence it. Our studio suffered severe losses. More than one state security guard died a hero’s death. Our workers did not face the firing, often machine-gun firing, without loss. But we have been on the air since this morning and remain, even now, Kossuth Radio Budapest.

  “Dear listeners, you have heard a report by Gyorgy Kalmar entitled ‘What Happened at the Radio Station.’ ”

  As he listened to this extraordinary concoction, Zoltan Pal felt weak. “I was there,” he kept repeating, as if one man’s witness of incontrovertible fact could somehow outweigh the confirmed lies of a regime. And in this growing realization of the web of falsehoods and terror in which he was caught, Zoltan Pal became a revolutionary.

  Zoltan’s role in the fighting was not conspicuous—for one thing, his wife kept him at home as much as possible—but when the Russians finally withdrew from Budapest on October 29, the Pals had a right to say to themselves, “We helped free the city.” Their contribution was not spectacular, but without the tacit support of millions of people like the Pals, the revolution could not have triump
hed.

  When relative peace settled over the city, the Pals had an opportunity to find out what had been happening. They were astounded, for example, when they heard that the Kilian Barracks had not surrendered. “When I last saw it,” Zoltan said, “I thought it was finished.”

  The Pals were unprepared for the number of burned-out Russian tanks they saw along the boulevards. “I expected to see only one or two,” Eva said.

  With embarrassed pride Zoltan led his wife to the first reconnaissance car he had helped destroy, and then to a tank where he had taken part in a gasoline attack. Eva looked at the stricken, shattered vehicle, its treads jammed with steel pipes thrust there by children in order to halt it, and said, “I would not have believed it possible.”

  All Budapest seemed affected the same way. “Do you mean to say that people with no weapons destroyed all these tanks?” women marveled. And a quiet surge of patriotism possessed the city, for it had been Hungarian patriots, fighting alone and with no help from the world, who had evicted a cruel conqueror, Soviet Russia.

  “I can hardly believe we did it,” Zoltan reflected. “I don’t think they’ll stay out,” he warned his wife, “but if they do try to come back, the United Nations and America will send us an army.” Then he added, “And this one will have weapons.

  Eva refused for the moment to contemplate the possibility of Russia’s return. “What amazes me,” she said, “is that we drove out the AVO too.”

  This last claim was not quite correct. For several days, isolated groups of AVO men in high-powered cars would rip through the city at eighty miles an hour, spraying machine-gun bullets in sullen revenge. In Pest a queue of women waiting for bread was shattered by such a hit-run blast, and many were left dead.

  Food was a major problem. Bakeries tried to open two hours a day, and Eva had to stand in line endlessly to replace food that Zoltan had handed out to the fighters. However, peasants from the surrounding countryside, feeling somewhat guilty for not having participated in the liberation fight, tried to make amends by streaming into the city with all the food they could muster. By truck, by cart, by hand-drawn vehicles, by tractors pulling hay wagons, the country people came with food. Stopping at main thoroughfares, they gave away tons of produce and young pigs and chickens.

  There was a kind of festival in Budapest. Nobody stopped to clean up the debris, which littered most streets, nor even to bury the Russian bodies in the burned-out tanks nor the AVO men. Freedom fighters, of course, were buried in improvised graves that lined the public parks, but the hated enemies of the people were left exposed in final and complete contempt.

  One of the most touching proofs that freedom had really arrived—and you could see men and women all over the city fingering these proofs with actual affection—was the appearance, almost as if by magic, of many different kinds of newspapers. There were socialist papers, peasant-party papers, labor union papers, and organs proclaiming this or that sure pathway to national prosperity.

  “Look!” Eva cried one afternoon. “Newspapers!”

  The Pals went up to a bombed-out stand where four different kinds of badly printed sheets were available. They carried mostly rumors, mostly hopes. But they were newspapers … at last. The Pals bought one of each. But when they saw that the old Szabad Nep of the communist party had the effrontery to use as its new masthead the almost sacred seal of Louis Kossuth, they threw it in the gutter.

  The Pals were deeply affected by many trivial things. Sometimes a ridiculous incident, which would have gone unnoticed in another country, would bring them to tears, and they would stand for a moment in the bright sunlight and wonder, “What happened to us?” One day when Eva was walking along the street she was jostled by a man. He stopped to apologize and she realized that he was not a Hungarian. He spoke in a foreign language and they stood looking at each other until a passer-by stopped to interpret. “He is a Frenchman, a newspaperman.”

  Eva said, “Are newspapermen from abroad allowed in Budapest now?”

  “There are hundreds,” the Frenchman said. “Everyone wants to know what happened in your city.” And for no reason Eva began to cry.

  On All Saints’ Day, Zoltan was listening to the radio when the announcer said that in honor of the brave men and women who had died winning Hungarian freedom the radio would play music that had not been heard in Hungary for many years. And from the speaker came the golden music of Mozart’s Requiem Mass, which was rarely performed in the days of communism. Zoltan sat absolutely quiet during the entire performance, staring at the floor. He felt exalted that he was again able to hear the music of the west.

  One of the finest rewards came about in a curious way. In the early days of the revolution, students had demanded that the government shut down its jamming stations, and now the flow of news from London and Paris and Munich could come in strong and unimpeded. It was a luxury beyond analysis to be able to sit and listen to news coming in clearly from the rest of the world. Each of these little things—the coming of strangers, the playing of forbidden music, the arrival of news from Europe—made the Pals think, “We are part of the world once more.”

  Rumors infected the city, and none was more tragic than the one which claimed that the United Nations would shortly intervene in Hungary’s behalf. Eva Pal had long had the habit of listening to the American Radio Free Europe stations whenever their programs were not being blanketed by communist jamming stations. From the messages of hope which she had received in this way, she had unfortunately convinced herself that not only the United Nations, but the United States as well, would land paratroopers in Budapest, followed by tanks and an expenditionary force. When time proved that these rumors were false and that no outside agency had any intention of underwriting the apparently successful revolution, a foreboding sense of having been left isolated crept over the city.

  This was partially dispelled, however, by the many jokes which the irrepressible Hungarians circulated. For example, Zoltan Pal took his wife to see the remains of the Stalin statue in Stalin Square. There the two empty boots stood, with a Hungarian flag jutting out of one of them. “We don’t call it Stalin Square any longer,” Zoltan laughed. “Now it is Bootmaker Square.”

  Another visitor said, “You know, they didn’t pull the statue down at all. They just dropped a wrist watch in front of it, and like any Russian fool, Stalin bent down to get it.”

  The most appreciated jokes were those which ridiculed the stupidity of the communist government, which had actually broadcast the following plea:

  “Persons serving prison sentences for murder, willful manslaughter, robbery, burglary, larceny or theft and who have left prison since 23rd October for any reason without having served at least two-thirds of their sentence should report back immediately to the nearest criminal police headquarters.”

  Once Zoltan pointed to destroyed machine guns and said, “Those Russian guitars won’t play any more music.” And the most common joke had in it a large grain of truth: “Imre Nagy says he wasn’t really a communist. Janos Kadar says he isn’t a communist. In fact, the only communist in Hungary is Nikita Khrushchev.”

  In this light spirit several profound changes were made in Hungarian life. The word “comrade” was officially banned, and it became very offensive to call another man comrade. October 23 was proclaimed a national holiday, and the Kossuth crest became the great seal of Hungary. Russian language study was dropped as a compulsory subject.

  More important, political parties started to function, and nothing pleased the Pal family more. “Now we will be able to vote for the men we like,” they said over and over to their neighbors. It was strange how simple things that a large part of the world took for granted gave Hungarians so much pleasure in those brief days: independent newspapers, political parties, a promise of free elections, with a booth in which you might vote in secret.

  So joyous was the atmosphere that from all over Hungary delegations of miners and farmers and students came to Budapest bearing lists of proposa
ls for a more democratic nation. They were not reactionary suggestions, as the communists were later to claim, for few citizens wanted to go back to the days of fascism. What they dreamed of, these workmen, was a liberal, middle way of life.

  For example, one evening the Pals heard the radio announce the demands of one workers’ committee from Borsod County. The requests were simple: Fire the people responsible for the breakdown in what they called the planned economy. Raise the basic wage. Stop undercover price increases. Increase pensions and family allowances. More homes, more loans to builders of small homes. Get the Russians out of Hungary. See to it that Hungarian uranium is sold so as to profit Hungary and not Russia. Arrange some treaty like the one Gomulka got for Poland. Fire the Russians’ yes-men in Parliament. Then they added, “We agree with the socialist way of agriculture, but it must be reorganized in the spirit of complete voluntariness and with consideration for the peasants.”

  At the very moment when such rational demands were being submitted, communists in Moscow and elsewhere were claiming that the Hungarian revolution had been launched by fascists, capitalist elements, reactionaries and those discredited segments of the population who wished to take Hungary back to prewar days. Moscow implied that if the revolution succeeded, Hungary would be plunged back into medievalism or worse.

  But the new Hungary, if it had been allowed to survive, would have been a socialist state devoid of absentee land ownership, large concentrations of private capital or private ownership of important industries. One might have termed it a modified communism lacking dictatorship features. It would have been more capitalist than either Poland or Yugoslavia, but it would certainly have been no 1890 feudal oligarchy. Many Americans unfamiliar with developments in Central Europe would have considered the new Hungary dangerously leftist. The world in general would have welcomed the new state as a hopeful step in the gradual decommunization of Eastern Europe, for compared with what had existed up to October 23, 1956, the new nation would have been a model of liberalism.