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Budapest - In a place far from the renewed prosperity, optimism, and spontaneity that has again become Budapest, a bell tolls to remember in the city’s Central Municipal Cemetery, the resting place of the so many of the fallen heroes of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
In a faceless suburb, in a far and deliberately forsaken corner of the cemetery, one finds the once unmaked graves of those who ceased to exist--not simply having died, but being erased from memory in a macabre Orwellian gesture. Formerly a plot of mass graves marked only by tangled bushes, a high fence, and the presence People’s Militia guards who kept the mourning or the curious from this far corner, now is the formal and well tended resting place of those who died for freedom in those heady days of October/November 1956.
Visiting Plot #300 and 301 as it is still known --the bright warm sun hides the sorrow and the lush green grass the grimace of this place which has now been resotred as a National Memorial. It is less frequented than one would expect, but after all, 1956 is a long time ago.
This green field, Plots 300 and 301, sprouts with a dense forest of wooden totem-type grave markers each with a carved coat of arms and with a little usually faded bow of the red, white and green national colors. This field of sorrows marks what was a field of dreams. The dream of the October 1956 national uprising which embodied the hope for freedom and the desire to break loose from the Soviet tyranny, the cruedly imposed East bloc conformity, and abject socialist stupidity. The sorrows reflect the November crushing of the revolution by the brute force of Soviet tanks who sealed Hungary’s fate for another two generations until 1989.
One finds the familiar names which made the headlines in the fall of 1956-- Imre Nagy the ill- fated Premier who switched from the side of the “reform communists” to the people and who was later executed and dumped in a mass grave not much different with those one discovers in the Balkans today. The others, four hundred in all, lay in silent testimony--names like Janos Berta, Peter Mansfeld, Miklos Szabo, and Tibor Toth, names only known by a few. Many of these people were among the 26,000 imprisoned after the Revolution of which 230 were later executed by communist kangaroo courts. Premier Imre Nagy himself was tried and executed in June 1958.
Others such as the courageous Danish diplomat Paul Bang-Jensen--who championed the Hungarian cause in the United Nations in the crucial years following the Revolution, rests in Plot #301 too. Paul Bang-Jensen who mysteriously died in a Queens, New York park on Thanksgiving Day 1959, rests among those he fought for.
Naturally such a place evokes the classic “What If’s” of history--namely if the Hungarians had been allowed to retain their sovereignty as a “neutral state,” what if on that fateful weekend of the Soviet intervention of 4 November the United Nations Security Council were not overwhelmed by the dual crises of Suez and Hungary, and what if the Soviet crackdown was not days before the American Presidential election? What if the diaspora of 200,000 Hungarians who fled to freedom in Austria and were later resettled in the USA, Canada, and Western Europe, did not have to flee their homes?
Fast forward to 2000. Modern Hungary has emerged as a democracy and generally prosperous nation. Since the collapse of communism in 1989, Hungary has striven to rejoin the West to which she always belonged. Hungarians recently celebrated the 1000th anniversary of King Stephens’s coronation who forged the Magyar tribes into a formal state identified with the West. Later canonized for his Christian evangelization efforts, St. Stephen, known as the founder King, strove to keep Hungary philosophically with the West. Today Hungary is a member of NATO and on the short list for European Union membership.
A little bell tower alongside the graves of Imre Nagy and of the Unknown patriot
holds a cryptic inscription, “ I call the Living, I mourn the Dead, and I chase the Lightning.”
The bell tolls for their dreams too.
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
