Fifty years after the Hungarian revolution, Dan McLaughlin , in the first of a three-part series, hears about one of its worst atrocities
Revolution reached down a telephone line to touch Elemer Bogyay, and the call changed his life forever. Like most of the world in October 1956, he knew rebels were fighting Soviet troops in Budapest in an unprecedented challenge to the Kremlin's power, but Hungary's grand Danubian capital and the bloodshed in its streets seemed very far away indeed.
As a student in a quiet town near Lake Balaton, Bogyay could not imagine the ferocity of the battle for Budapest, or that Hungarian blows were sending deep cracks through a Soviet empire that would eventually crumble three decades later.
Inspired by three days of fighting in Budapest and the apparent reluctance of Moscow to use maximum force to crush the uprising, revolutionary councils began appearing across Hungary to organise protests and strikes.
It was then, on October 26th, that 20-year-old Bogyay heard horrific news.
In the town of Mosonmagyarovar, students from a college affiliated with his own had joined a peaceful march of about 1,000 people, chanting a slogan that was by now familiar across Hungary: "Russians go home!" When they reached the barracks of border guards stationed on the nearby Austrian frontier, the demonstrators stopped and asked the soldiers to lay down their arms, join the revolution, and remove the Soviet red star symbol from the roof of the building.
Even 50 years on, what happened next is still disputed.
Some former soldiers say they heard a shot from the crowd or another nearby barracks and, in something approaching panic, the commanding officer ordered his outnumbered troops to open fire.
Demonstrators insist there was no shot from among their ranks, and accuse senior officers at the scene of ordering a massacre of unarmed civilians. In a hail of sustained machine-gun fire and splintering shrapnel from hand grenades, scores of people were cut down outside the barracks.
Officially, about 50 people died and about 80 were injured. But when Bogyay arrived at the scene a few hours later, after hearing the shocking news in a call from Mosonmagyarovar, he counted twice as many corpses.
"I saw 105 bodies lined up, all of them shot dead, and many, many more were injured. Some of the soldiers hadn't wanted to fire on the crowd despite their orders, so they had fired low, into the legs of the protesters. Some of them were terribly wounded." One was Geza Kuroli, who was a 20-year-old student when a bullet shattered his pelvis and damaged his spine outside the barracks in Mosonmagyarovar.
"As we approached an army barracks, soldiers suddenly fired into the crowd indiscriminately and tossed grenades at unarmed civilians," Kuroli recalled decades later. "I saw my friend's brains blown away and I was covered in blood too."
He was close to death when, later that same day, a crowd reassembled in Mosonmagyarovar. Enraged by the bloodshed, it was now a mob that caught three soldiers, beat them to death and, according to reports, literally tore them limb from limb.
AFTER THE REVOLUTION, seven people were hanged for the lynching following a typical communist show trial, while only a few soldiers were charged over the killing of peaceful protesters in several towns around Hungary, and hardly any served time in jail.
Only after seven operations could Kuroli walk properly again, and for three decades he was not allowed to talk openly about what happened at Mosonmagyarovar, as Hungary fell back into the Soviet embrace after its brief struggle for independence.
Bogyay never returned to provincial university life, after his fateful visit to what became known in Hungary as the "town of shame".
He was at his family home in Budapest when Soviet tanks reversed their initial withdrawal and rolled back into the city to crush the revolution and arrest its leaders, with whom the Kremlin had pretended to negotiate, and who were ultimately executed. In a mass exodus, some 200,000 Hungarians fled into Austria, throwing themselves at the mercy of Western powers which, fearing nuclear war with Moscow and distracted by the Suez Crisis, had done nothing to stop the Soviet crackdown on Budapest.
Bogyay left his departure late, but moved quickly when warned that the police were looking for him because of his role in a short-lived revolutionary council at college.
It was December 17th when this son of a Hungarian poultry breeder boarded a train towards Austria, carrying forged papers giving him permission to collect animal feed from a farm near the border. The documents fooled the Soviet guards patrolling the train, but the fog was so thick when he disembarked that he couldn't be sure which way was west.
Heading out across the shrouded fields, he eventually came to a road and crouched down, listening for anything that could tell him where he was - the voices of Hungarians, Austrians, or Russian soldiers.
"Eventually I heard a car go past, then another and another, and I knew from the sound that they were Western, not Soviet-bloc cars," he recalls. "I had made it into Austria and could breathe again."
Later, as he trudged away from a forestry college outside Salzburg having been told that it was full, he was stopped on the road by the car carrying the Canadian ambassador to Austria, who arranged his visa for travel to North America.
WITH 600 FELLOW Hungarians, most of them forestry students and lecturers, he travelled by train and boat to Liverpool, where the Empress of Britain cruise liner awaited to carry them across the Atlantic. Landing at St John on Canada's east coast, the refugees boarded a cross-country train to Vancouver, before being dispatched to logging camps in the wilderness of British Columbia.
It was not the life for Bogyay, however, who instead became catering manager at the prestigious Trinity College in Port Hope, where he worked for 30 years, married an Irish-Canadian and had three children.
Now, for the 50th anniversary of the revolution, Bogyay is back in Hungary and protesting against another government that he accuses of betraying the nation. He is an almost daily presence outside parliament by the Danube, where he has addressed a crowd demanding the resignation of Socialist prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany - a former communist who became a millionaire businessman - for lying about the economy to win re-election in April.
"I will never forget what happened in Mosonmagyarovar, and I still wake up in a sweat after having nightmares about it," says Bogyay, who is now 70 years old.
"But I thought that after communism collapsed the bad days were behind us. If you had told me in 1990 that we would be in this situation 16 years later - and that I would have to demonstrate again - I'd have told you to get your head examined."