Last weekend, Hungary marked the 60th anniversary of its famous 1956 uprising against the Soviet regime. The revolt, which lasted three weeks before it was quashed by Red Army tanks, was the first significant military conflict on European soil since World War II. The events echoed worldwide as the first crack in the Soviet bloc.
When it came to internal Hungarian affairs, the political story was complicated and remains so even today, since the leaders of the revolt against the Soviet communists were mainly idealistic Hungarian communists, who became mythical heroes to the country’s modern Right, and even the extreme Right.
The revolt broke out 11 years and four months after the end of the Holocaust, which in Hungary was perpetrated mainly by locals. The Jewish community was still very afraid of a rise in Hungarian nationalism. The revolt created a problem of loyalty for the Jews of Hungary, whom the Soviet Union had saved from Hitler and his collaborators. The fact that a few of the communist leaders were Jews just fueled the hatred of the anti-Semites.
Sixty years after the revolt, Israel Hayom spoke with some Jewish Hungarians who were there. They describe the tragedy of a generation trapped between Nazism and communism.
‘We woke up to the sound of tanks’
Eva Fahidi did not need the 1956 revolt to understand that sometimes life is an ideological lie. In 1936, when she was 11, her father took the whole family to church to convert to Christianity. He thought that converting would save them from further troubles in a country that had already passed sweeping anti-Semitic laws. Eight years later, the family ended up in a cattle car on a train to Auschwitz, with 14,000 other Jews from Debrecen. Two of Fahidi’s aunts survived the war, although one, a doctor, committed suicide two years later, unable to bear the memories.