Gyula Csics

Notes to My Childhood Diary

 

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Our house was not far from where Rákóczi Avenue and the Great Boulevard meet, at Blaha Lujza Square: there stood the National Theatre, the Corvin Department Store and the party daily Szabad Nép offices, with its printing house and distribution centre. From our house it took about ten to fifteen minutes to walk to the Hungarian Radio at the far end of Bródy Sándor Street, or to Corvin Close and the Kilián Barracks, legendary scenes of some fierce fighting, as well as to Köztársaság Square - all focal points in the Pest of the 1956 Revolution.
The house itself was poor enough, a typical Joseph Town tenement building, with the characteristic open corridors around the inner courtyard and stairways

at the front and back. The back stairway led up to the attic and down to the cellars. Wooden planking divided up the attic into drying rooms, which could be locked, and there were planks over the dirt floor leading to them. The cellars could also be reached from the front stairway. People stored their winter fuel in the bunkers there, but there was also a spacious room suitable for an air-raid shelter, which during the Cold War was considered indispensable (in fact regulations made it compulsory). It was there that the upstairs tenants proceeded whenever fighting flared up and they felt they shouldn't stay in their own flats. This happened frequently after the Russians marched in on 4 November.
There were two shops on the street front of the house. My uncle Góré had a small bar in one of them, with my mother at the till and helping out with the food and at the bar sometimes. The barman, Steve Szőke, lived on the second floor. The other shop was a grocer's, owned by the parents of my friend Jancsi Kovács, who also kept a diary. Both families lived on the ground floor, since these flats gave direct access to the shops. 
The front stairway had a passage leading to my uncle's wine cellar, where he hid his large casks of wine. During the wave of nationalisation, it became clear that he could not avoid having his business nationalised, so he shut his restaurant down and moved the furnishings to his parents' home, thinking that at some point he might be able to open up again. Nothing came of this, of course. All the furnishings got spoilt in his parent's place and were only good for firewood. (Before that, I played many great games of button-football on the slate-covered tables.) The only way he could save his casks of wine was by having the entrance to this section of the cellar bricked up and stacking coal in front of it. It wasn't until the beginning of the sixties that he dared to open the wall to sell his old casks. Since he had once been a master cooper, he took the casks apart in the cellar and carried them up stave by stave, with me as one of his helpers. Up to this day I can't understand how he was able to get away with this at the time. Obviously there must have been a remnant of honour, or some feeling of solidarity among the people living there, or at least nobody envious or hostile enough to report him. However, he was always afraid of being dragged off to 60 Andrássy Avenue, the headquarters of the ÁVH, the secret police, or having to suffer some other retribution for trying to save what he had once owned. But the fact is that no one from the house reported on him.
There was also a garage in the courtyard, where someone kept a motorbike with a side-car, which he was always tinkering with. Next to the garage, there was no paving over quite a large area. We turned this plot of earth into a garden. Jancsi and I tended it together, planting it with all sorts of bushes and flowers we collected on the outings we made.
The house was not at the centre of fighting during the Revolution, but things were happening quite close to us. Not too much could be seen from the entrance door, or the windows. But when the sound of fighting subsided, or if we had to go and fetch bread or other provisions, I did my best to tag along with my father, mother or any other adult, so as to see what was going on not so far away. My father was happy to take me anywhere, except Köztársaság Square. What was going on there, he said categorically, was not for small boys.
The residents of the house were all ordinary people. There were labourers among them, shop assistants, some who had fallen on hard times, and of the young lodgers, some ambitious country folk. These lived in the one- or two-room flats with doors onto the open corridors, or else in the single-room 'flats' that had been offices prior to the Second World War. These, just as in most tenement buildings in Pest, did not have their own toilets but shared common toilets, one on every floor. The larger, more comfortable, street-front flats were occupied by families, many of whom had 'seen better days' but were now at most lower middle class.
What I have written in the diary probably reflects the judgment of this house. A twelve-year-old mind could only sense the pathos of the events and would not have been capable of forming an independent opinion. One thing is certain: what I had written was not influenced by later events, nor by the propaganda hammering home that it was all a counter-revolution, harping on the unavoidable negative side of revolutions (book-burning, lynching, the humiliation of the innocent, etc.). Without exception, everyone in the house agreed that this was a justified, spontaneous revolution sparked by the abject situation people found themselves in and their general dissatisfaction and their hatred for the occupying Soviet forces. The social standing of the residents was pretty mixed. It was by no means a group representative of Hungarian society as it was then, and I most often formed my perception of the events from their accounts, paying close attention to their words and then trying to piece together the course of events. I still believe that no one in the house took an active part in the Revolution, though some had been caught up here and there in certain situations. Witnessing what happened, they naturally described their experiences once back in the house. This is how information reached the community. All ears whenever the adults started talking, I sucked up all the news I heard.
Idecided upon writing a diary on the 24th of October, 1956. I began writing in a school notebook, but after a few weeks I transcribed it, because I found the format too insignificant in comparison to the events. So I chose a sturdier and much larger notebook and framed every page in the national colours. I took up writing it, as I said in my diary, because I found out that my playmate, Jancsi Kovács, who was a year older than me, had begun writing one. We did everything together, talked about everything together, and planned and went off exploring the city together. I felt that the things happening at the time were very important, perhaps more important than anything else that would happen in my life, and that I must record them for posterity.
Apart from what the people in the house said, an important source of information were the many newspapers and fliers, hand distributed, thrown from planes or bought. I carefully filed them because I felt they were very valuable. I am surprised even today by how much I read at the time: newspapers, fliers and the usual books, of course. I kept every flier and newspaper, irrespective of who gave it to me or who was distributing it. Naturally, my twelve-year-old mind would not have been able to tell whether a particular flier came from the revolutionaries, from the old Communist authorities, or was propaganda by Kádár's new Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Government, or perhaps was the result of the Western capitalist powers' "aerial intrusion into our domestic affairs".
The radio was another important source of information for me, or rather for my parents. I just paid attention to what they were listening to, Radio Hungary for the most part, but Radio Free Europe was tuned in almost as often. Since I could not judge the accuracy of the news, I simply tried to record everything honestly. I can still hear the sound of Radio Free Europe today, including the jamming and the interference that, I felt, came exactly at those moments when the most vital information was broadcast. How desperately people expected help from the West, with every passing day more and more desperately. It was forbidden to listen to Radio Free Europe both before and after the Revolution, and the station was continuously jammed. The atmosphere of those days was very peculiar. No one had told me, or at least I cannot remember having been told, what you must not talk about in front of strangers or at school, and yet we were all exactly in the know. Even a twelve-year-old!
This we must have learned in the fifties, during the Rákosi dictatorship. By 1956, even small children were clear about what things heard at home were not to be repeated elsewhere. Perhaps not every family listened to Radio Free Europe during the fifties and sixties, but the majority did try to get their bearings from it, or at least this was certainly true of the people we knew. Another thing that happened of its own accord (without any parental hints) was that instead of the new street names that had been given in the fifties, I used (wherever I knew them) the old names in my diary.

The other setting for the events I describe is my Grandma's home and its neighbourhood. The house was in Kőbánya, on the edge of the 10th district, close to the Rákos stream, on Rákosmező, at 58 Paprika Street, where she lived with her oldest son Franci. There were fruit trees around the house, my grandmother had a kitchen garden and grew lucerne for the pigs. She kept poultry in the courtyard, and sometimes rabbits, which helped a great deal in feeding the family. There were always a few pigs at the house, and when they farrowed, the piglets had to be registered. The piglets received licenses (or at least that is what they were called at home), and were checked upon once in a while. We killed one or two pigs every year, under my father's direction. We prepared small packages of the sausages and black puddings 'for tasting', as was the tradition, and it was usually me who delivered these to our friends, just as I describe in my diary. There was a housing estate for employees of MÁV, the Hungarian State Railways, not far from our house, and I had a friend who lived there called Jóska. As in all of these residential estates built by the big companies, all kinds of people lived here, in different types of houses. Railway officials and engine-drivers lived here, as did simple pointsmen and ticket-collectors. What brought them together was where they worked: all of them for MÁV. There was a big football pitch alongside the estate where we watched many games and on which we ourselves played a lot as well. We were always going over to the estate, because we only had a well at Grandma's, and if we needed tap-water for something or other, we brought it over in buckets or in small cans, and very often it was me who went to fetch the water. It was not easy to get to Grandma's house from our place. It was the same distance from the 28 tram stop, or we had to take the train all the way to Rákosfalva. We went to church in Rákosfalva. That's where the nearest cinema was, but we went quite a few times to see films in the MÁV estate's House of Culture. To move about between the two places that figure in my diary, we often used the rickety side-car combination that my mother's younger brother Gyula owned, although more often it was not in proper working order. I always enjoyed going on it even though I used to get frozen. Of course, we walked a great deal in those days. My father, who worked at a butcher's in Rákospalota, another suburb, frequently went on foot all the way from our place in the city centre before public transport got under way in the mornings, so he could sell meat to people who had gone without for so long.
My mother's family had come from the Burgenland, the Trianon Treaty had left part of the family in Austria, the other part in Hungary. Grandma and her family remained in Hungary, her younger brother in Austria, simply because they were living in neighbouring villages, one of which went to Hungary, the other to Austria. In the summer of 1956, many people took to the road, visiting their relations across the borders. This was the first time they had the opportunity to cross since the Communists had come to power. This was how Grandma managed to visit Austria. They let her across to see her younger brother, in view of her advanced age not long before the Revolution. Our relatives in Austria invited us to settle there for good, as many Hungarians were doing at the time. Everyone in the family finally decided to stay here, even though they had promised us houses to live in and full support. Support continued in the form of the parcels they sent, but Hungary remained our home.
My Grandma's neighbours were lower middle-class, too. Their thinking was the same as ours: they truly wished and expected the Revolution to succeed and bring changes, they hoped to see the Russians leave. All I sensed, or managed to glean from all of this, was that the occupying forces must leave, otherwise the country would not be free and independent. We had fought the Turks and the pro- Habsburg Labanc for independence, and we must fight against the Russians as well. That was how I saw it then.
The afterlife of the diary was also interesting. When I took it out of its hiding place, after the Russian army withdrew in 1990, I read it through a number of times. I was a little disappointed, because I could not find everything that I thought I had recorded, all the things that had affected me so much. One such memory is of walking with my mother down the left side of Rákóczi Avenue towards the Danube, and seeing a suitcase propped open in a smashed shopwindow, with a sign on it saying, "We are collecting for the martyrs of the Revolution!" In the suitcase there was an amount of money that seemed beyond my imagination. Almost all paper money, when the smallest banknote at the time was a ten forint, and a kilo of bread and a litre of milk was three forints. No one dipped into it, they just added more. This moved me greatly.
I don't know why I did not write about the graves dug in the squares of the city. I had seen these on Rákóczi Square, Harminckettesek Square and Teleki Square. This is where they temporarily buried those who were killed in the streets, as they could not be taken to the cemeteries. The graves were marked with a cross, inscribed with whatever was known about whoever was lying there, or with an identity card simply tacked on. Sometimes all they wrote was "unknown Hungarian soldier", "unknown Hungarian civilian", "unknown Russian soldier" and so on. As life returned again, they were exhumed and taken to cemeteries. On All Souls' Day, the second of November, there were many candles lit on these graves as well, but there were flowers on them all the time.
When I 'declassified' my diary, after the changeover in 1990, its second life began. I had it copied to spare the original and lent the copy to anyone interested. This is when my family got to know about it. My younger sister though (who obviously figured in the diary), asked for a copy of her own, so that her own family could see what it was about. It was they who encouraged me to have it published as a book. I found it hard to imagine why it would be of interest to others. Who could be interested in the plainly written banal stories of a twelveyear- old boy? But as more and more people read it, the more they said that it was indeed interesting.

 

Gyula Csics
is Chief Librarian of the Tatabánya County Library. In February 2004, after a public discussion on the 1956 Revolution at the library, he approached János M. Rainer, Director of the 1956 Institute, introduced himself and offered him the manuscript of the diary he kept in 1956 - 57, "in case it might be interesting." The original text, including its original documentation, is appearing in a full facsimile edition as we go to press. The Hungarian Quarterly's presentation of the diary, in two parts, attempts to capture some of its flavour.