Gábor Murányi Counterpart Diaries [János Kovács]: Magyar Forradalom 1956. Napló (Hungarian Revolution 1956. Diary). Facsimile edition in numbered copies. Budapest, Tamás Kieselbach, 200 pp. º Gyula Csics: Magyar Forradalom 1956. Napló (Hungarian Revolution 1956. Diary), Budapest, 1956-os Intézet, 222 pp.

In 2006 Hungary is remembering one of the decisive events in its history, the October of fifty years ago: the 1956 Revolution. Hope lasted just two weeks, though years, decades, of events and experiences were compressed into those 13 days, kneading Hungarians-at least temporarily-into a genuine unity. Some still chose to place their trust in a truer form of communism, others hoped for civil, democratic institutions that had never existed in the country, while others nurtured a fierce anti-communism-nearly everyone lived in some sort of euphoria, nurturing the hope that starting tomorrow things would be different. The days of oppression would be over.
During Kádár's long rule there were two absolute taboos: to question the "temporary stationing" of Soviet troops in Hungary or the official designation of 1956 as a counter-revolution. It was the overturning of those two taboos that prepared the way for the 1989-90 transition to democracy. With that turning-point, the dam burst on three and a half decades of pent-up silence. Survivors trying to come to terms with this legacy create myths and demolish them-including distinguished academic works, memoirs and albums of photographs-but the biggest sensation has been the publication, by separate publishing houses, of reproductions of parallel diaries kept at the time by two boys who were close friends.
The story, or rather, part of it, was related by one of the diarists, Gyula Csics, in the previous issue of this journal as an introduction to a translation of selections from his diary. (Part 2 follows this article.) In this Csics writes that he believed his friend's diary had been lost.

On Tuesday, 23 October, 1956, two young boys who lived in a tenement in the very heart of Budapest-14-year-old János Kovács and 12-year-old Gyula Csics- decided that they would record the events of the day in diary form (more specifically, in separate diaries). On the first page of a 200-page hard-cover notebook that was originally a book-keeping ledger, Jancsi set down his title, "Hungarian Revolution 1956", and beneath that drew the Kossuth coat of arms, used during the 1848-49 War of Independence against the Habsburgs, which Hungarians promptly adopted as their own symbol on the first day of the 1956 uprising. Also added to the title page was the opening line of the national anthem by Ferenc Kölcsey: "Bless the Magyars, Lord we pray...," which was not exactly in favour in the Rákosi era. The younger Gyula then copied this into his spiral-bound notebook as the opening for his diary too. From that point on, for the better part of half a year, the two friends kept up a nearly daily account for themselves (and, it now turns out, for posterity) of all the things that had happened to them, sometimes together, sometimes separately. Given that they were constantly reading over what the other had written, it's little wonder that they quoted one another, or to be more accurate, made references to entries that the other had made, and also argued with one another.
Such records can be held together by the naďveté, the complete lack of interest in the 'big picture', the pure logic and lack of logic of a child's way of thinking, the ability to be amazed, the childish maturity-as has been shown by Anna Frank's Diary of life in Nazi-occupied Holland in the 1940s. Much the same can be said of Jancsi and Gyula's dual chronicle of 1956. What do these two intelligent, openminded boys see, feel and understand of the events around them? And "around them" should be understood in the literal sense, for the six-storey tenement building in which they lived is just a block away from one of the locations of the fighting on the very first day, the editorial office of the Communist Party's daily newspaper, Szabad Nép, and only a few blocks from Hungarian Radio, or from Corvin Close, which was to become famous as one of the toughest pockets of resistance in the insurgency.
The boys went to school on the first full day of the Revolution (Wednesday, 24 October), being questioned on their homework and doing their homework, as per usual. In the afternoon they tried to get chewing gum at the nearby newsagent, and 'as usual' it didn't have any in stock, but then the possibility of a terrific new game flashed through their minds: they could collect handbills. That was no simple matter, as they found time after time that the leaflets scattered in the streets were snatched up by other people before their very eyes; in the end, though, they laid their hands on a few and used them, together with their own elaborate drawings, as pasted inserts. These were texts of a tone quite unfamiliar to them: "We demand the instant withdrawal of any Soviet troops that remain in Hungary!" On one of these handbills there appeared the name of Imre Nagy, previously unknown to the boys, who was being urged to form a government. The boys did not have much time to digest these leaflets, dizzying and often frankly shocking for the grown-ups as they were, encouraging them to take resolute action, for they were swept along by the crowds that were packing the streets. Admittedly, it did not take long for them to become frightened by the shouting in the streets, so it was in the safety of their homes that they heard the subsequent shooting. At first they did not know what the strange noise could be: "It was like something big falling on the ground," Jancsi described the rattle of the guns (and as there is no teacher quite like real life, within a week he could infallibly identify the type of gun from its sound alone).

The course of the Revolution ground remorselessly on, and these diaries do not add anything to the known chronology of events. What is of interest is what they lived through from a child's point of view; how they faced up to new developments and rumours, and when the truth dawned upon them. The story of 1956 and the ensuing months is something their accounts bear witness to with greater authenticity than any historical evaluation.
Their reaction to the aftermath is particularly interesting, given that after the armed insurgency had been crushed, the political apparatus that the Soviet tanks installed in power, with Kádár at its head, was initially feeble and at a loss. While an unprecedented tide of humanity fled Hungary to the West-around 200,000 in just a few weeks-the majority that decided to stay may have acknowledged, with the sober realisation that life has to go on, that they had lost the fight, but they were not (as yet) going to yield on their Revolution's key ideals and demands. One can gain surprisingly accurate assessments of this stoical yet optimistic mood from the two diaries. During the few miraculous days, the two boys matured into adults capable of seeing and expressing what they saw; they became adults who were above compromise and who did not forgive compromise in others. That maturation in itself is noteworthy, elevating (and regrettable).
Let us take 7 November 1956 as just one example (the date when the Hungarians were forced to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917). Both diarists, who go into some detail about the operations of the Soviet invaders, enter it under the title "The most horrible day of the siege". Jancsi starts his entry with the observation that "The shooting was not particularly noticeable in the morning" but then goes on to record that just an hour or two later it was as if all hell had been let loose. Whereupon he, to the constant chatter of machinegun fire, reads for hours on end in his family's second-floor apartment, flat on his belly behind the shield of a sofa. And what does he read? One of the classics of children's literature: Egri csillagok (Stars of Eger), set in sixteenth-century Hungary at the time of the Turkish wars. Siege outside and also a siege inside his head, given that Géza Gárdonyi wrote his book as a memorial to the heroic defence a handful of Hungarians mounted successfully against massively superior Turkish forces besieging Eger Castle in 1552. Whereas in the book the garrison fought with sabres, the hopelessly uneven struggle against Russian tanks was being waged in the streets of Pest with single-shot rifles and Molotov cocktails.
Gyula Csics's entry tells of other events, explaining: "Today would have been my twelfth birthday celebration." These words imply that there was no celebration because the shooting was still going on. He also records that when the Russian tanks fell back (to regroup, perhaps), the insurgents in Blaha Lujza Square obtained a football from the nearby Corvin department store and played a quick game in the brief respite until the Russians pressed back into the attack and they again snatched up their weapons and returned to the fighting, perhaps to their deaths. The boys "asked" for the ball from one of the local residents, who had himself asked the players to give it to him (perhaps we should see this as compensation for the missing birthday).
23 November 1956 was a month to the day after the Revolution had broken out and, incidentally, the day on which Imre Nagy and his associates, who had taken refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy when the Russian army resumed its attack, were tricked into leaving that safe haven and, as the first stage on a road that was to lead to their execution, were carried off to Romania. It was also the day on which, in a demonstration of passive resistance, the inhabitants of Budapest staged a silent protest by keeping off the streets between two and three o'clock in the afternoon, and the rumour was spread that anyone in the streets was a Kádár supporter.
That day was notable for the two boys for quite a different reason. It was the first snowfall of the winter, and with two girls of much the same age in their building, they embarked on a snowball fight. "It was just one-thirty," Jancsi explains somewhat apologetically to signal that he was no Kádár supporter and wished to avoid giving even the appearance of being one. Male patriotism also manifested in the fact that the boys were all for "bags I the side of the Hungarians", leaving the girls with the role of the Russians; and as befits folk tales, those fighting for the cause of justice won, as Jancsi boasts in his diary. A month later Jancsi undertakes another exploit. On one of their regular walks, which now covered an ever-wider area, he notices that the new régime is swinging into vigorous propaganda action, and so he too decides to act: "I snowballed every poster that bore the slogan 'Long live the Kádár government!'"

Anyone who supposes that this is just role-play by two boys would be truly mistaken. One only has to read the entry that Jancsi made on 23 January 1957, two months after the outbreak of the revolt. His account is quoted verbatim by Gyula Csics. He relates that by the time Jancsi got to school, a classmate had chalked the by then prohibited Kossuth coat of arms on the blackboard, signing off with the stirring "Glory to the heroic Hungarian martyrs of the October 23rd Revolution!" Some small candles sent from Switzerland were placed in the classroom window and the class bowed heads in their memory-and not just the class but their maths teacher as well. It was clear that although she could hardly fail to notice the blazingly obvious, she did not dare make any comment and kept her voice down, thereby signalling that she shared the sentiments. Everything was done "in a hush". A genuine mini-drama is revealed, for Jancsi records how each of their teachers reacted: who was brave, and who was not, for some of them admit frankly that they were scared that the kids would cause trouble for their teachers, while another teacher cited biblical parables in recognition of the pupils' right "to remember fallen heroes". He added though "that's enough of this, let's take down those candles!" as greater trouble may come of it. And that was true beyond any doubt. In early 1957, as a taste of the retribution to come, the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party's summary courts, the "people's tribunals", imposed a number of death sentences to signal severe consequences for less modest "manifestations inimical to the state". If these two diaries, for instance, had fallen into the hands of the vigilant authorities-perhaps through a house search-there is no question the boys' fates would have taken a different course. Luck was on their side, however. 15 March is the anniversary of the outbreak of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution. On that day in 1957 they broke a solemn promise they had made to keep up the diaries until Soviet troops left Hungary: they broke off the chronicles, consigning the notebooks to their desk drawers at home, or to the depths of the cellar, where they lay undisturbed for over four decades until the moment when, near-miraculously, they were independently but simultaneously resurrected.
During the Kádár era, the two boyhood friends drifted apart, their lives taking quite different courses. Gyula Csics became a librarian in the provincial town of Tatabánya, but he still secretly preserved his old diary, with its elaborate, stunning drawings and pasted-in leaflets. In the years after the change of régime, he would find himself taking this out and leafing through it more and more often. Then, about two years ago, he went to a lecture given in Tatabánya by János M. Rainer, who heads the Institute for the History of the 1956 Revolution. At the end of the lecture, Gyula Csics showed his diary to the historian, who was so excited that he not only persuaded the diarist to allow his chronicle to be published in a facsimile edition, but also convinced him to be the subject of a documentary film. The film crew spent two years trying to track down the other diary, the one Jancsi had kept, but they drew a blank. They managed to find Gyula's old friend, but several years earlier he had suffered a major stroke and was by then in an old people's home. (He is still living there to this day, though it is next-to-impossible to communicate with him.) The contents of his home had been dispersed when he had moved out. So the Diary had most likely disappeared-that was the assumption Gyula Csics made when he recounted his story in the previous issue of the Hungarian Quarterly.
Except that something else had happened in the meantime. On one of his regular trawls of the flea markets, some time in 2004, the art historian Tamás Molnos happened to fish out from the bottom of a pile of papers a hard-bound notebook that had originally been a book-keeping ledger. The cover bore the title "Hungarian Revolution 1956. Diary"; it was clearly in a child's hand and stuffed with many drawings and handbills. He bought it on the spot, then showed it to the well-known Budapest gallery owner Tamás Kieselbach, who in turn did not waste much time before pronouncing the Diary an "unknown art object" and taking steps to have it reproduced. The bibliophile facsimile edition preserves the depredations of the past, such as the rips, the mould stains and other damage, which, as the Foreword noted, was by "an as yet completely unknown author". By one of those coincidences that life abounds in, the two diaries rolled off the printing presses on virtually the same day, and each found its counterpart on the day of the book launches.

Gábor Murányi
is a journalist on the staff of the weekly HVG and the author of several books on press history.