Hungarian Uprising 1956: To Remember Those Who Remember

Like the Burmese presently, like other innocent groups risking their lives for true liberty just to be allowed to live in free and decent ways without governmental oppression… in 1956 the Hungarian young, middle-aged and elderly, took to the streets to rail against the Soviets, fighting for freedom for Hungary.

When the marchers were met in the streets by Russian soldiers in iron tanks, the Hungarians fought with rocks, with wine bottles filled with benzene lighter fluid and stuffed with doilies made by the old women. When the people ran out of their munitions, they fought the tanks with their hands.

President Bush issued a proclamation honoring the 1956 Hungarian Revolution… “The story of Hungarian democracy represents the triumph of liberty over tyranny. In the fall of 1956, the Hungarian people demanded change, and tens of thousands of students, workers, and other citizens bravely marched through the streets to call for freedom. Though Soviet tanks brutally crushed the Hungarian uprising, the thirst for freedom lived on, and in 1989 Hungary became the first communist nation in Europe to make the transition to democracy.”

THE TELEVISION WARRIOR

My foster father is Magyarok, a Hungarian born Hungarian. He came to ‘Amereeka’ with a sewing machine under his arm. And now, he is in the living room yelling at the television again. He thinks the people inside the TV can hear him.
Hollering is a form of Hungarian aerobics;
it’s kept Dad strong all these years.
He immigrated to the USA before World War II.
Afterwards, the small ancestral farm still worked by
his mother and brothers and sisters in Hungary,
was confiscated by Germans, then Soviets.
The men dragged onto freight rollers,
the women, their children held like empty rifles,
were marched to Russian labor camps,
the rest forced from Hungary to Germany.
No children survived. Dad found
his people in the camps, brought the tiny band
one by one and oh so filled with bad night dreams,
to ‘Amereeka’.

My much older cousin had fallen in love with a man
she’d met in the refugee camps.
They’d married in secret there and she was now pregnant.
Now, in ‘Amereeka’, the old people watched over her round belly
as though a ghost Bread of Life
was baking there. A child, a child, they all
sighed, and said hope makes people cry harder than hurt.

So, we all lived together in our little house with Dad going toe to toe every night with the evening news. He’d yell at the TV in his broken English, “You e-diots, you fools!” and heave back in his chair like a soldier thrown by a blast. Dad was the intimate enemy of Vyacheslav Molotov who was a protégé of Stalin; the fascist Franco; Nikita Khrushchev, any dictator who said he wasn’t.

In 1956, so distraught was he seeing the first news reels of Russian tanks in the streets of Budapest, and the young and elderly Hungarians trying to fight the iron tanks with rocks and bare hands, that Dad waved his arms like windmills and threw himself down on the living room rug, daring the tanks to come run over him, “Come get me, you cowards, Come! Get! me!!”

In the ‘60s it was missiles in Cuba and these last many years he has had a yell-fest with apartheid and ayatollahs. He warned Ortega, “Hah! Roll yourself in a tamale, let the comunistos eat you. May they all suffer indigestion.” To the lone student in Tiananmen Square, he waggled his finger, “Ya, ya, I told you so. Ve haf seen dis before. So run him over already!
Get it over with! Dere are no living heroes.” Dad’s eyes watered and watered — he said — from sitting too close to the TV screen.

Last year when Dad was 80 years old, he went hoarse from indicting the televised Ceausescu.
“He vants to bulldozing 7,000 farm villages?
You vant to tear people away from their trees??
You craze man! You want to stack them like chickens??
You insane! You vant to peel away dere history??
Then skin them already! Let them run naked through the streets of Bucharest like a bunch of nervous breakdowns. Hah! Craze man! Vot can you speck from a craze man?! Hah!”

My mother who knits faster and more grimly when watching the evening news, always said, “Jozsef, stop saying, ‘Hah!’– It’s only television.”

But, over the years, Dad perfected a generic shout for TV news: “Oh my God! Vy you are doing dat ting? Answer me you fool. Awwww!”

He’d wave his hand once in a fake goodbye, pull his lower lip up over his upper lip like an indignant bullfrog, and spit, “You know vat? Bullshit! dat’s vat.”

Tonight after watching the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, he says, “Lookit how happy dey people air tonight.”

The news correspondent asks about the crowds surging through the broken wall, “How will they live? Where will they all go?”
“Awwwww,” says my father, “don’t you vorry,
the horse always knows the vay home.”
He turns from the television, both hands over his eyes. I touch him for a moment; an old warrior cannot be touched too long.

“You okay, Dad?”
I peek between his fingers. There in his wrinkled palm is an old map and a tiny farmhouse shines so white. The men, the women, the children there
have hairy roots for feet, strong boughs for arms.
They walk abreast loving the fields, scooping seed from the bags at their hips, bending to sow.
An old man struggles toward them, black hat squashed on his head,
his coat too short over his hind end.
He cries out in greeting.
They run toward him, receiving him into their arms. Stories fly. The old man’s eyes are watering.
He is telling them his eyes are watering because
of all those years of sitting too close
to the television screen.

CODA

Our gregarious, demanding, brutal, beloved, beautiful father, who struggled so with alcoholism since boyhood, slipped from this world nearly nine years ago. I miss him like fire. He, who handed down his great love for the ancient tribal groups known now as the Hungarians, he who honored every October 23 for the Freedom Fighters of the 1956 Uprising, he of the double first name: Jozsef Jozsef Pinkola 1911-1999

The photograph is of the Hungarian Freedom Park Monument in Denver Colorado. The bas relief sculpture is by the artist Saco R. DeBoer. The bronze portrays a human being running toward freedom, but over the figure is draped a heavy veil, so that we can see freedom is so close, so very close we can see its very bones, but yet, for a while more, because of the ‘iron veil,’ freedom will be out of reach, but never, never, forgotten or set aside. The Hungarians are a fine, humor-filled, hard-working, gallant and passionate people. There are numerous famous scientists and musicians amongst them. They have a finely honed sense of what is just. There are many fierce, enterprising and famously energetic Hungarian naturalized citizens in the USA who carry huge love and gratitude for freedom in “Amereeka,” utterly in their hearts… and they bless that Hungary, their first motherland, is free again as well.

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Copyright © 2007, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, All Rights Reserved, is printed here under Creative Commons License by which author grants permission to copy, distribute and transmit this particular work under conditions that use be non-commercial, that the work be used in its entirety and not altered, added to, or subtracted from, and that it be attributed with author’s name and this full copyright notice.