A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [85]
Gyula could not understand why this nice old lady had cursed at him. He had done nothing wrong. He had just been keeping some bullies from picking on a fat boy. He told his mother what bad happened and asked why the woman had cursed at him.
Zsuzsa explained what a Jew was. Then she explained that her family had gone to Vienna and come back to Budapest to flee the Nazis, and that the Nazis had put his grandmother in the ghetto, and that the Arrow Cross had been about to shoot her by the Danube when she hid her in the hospital. And she told Gyula about his grandfather, and how he had been taken to Auschwitz and killed. Then she had to explain what Auschwitz was and how he was killed. Then she told him that his father was a Jew also, and that he had escaped to France, and she told him about his fighting with the Resistance.
Hours later, six-year-old Gyula was changed. He took to saying openly in school that he was a Jew. And he angrily denounced children who used the word Jew as a curse. He could not stop thinking about the things he had learned, about the deportations and Auschwitz. When he was eight years old, he resolved that he would be a filmmaker and make movies about the Holocaust.
THE GADOS LIVED in Ujpest. To them, the essential fact remained that the Red Army had saved them. Both Bela and his wife joined the Communist party. As a lawyer with Red Army experience and a party member, Bela soon became a judge in the Hungarian Army. But at the time of the Slansky trial, Hungarian Jews were being removed from prominent places, and he was among the Jewish officers who were thrown out of the military. Nobody told him that it was because he was a Jew. Like many other Jewish officers, he was dismissed with no explanation at all. Eventually, the most prominent Jew, Matyas Rakosi, was removed as head of government and replaced by Imre Nagy, who was charged with cleaning up the party. Cleaning up meant expelling Jews, even some of his own close friends.
Bela Gado's son, Gyorgy, who had been rescued in his hiding place by his father and the Red Army, had also become a party member. But he was growing angry about what was happening to the party and the country, and increasingly he said so to other party members, which was a risky thing for a civil servant to do. Soon there came a restructuring in government that left no job for him. After nine months out of work, he realized his civil service days were over, and he became a schoolteacher.
Many Hungarians were getting angry not only about the abuses of power but about the economy, which was lowering Hungary's living standard. Under these pressures, Nagy turned out not to be Moscow's man. He made the economic policy less rigid, allowed a small degree of private initiative, and released political prisoners, including those accused of Zionism. In doing so, he pleased some Hungarians but not the Soviets, who removed him from power in February 1955, just as a few years earlier they had removed the populist Wfadysfaw GomuHca in Poland. Matyas Rakosi was returned, and Hungarians grew angrier. Encouraged by a Polish movement that came so close to open revolt in October 1956 that Moscow had to bring Gomulka back, a popular movement in Hungary started openly demanding not only the return of Nagy but free elections. Hoping there was a choice between the two demands, Moscow rehabilitated Nagy.
The concession was a tactical error, one that the Soviets were to make again. Spurred on by their small victory, the Hungarians pressed for more, demanding the removal of Soviet troops, democracy, and free speech. Nagy himself pressed further demands on Moscow, such as release from the Warsaw Pact, and neutral East-West status. Austria, Hungary's historical partner, had successfully negotiated such an arrangement the year before.
Once all demonstrations were banned, a huge spontaneous rally filled the streets of Pest. The police opened fire on the