A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [88]
But another nine-year-old boy, Andras Kovacs, did think it was fun. Kovacs, like Konrdd, was changed from a Kohen name in the last century. Andras's father, Imre, was a Sachsenhausen survivor with many relatives who didn't survive. Living in the sixth district in central Pest, not far from the traditional Jewish area, they had many Jewish neighbors. This was also a convenient location for the uprising. Only a few yards from the Kovacses’ building was a barricade, and neighborhood people would go home and shower or eat or rest and then go back to the barricades. One young man in their building went to the barricade faithfully every morning at eight o'clock. Andras remembers it as “a sort of comfortable revolution.” His parents seemed confident that soon United Nations troops would arrive and Hungary would be declared neutral—the Austrian solution. But one clay, as Andras was walking in the street with his mother, two rebels raised their arms in fascist salutes and greeted each other, “Sieg heil” and then his mother started to be frightened.
Gyorgy Gado, a schoolteacher at the time, enthusiastically participated in the demonstrations. In fact, he was one of the party dissidents who had been attending meetings for a year leading up to this rebellion. But when the shooting started, he backed away. He saw that there were really two factions in the rebellion. One wanted to reform Communism and make it live up to democratic egalitarian ideals. The other wanted to resurrect Horthy's fascist Hungarian state. Gado feared the latter would triumph if the Soviets backed down. Although in later years he would modify this view, at the time he concluded that the Soviets were the only safeguard Hungary had against fascism.
Even Gyorgy Konrad, while involved in the rebellion, had noticed that it had some worrisome elements. When it first erupted and Konrad was trying to put to bed his new literary magazine, he had to work over constant shouting both on the street and in the building. At one point someone in the building from an office near his shouted, “Jewish murderers!” Konrad later heard similar comments on the street. Konrad's wife sat on a committee of schoolteachers that began talking of purging the teaching staffs of Jews. Konrad believed that the rebelling Communists would in the long term lose out to a conservative element. But he thought that the moderate wing of the conservative movement would gain control.
The subject will always be debated, because Soviet tanks preempted any political process at all. A working-class Hungarian Communist, Janos Kadar, was placed at the head of a government that ruled by martial law. Once again, when the Red Army came to Ujpest, the Lippners and some of the other Jewish families were relieved to see them. Gado, having been frightened by his glimpse of counterrevolutionaries, rejoined the Communist party. Zsuzsa Gazdag, on the other hand, quit the party.
Gyula Lippner used his connections at the big state company to get a good supply of glass and, being an experienced window man, he was kept busy replacing missing panes all over Ujpest. Since the Kadar government had a more liberal attitude about economic activities, he was able to turn this into a small shop that did windows and picture framing.
An estimated 180,000 Hungarians emigrated. At least 20,000 of them were Jewish. The Seiferts stayed, though most of Geza's family left. A relative of Ilona's who had survived Auschwitz left with his wife and child, leaving behind the unnerving warning, “It's starting again.” But Geza and Ilona had been more frightened about “it starting again” during the uprising. At first they thought it was a grand thing. They had not liked the way the institutions they had built had been shut down and replaced by an official Jewish Community. They had thought there were many things wrong with the way the Soviets had been doing things, and