All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [378]
A deathly silence fell upon Budapest. Fifteen-year-old László Deseö wandered back into his family’s apartment after the first Russians had stormed through it. ‘One could howl, walking through the rooms. There are eight dead horses there. The walls are red with blood as high as a man, everything is full of muck and debris. All doors, cupboards, furniture and windows are broken. The plaster is gone. One steps over the dead horses. They are soft and springy. If you jump up and down on them, small bubbles, hissing and bloody, rise near the bullet wounds.’
Survivors began to creep warily out of rubble. They were bemused by the unpredictable conduct of the victors: sometimes, on entering an apartment, Russians killed whole families; at other times they instead fell to playing with toys, then left peacefully. A Hungarian writer said of the conquerors, ‘They were simple and cruel like children. With millions of people destroyed by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin or in the war, death to them had become an everyday affair. They killed without hatred and let themselves be killed without resisting.’ There were many executions – especially of Russians caught in German uniforms. Some postmen and tram conductors were shot, because the Russians mistook their tunics for those of Arrow Cross militiamen. Systematic looting of bank deposits and art collections was conducted under NKVD auspices, notably including those of the great Hungarian Jewish collectors; the booty was shipped to Moscow. A large proportion of Budapest’s surviving women, of all ages from ten to ninety and including pregnant mothers, were raped by Red soldiers. The plight of the victims was worsened by the fact that many of the perpetrators were diseased, and in all Hungary there were no drugs to be had. Bishop Joseph Grosz wrote despairingly, ‘This is how things may have been in Jerusalem when the prophet Jeremiah uttered his laments.’
Hungarian communists pleaded with the Soviet command to restrain its soldiers. ‘It is no good praising the Red Army on posters, in the Party, in the factories and everywhere,’ declared one such bitter appeal late in February, ‘if men who have survived the tyranny are now herded along the roads like cattle by Russian soldiers, constantly leaving dead bodies behind. Comrades sent to the country to promote land distribution are being asked by the peasants what use the land is to them if their horses have been taken from the meadows by Russians. They cannot plough with their noses.’ Such representations were vain. Stalin decreed that pillage and rape were the rightful rewards of his soldiers for their sacrifices. Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs and Hungarians alike suffered the fate that would soon fall upon Germans.
In Budapest, even before the final collapse of the defence, the city’s first cinema reopened with a showing of the Soviet propaganda film The Battle of Oryol. Work began almost immediately on erecting statues of Soviet war heroes in public spaces. After enduring extremities of suffering, Hungarians yearned to laugh again, and cabarets were soon doing brisk business amid the rubble. The comedian Kálmán Latabár walked on stage to a standing ovation which became ecstatic when he pulled up his sleeves and trouser-leg to reveal rows of watches, mocking Hungary’s Soviet ‘liberators’. A few months later, he would have been shot for less.
The capture of Budapest cost the Russians around 80,000 dead and a quarter of a million wounded. Some 38,000 civilians died in the siege; tens of thousands more were deported to the Soviet Union for forced labour, from which many never returned. The German and Hungarian forces lost about 40,000 dead and 63,000 men taken prisoner. This savage, futile battle would