Inferno - Max Hastings [379]
In narrow Kazinczy Street enfeebled men, drooping their heads, were pushing a wheelbarrow. On the rattling contraption naked human bodies as yellow as wax were jolted along and a stiff arm with black patches was dangling and knocking against the spokes of the wheel. They stopped in front of the Kazinczy baths … behind the weatherbeaten façade bodies were piled up, frozen stiff like pieces of wood … I crossed Klauzál Square. In the middle people were squatting or kneeling around a dead horse and hacking the meat off with knives. The yellow and blue intestines, jelly-like and with a cold sheen, were bursting out of the opened and mutilated body.
The Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who was among those trapped in Budapest, strove to check the Jewish massacres, warning German commanders that they would be held responsible. But killings continued, sometimes including the shooting of Hungarian police officers sent to protect Jews. Wallenberg was eventually murdered by the Russians.
By the beginning of February, as German casualties mounted and supplies dwindled, much of Budapest was reduced to rubble. Fires blazed in a thousand places as palaces, houses, public buildings and blocks of flats progressively succumbed. Explosions and gunfire persisted around the clock. Soviet aircraft strafed and bombed at low level, causing wounded men to scream in despair as they lay incapable of movement beneath the attacks. The grotesque became commonplace, such as an antitank gun camouflaged with Persian carpets from the opera house’s props department. Terrified horses, sobbing women and children, and despairing soldiers alternately stampeded and huddled for safety.
Mastery was contested in a dozen parts of the city simultaneously. Buildings changed hands several times amid attacks and counterattacks. Hungarian soldiers who deserted in growing numbers to the Russians were offered an abrupt choice: they might join the Red Army to fight their former comrades or face transportation to Siberia. Those who chose the former were provided with identifying red cap ribbons, cut from parachute silk, and immediately thrown back into the battle. The Russians treated such renegades with surprising comradeliness: one rifle corps commander, for instance, invited Hungarian officers to dinner. After the war, it was found that the death rate had been similar among those who chose captivity and those who joined the Red Army. In a chaos of loyalties, Hungarian communist resistance groups sought to aid the Soviets, and especially to kill Arrow Cross leaders and militiamen. In late January, scores of imprisoned dissidents were shot by their fellow countrymen on the terrace of the Royal Palace, most of them after torture.
On 11 February 1945, resistance collapsed in Buda. The commander of the Hungarian antiaircraft artillery disarmed Germans in his headquarters at the Gellert Hotel, raised a white flag and had his men shoot those who defied him and sought to prolong resistance. That night, the remains of the garrison and its senior officers attempted to break out, some in small groups, others in crowds. Most were mown down by Soviet fire, so that the dead lay heaped in open spaces. The commander of an SS cavalry division and three of his officers chose suicide when it became plain they could not escape. Another twenty-six SS men likewise shot themselves in the garden of a house in Diósárok Street. A panzer division commander was killed by Soviet machine-gun fire. Old colonel János Vertessy, a Hungarian, tripped and fell on his face as he hurried along a street, breaking his last remaining tooth. “It’s not my day,” he said ruefully, recalling that exactly thirty years earlier he had been shot