Inferno - Max Hastings [380]
Two thousand wounded men lay in the cellars of the Royal Palace. In the words of a witness who came upon them, “Pus, blood, gangrene, excrement, sweat, urine, tobacco smoke and gunpowder mingle in a dense stench.” Panic and factional strife overtook the doomed garrison. Two soldiers burst in on surgeons who had just opened a wounded man’s stomach and began shooting at each other across the operating table. Soon afterwards fire engulfed the building, killing almost all the casualties. In the headquarters of General Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, a young NCO donned his commander’s abandoned uniform—and was promptly shot dead by a crazed soldier. Stragglers roamed the city’s public buildings among slashed paintings, shattered porcelain, broken furniture and abandoned personal possessions. Fires raged everywhere unchecked.
Some defenders sought to escape along the sewers by candlelight, wading through filth that sometimes rose to their waists, while the sounds of desperate fighting echoed down from the street above. They came upon the body of a handsome woman, elegantly clad in fur coat and silk stockings, still clinging to her handbag, and speculated about her identity. After advancing several hundred yards, the water level rose too high for passage. Most, including Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, were obliged to ascend through manholes into the street, where they were soon captured by the Soviets. An estimated 16,000 people, soldiers and civilians, escaped to the surrounding hills, where they roamed or lay in hiding. Some captured a Soviet bread wagon, precipitating a gunfight among themselves for its contents. Others who trudged on westwards found themselves emerging from woodland into the open ground of the Zsambek basin. Here, exposed against the snow, Soviet snipers and machine gunners shot them down in the hundreds. Throngs of desperate men were also killed in the city. A Soviet officer wrote, “The Hitlerists continued their advance towards the city exit despite their huge casualties, but soon ran into our multiple rocket-launchers firing salvos from point-blank range. It was a terrible sight.” Only 700 of the 43,900 men in the Budapest garrison on 11 February reached the German front farther west; of the remainder, 17,000 had been killed and more than 22,000 taken prisoner.
A deathly silence fell upon Budapest. Fifteen-year-old Lazlo Deseo 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