Victor Sebestyen

The twelve days which shook Victor’s world

Victor Sebestyen’s account of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 was a labour of love, writes Gerald Isaaman

Twelve Days: Revolution in 1956
by Victor Sebestyen
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20). order this book

HUNGARY and Hampstead play a vital role in the life of Victor Sebestyen. It was in Budapest that he was born and he was just six months old when his family of five escaped during the 1956 revolution, put down with brutish force by Russian tanks.
It was to Hampstead he came, to be a pupil at King Alfred’s School, and I took him on as a trainee reporter at the Ham and High in 1975, when he lived in in Gayton Road, before he headed for Fleet Street.
But Hungary and its bloody history have always haunted him. Now he has paid his personal tribute to his homeland with this brilliantly alive and graphic account of how a suppressed people rose up, almost on whim, to topple their Soviet oppressors.
It is being published here, as well as all over Europe, in America, and of course Hungary, to mark the 50th anniversary of the revolution which changed world politics. And it has been written with the benefit of recently released archive material in Moscow, Washington and Budapest.
Victor spent months going through the new evidence researching and interviewing those who were there with Molotov cocktails in their hands.
Among the witnesses is Matyas Sarkozi, now living in Hampstead, who was then a young radio reporter.
He recalls the awful speech of Erno Gero, the deluded, out of touch Soviet puppet in charge of Hungary, who rejected the 16 demands of those seeking freedom to rule their own lives.
“That speech was the fuse that set off the explosion,” recalls Matyas.
Victor decided more than three years ago to write the day-by-day saga of stirring events which will take your breath away.
“The new material was fascinating and it has helped to dispel past myths and put real flesh on the story,” he says.
“It’s a drama that is compacted into a short length of time but now we know what was going on in the Kremlin at the time and what Krushchev was up to.
“My father – I was 10 when he died – talked a little about it. But it always seemed to be my story, a damn good story that one day I had to tell, one I cared about. Telling it has been a labour of true love.”
Indeed, it is a labour enhanced by the enormous detail of a truly complex story, one that takes in Hungary’s history and the events leading up to the conflict of October 1956, when the West watched in astonishment as the brave freedom fighters humbled the might of the overwhelming Soviet Union.
You can almost smell the cordite in the embattled streets of Budapest as the book, almost like a thriller, complete with astonishing tales of human, courage, confusion and sacrifice en route, builds its momentum to what, inevitably, was a defining moment of the Cold War but, nevertheless, an abject and heroic failure.
US President Eisenhower sat mesmerised in the White House and did nothing, partly because of the speed of events, his lack of information and the fact that the rebels appeared from nowhere.
It wasn’t until October 23, 1989, exactly 33 years to the day, that the so-called People’s Republic of Hungary was replaced by a democratic new state.
The book’s postscript could have been enhanced by telling us in Britain, where there was massive support and sympathy for the Hungarian refugees who poured in, what political lessons, if any, we learnt at a time when we were engulfed in the Suez crisis.
Yet, overall, this remarkable and moving account of the few taking on their oppressors does not spare us the anguish of seeing it all still being repeated, in one ghastly form or another.
The world today is still shattered by religious fundamentalist beliefs and opposing didactic and democratic forces which, almost inevitably, heap high the piles of massacred innocent dead bodies.
All past warnings – and this book is yet another – have gone unheeded.