The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising Escape
A dramatized first-person retelling of documented events
The tracks clattered on the cobblestones right outside. I pressed my face to the window glass and saw the long barrel swing past our storefront. My father pulled me back by the collar and told me to stay low. My mother already had my brother George by the hand and was heading for the door.
We crossed the two blocks to my grandparents’ house at a run. Bombs thudded somewhere beyond the edge of town. Inside, everyone crowded behind the china cabinet, the only solid piece of furniture that might stop a stray round. Through a gap in the curtain I watched a house two doors down vanish in a single flash and roar. The floorboards jumped under us.
By morning the street was quiet again, but my father had already decided. He said we would not wait to see what came next. My mother nodded once and began packing the smallest bundle she could carry.
The town settled into its old rhythms for a few weeks. My father opened the store each day and closed it at the usual hour. At night he met quietly with men who knew the western roads. None of them asked for payment up front. They said the arrangements were already made.
One afternoon a stranger stepped inside and laid a folded paper on the counter. My father recognized the handwriting at once. The note said his brothers in America had paid for the crossing and that we should trust the man who brought it. My father slipped the paper into his pocket and finished the day’s work without telling anyone.
That evening another knock came at our door. A second man stood there with an identical message in the same hand. My father invited both men to the café in the square. They sat at separate tables until he brought them together. After a short conversation he chose the one who spoke least.
We left Nyirbator after dark three nights later. The smuggler led us on foot to a rail siding where a freight train waited with its doors already open. We rode two hours in the dark, then walked again through fields stiff with frost. At Kapuvár we met the larger group the guide had assembled.
Ninety-six people stood in single file along a drainage ditch. The guide moved down the line once, checking that no one carried a light or spoke above a whisper. He said the border lay six hours ahead if we kept the pace. We started at ten o’clock under a sky that had begun to spit snow.
The line moved steadily for the first hour. Then the snow turned to freezing rain and the ground softened underfoot. My brother slipped once and I caught him by the strap of his pack. The guide never slowed. When a distant reflector swept across the field we dropped where we stood and stayed motionless until the light passed.
I remember the cold reaching my knees and then my hips. After the fourth time we hid I could no longer feel my feet. The line had stretched. I tried to keep the shape of the person ahead of me in sight and missed a step. The next thing I knew I was lying against a tree trunk with my cheek against the bark.
My brother’s voice reached me first, then my father’s hands under my arms. They had been the last two in the file. They lifted me and kept moving. The guide waited at the next rise until the three of us caught up, then signaled the column forward again.
By the time the sky lightened we were on the far side of the wire. The guide pointed to a cluster of lights and told us those were Austrian border posts. He collected the last of the payment in silence and disappeared back the way we had come.
We reached a reception center near Vienna two days later. My uncles had already sent word through the congressman that papers for the United States would be ready. We waited in the camp with thousands of others while the lists were checked and rechecked.
My father found work in a factory within a month. My mother took in sewing. George and I started school the following September. The letters from Hungary arrived months late and said little. We answered every one with the same short line: we were safe and the children were in school.
Years afterward my father still kept the two folded notes in the back of a drawer. He never threw them away. When visitors asked how we had left, he answered that two men had come to the store on the same day and that both had been telling the truth.
My father’s shifts at the rubber plant in Akron ran from six in the morning until two-thirty, the same schedule he had kept at the Nyirbator hardware store, and he brought home pay envelopes stamped with the date and the amount thirty-eight dollars and seventy cents each week. My mother set up her Singer at the kitchen table and took piecework from the dress factory on South Main, hemming sleeves at twelve cents a dozen; the first check she cashed bought a used coat for George and a pair of shoes for me that cost four dollars at the Salvation Army on Exchange Street. We enrolled at East High School on the first Monday in September 1957, where the principal recorded our names as George and Joseph Kovacs, born 1943 and 1945, and assigned us to English classes that met in the basement because the upper floors were still under construction after the fire the previous spring. Letters from my uncle in Nyirbator arrived folded inside the newspaper wrapper and carried the postmark 14 March 1958; one line read, “The new council chairman has asked for the names of everyone who left after the fourth of November,” and another, dated 22 July 1959, said, “Your cousin Lajos was released from the county prison last week after serving twenty-two months.” My father answered each letter on the back of a blank invoice from the plant, writing only that the children were in school and that the two notes from the guides were still in the drawer.
In 1963 the plant added a second shift and my father began working both, bringing home seventy-nine dollars and forty cents on Fridays; he used part of one paycheck to buy a 1954 Chevrolet from a coworker and drove it to the Hungarian Hall on Buckeye Road every other Sunday to meet men who had crossed at Andau or Hegyeshalom. My mother stopped taking piecework after she found steady work altering uniforms at the Akron City Hospital laundry, where the time clock showed her card punched at 7:02 a.m. and 3:58 p.m. six days a week; she saved the extra money in a coffee tin and used it in 1966 to send George to Kent State for one semester. George left after that semester for a job at the Firestone proving grounds in Mogadore, and I stayed at East High until graduation in June 1964, when the yearbook listed me as Joseph Kovacs, member of the track team that placed third in the city meet. The letters from Hungary continued to arrive every three or four months until 1968, when the postmarks stopped for almost two years; the next one, mailed from the same address in Nyirbator and dated 11 April 1970, contained only the sentence, “Your grandfather died on the twenty-third of March and the funeral was attended by forty-two people.”
My father retired from the plant in 1981 after twenty-five years and three months; the company newsletter printed his name and the exact date 17 April 1981 on page four, along with the line that he had “worked without missing a shift since 1958.” He kept the two folded notes in the same drawer until the day he died in 1987, and my mother placed them inside the casket before the service at the Hungarian Reformed Church on East Market Street. After 1989 she began receiving telephone calls from relatives in Nyirbator who could now speak openly; one cousin, born in 1952, described standing at the barbed-wire site near Kapuvár on 23 October 1991 with a group of forty former escapees who had returned for the first time. My mother flew back in 1992 on a flight that landed at Budapest Ferihegy on 2 September; she stayed three weeks in Nyirbator and brought home photographs of the house on the corner where the china cabinet had once stood, now replaced by a concrete block building that served as the district post office. She died in 1998, and the notes remained in the drawer until George and I divided the contents of the house; I kept one and he kept the other.
The crossing point near Kapuvár was marked in 2006 with a stone plaque listing the names of twenty-three guides who worked the route between October and December 1956; the plaque records that 4,872 people passed through that sector before the wire was reinforced on 10 December. In 2016 the Hungarian government opened a small museum in the old border barracks at Hegyeshalom that displays one of the freight-train manifests from the siding outside Nyirbator dated 19 November 1956 and signed by the stationmaster with the number of passengers counted as ninety-six. George returned to Hungary in 2019 with his daughter and stood at the same drainage ditch where the guide had checked each person for lights; he noted the coordinates on his phone as 47.6204 north, 17.0998 east, the exact spot where the line had halted four times under the reflector sweep. The last letter my mother received before her death came from the cousin in Nyirbator and carried the date 14 March 1997; it read, “The street where your father’s store stood is now called Kossuth Lajos utca again, and the number on the door is still 14.”
Today the storefront in Nyirbator is occupied by a pharmacy whose records show it opened on 3 May 1993; the original wooden counter was removed in 2004 and replaced by a glass display case that holds the same type of hinges and nails my father once sold. The house two doors down that vanished in the flash still stands as a single-story brick structure whose address is listed in the county registry as rebuilt in 1958 with state funds amounting to 18,400 forints. My brother George lives in Cuyahoga Falls and keeps his note in a frame on the wall of the spare room; he shows it to visitors and says only that both men who came to the store on the same day had been telling the truth. I keep the second note in the same drawer where my father placed it, and each year on 23 October I take it out, unfold it once, and read the single sentence written in my uncle’s hand before returning it to its place.
The pharmacy on Kossuth Lajos utca 14 still stocks the same brand of roofing nails my father sold in 1956, and the ledger from 12 June 1994 records the first bulk order of three hundred kilograms placed by the new owner, a man named István Szabó who had trained as a pharmacist in Debrecen. On 4 November 2006 the county archive in Nyírbátor released the original arrest warrants issued after the uprising, listing my father’s name among the ninety-seven residents who left the district between 5 November and 20 December; one warrant carried the handwritten note “destination unknown, believed Austria” signed by the local militia commander. George and I returned together in October 2011 and stood at the rebuilt house two doors down from our grandparents’ former address, where the owner showed us the 1958 building permit stamped with the exact sum of 18,400 forints and the signature of the district engineer.
The stone plaque at the Kapuvár crossing was cleaned on 20 October 2014 by a volunteer crew from the Hungarian Border Guard veterans’ association; the inscription lists the twenty-three guides and adds that 4,872 crossings were logged before the reinforcement date of 10 December 1956. My cousin in Nyírbátor, the same one who wrote the 14 March 1997 letter, telephoned on 15 March 2015 to say the county prison records for Lajos had been opened under the new access law and confirmed the twenty-two-month sentence ending 15 July 1959. George’s daughter photographed the drainage ditch coordinates again on 23 October 2019 using a different phone, this time noting the elevation as 112 meters above sea level and the distance from the nearest Austrian post as 2.8 kilometers.
I visited the Hegyeshalom museum on 2 September 2022 and examined the freight manifest dated 19 November 1956; the stationmaster’s count of ninety-six passengers matched the number the guide had assembled at the siding outside Nyírbátor. The museum curator allowed me to photograph the page, which also records the train’s departure time as 21:40 and the destination listed simply as “west.” On the same trip I walked the route from the rail siding to the first field where we had hidden from the reflector, counting the exact number of times the line stopped—four—as the guide had required.
George keeps a second framed copy of his note beside the original in Cuyahoga Falls; the copy was made on 11 April 2023 at a print shop on State Road when a visitor asked to see the handwriting. He still says the same sentence about both men telling the truth. I opened the drawer in my own house on 23 October 2024 and read the single sentence from my uncle once more before refolding the paper; the ink has faded at the edges but remains legible on the line that directed us to trust the bearer.
The last time I spoke with George was on 12 January 2025 when he called from the Firestone plant retirement office to confirm the date of our next visit to the Hungarian Hall on Buckeye Road. He mentioned that the 1954 Chevrolet my father bought in 1963 is still registered in his name and that the odometer shows 87,412 miles. The call ended when he said he had to meet a man who had crossed at Andau the same week we crossed near Kapuvár.
