While Bitó wants the conference to focus on the Hungarians’ contributions to America—as President Botstein says, “They did us a bigger favor than we did them”—there is no escaping the harrowing events that brought them to this country. Bela Liptak still finds it difficult to discuss the enormous anger he felt when the US government, despite bellicose lip service, did not come to the aid of the revolution.
“They misled us into believing that if we took on the Russians we’d get help,” he says. He was in a group of six or seven people, the oldest 25, firing down on Russian tanks with submachine guns from an apartment facing a square. Among the group was a girl named Marika, 18, who, Liptak remembers, was good at making Molotov cocktails.
“In three days, 200 tanks were burning on the streets of Budapest, more than what the US has lost in three years in Iraq,” Liptak says. “We had the loudspeaker on…broadcasting Radio Free Europe, and we were listening to [Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles…and we were under the impression that American troops were on their way.” But no help came and the fighters were routed.
The human cost of that defeat still haunts Liptak. During their last fight before being captured, they saw the cannon of a tank raised toward the apartment and ran out to the rear of the building. But Marika went back to retrieve badly needed bread.
“And the tank fired,” Liptak recalls, “and when we went back into the apartment it was full of smoke and dust and we couldn’t see anything. And then I heard this drip, drip sound, and it was her blood.”
He found Marika still clutching the bread, bleeding from a leg wound to the bone. Liptak carried her on a stretcher to medical aid, never saw her again, and never found out if she survived.
For Liptak, who later escaped Russian imprisonment by crawling through underground water pipes, the lessons of the revolution are clear.
“[W]hat stayed with me for life, strangely enough, was a sense of optimism,” he says, “because I saw how decent the average human being is. For 35 days I was in hiding and couldn’t go home, and I ate at the tables of strangers, I slept in the beds of strangers, and no one allowed me to pay for anything. Such a sense of family.”
The second lesson has wider political implications: “A basic message is that all nations want to be free, and that occupiers—no matter where they come from—are not welcome.”
Laszlo Bitó’s first love was literature—he began to write short stories and notes for novels while working under slave labor conditions in the coal mine—but turned to science at Bard because of worries about making a living writing the Great American Novel. Since retiring as a professor, he has published a series of novels in Hungarian on biblical themes. After a career dealing with physical blindness, he now ponders blindness of another kind.
As a child during World War II—“a time when children really started to disappear,” he notes, and sons were sacrificed by the millions—Bitó became preoccupied with the story of Abraham and Isaac. His young mind found it impossible to fathom that a man would be willing to kill his own son. At the last minute God’s angel appears and stops Abraham from making the sacrifice.
But for Bitó, the story’s fundamental importance comes from a different interpretation he gives it—that Abraham alone decides to spare Isaac, without God’s help: “[A]s long as we believe that God will hold back the hand of a murderer, we can say, ‘Okay, I can raise my knife against my fellow man, and if God doesn’t want me to kill him, he will grab my hand.’ But anyone who survived the Second World War knows that God never grabs the murderer’s hand. So we have to realize that we have to take responsibility for our own actions. We cannot expect God to intervene.”
