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At this high point of patriotic emotion, messengers came with the news that Gero was talking on the radio. Ferenc Kocsis went with part of the crowd to Radio Budapest, where the AVH were throwing tear-gas grenades. He saw a young boy—"just a little fellow with an open shirt and an old jacket, no overcoat and no hat"—pick up one of the grenades and throw it back. The AVH panicked, and the mob surged forward. Ferenc heard a burst of machine-gun fire. There was a sudden silence and then a roar went up, soft at first, and then like thunder. Says Ferenc: "I saw, being passed back over the heads of the crowd, a dead woman of about 45. I found myself screaming with rage. I was like an animal." A people's wrath is a terrifying thing. That night, the next day, and for many days afterwards, the people who had suffered so much under the AVH pursued the AVH men, flushed them from their hiding places, shot, garroted, and hanged them by the heels from trees and lampposts.
When Ferenc went out to Kilian barracks to get a rifle, he was told that it was more important for him to record what was going on in film. The director of his film company refused to give him a camera and film, but Ferenc broke into the warehouse, commandeered both. From then on, until Nov. 3, he and his cameraman recorded the battle. He took pictures everywhere, in the streets, from the cellars, from speeding vehicles.
Cursed Film. They had 12,000 ft. of film in the can by the beginning of November and sent it to the laboratory, by that time under rebel control, for processing. Some of the rebel leaders wanted it sent out to the West to be developed, but Ferenc insisted on its being done under his supervision. He curses himself for that decision. On Nov. 4, the day the Soviet army came charging back into Budapest, one of the first places they captured was the film laboratory.
Ferenc awoke on Nov. 4 to the sound of heavy Russian artillery. Hearing that the rebels were handing out weapons at the Piarist school, he went there and collected a rifle, two hand grenades and 40 rounds of ammunition. He took five gallons of gasoline from his father's garage and went to look for someone to fight with. Says he: "At the corner of Baross Street and the Great Ring, I went into a restaurant and found eight Freedom Fighters. They looked all right, so I joined them." Together they barricaded Baross Street and cut out an escape route in the cellar of the restaurant. "It was a funny time," says Ferenc. "The owner of the restaurant and everyone else had left, leaving his wine bottles on the shelf. Several were empty, but beside them was a stack of money, the exact price of each bottle."
The Freedom Fighters filled the empty bottles with gasoline and corked them with table napkins, making what they called "benzine flashes." About midnight a woman reported that there was a Russian tank by itself in Jozsef Street. Ferenc and an apprentice Freedom Fighter (aged 13) went out to get it.