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Ferenc and the boy entered a house at the corner of the dark street and worked their way across rooftops and down ladders until they came to the house before which the tank was parked. Says Ferenc: "I was very frightened. Here I was with a 13-year-old boy and a bottle of gasoline." Ferenc put a handkerchief in the mouth of the bottle, tipped the bottle up to soak it with gas, set the handkerchief alight and dropped the "benzine flash" on the rear end of the tank. Says he: "An enormous flame shot up, and the whole street looked like day. There was a terrible explosion, and the front part of the roof started to cave in. The boy and I ran to the chimney at the back of the roof. Russians on top of the roof across the street from us—I hadn't even seen them—started shooting. I said to myself. 'This is death' and felt pretty calm." Ferenc and the boy got away. At the restaurant Ferenc took a big drink of the restaurant owner's wine, left him some money, went home and slept for 36 hours.
Ferenc Kocsis was not quite sure why he acted the way he did. His father had been grabbed by the Russians after the war and forced to work in arctic coal mines until his health broke down. "Some nights," Ferenc recalled, "he would wake us all by shouting in his sleep. 'No! No! Don't beat me!' and 'Set me free!' But my father never said anything in public. He stayed out of politics, and he bore his hatred in silence. That's the worst kind of hate, you know." Husky Ferenc had shouldered his way through the Communist bureaucracy just the same, and had dreamed of becoming a motion-picture director. On Oct. 23 he had acted out of sheer impulse, emotion, and it was with something of the same feeling that he one day decided the revolution was over, and beat it for the Austrian border. Last month in Vienna he was ashamed of this decision, declaring that he wanted to go back and carry on the fight. Said he: "What else can a good Hungarian do?"
Peter Szanto
The Budapest which Ferenc Kocsis left behind was a ghost city. Streetcar lines were torn up, pavement stones had been piled into barricades, great buildings had been reduced to rubble, and fires still burned in others. There was not a whole pane of glass in the city. Nor was there a single Red star to be seen, or a Soviet monument. Even the boots of the gigantic statue of Stalin had been smashed to bits. The monstrous leonine head, spat on and befilthed, had long since disappeared.
Somehow this seemed a perfectly natural background for Peter Szanto. Short, powerfully built, with a freckled face and a mop of disarrayed red hair, Peter was a product of Budapest's war-battered slums. He was one of those people, men, women, even children, who came up from nowhere to carry on the freedom fight after many like Janos Feher had died, and some like Ferenc Kocsis had left.