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A truckdriver who worked 96 hours a week to keep his wife and two small children from starvation in a one-room apartment, Peter had his own view of Communism. Says he: "You need a special kind of character to be a Communist and rob the workers." Peter saw the Communist bosses riding around in big cars, bawling out the workers for being lazy, but it never occurred to him to join the Communist ranks. "If I'd been a Communist, I would have been a traitor to my buddies. Anyway I would have had to go to a lot of meetings, and I didn't want that. I hate politics."
Peter had skipped his morning meal to meet the last installment on the furniture. He was feeling surly. When a friend told him that a demonstration was in the making, he was against it. "But then I didn't like this way of life, and I was mad and so I said I'd go along." Peter was among the crowd at Parliament House, and later he heard the AVH shooting people at Radio Budapest. When somebody said get some arms, he went along.
At Kilian barracks there was such a big crowd that Peter was about to quit and go home when someone called for a truck driver, and he came forward. Peter drove "a tall colonel who seemed to be in charge" to an arms depot, called the Lamp Factory, where they loaded cases of rifles and machine guns. The revolutionary fever caught Peter up at this point, and he was swept into the battle for Radio Budapest, shooting from the rooftops.
Bread & Sweat. Reporting back to the tall colonel, who turned out to be Colonel Pal Maleter (later Defense Minister in the ten-day government of Imre Nagy), Peter at last ate some bread and tea. "Guys were sitting around everywhere. Many were sleeping on the floor." Sweating it out, Peter had time to think about the consequences of what he had done. He decided to go home. He told his wife he had been working all this time. But when he heard the official radio call the Freedom Fighters "counterrevolutionaries and fascists," he knew there would be reprisals, and he returned to the barracks, determined to fight it out. At the barracks, with everyone expecting the worst, the tall colonel told them that they were not counter-revolutionaries but only people who wanted truth and freedom. When the Communist radio announced that zero hour for surrender had passed, and then extended the time limit, everyone suddenly laughed and started shaking hands and hitting people on the back. "We knew we were strong and the government was weak." said Peter.