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Lazlo and his friends heard Radio Budapest, in rebel hands on Oct. 27, tell all factories to set up workers' councils. Lazlo was one of 14 elected by secret ballot at his mill. "I thought to myself, 'My God! What is happening? Are we really practicing democracy?' I felt like crying."
"There were happy meetings everywhere," says Lazlo. Everything went well until the day that the Soviet army attacked again. The workers got 6,000 rifles from the Hungarian army, but when 37 Soviet tanks and armored cars suddenly descended on Vac, there was no resistance.
The Russians had no food, and the Vac people gave them bread and a little meat, for which the soldiers were grateful. Says Lazlo: "Our people were not afraid of the Russians, and talked to them. Some of the Russians thought they were in East Germany and that they would soon meet American 'fascists' who had invaded the country. Other troops thought they were in the Suez Canal zone. Our people explained what was going on and what the Hungarian objectives were and what the Russians had done in Budapest. There was one captain who listened to all of this. He got redder and redder. We thought he was angry at us. Suddenly he threw his hat down and said: 'Bulganin and Khrushchev would rape their own mothers!' He was very angry, but not with us."
The Black Flags. From Budapest came orders from the new quisling government: back to the factories. About 60% of the men in Lazlo's mill showed up. But when they heard that the Central Workers' Council in Budapest had begun a general strike, the Vac workers struck too. A mass meeting of 5,000 demanded the reinstatement of Premier Nagy and the withdrawal of the Soviet army. The AVH rounded up members of the Vac workers' council. In answer, workers carrying black flags demonstrated silently, demanding their return, and the leaders were returned. "The strike," concludes Workers' Council Leader Lazlo Szabo, "is the ultimate weapon."
It is the leather-coated Hungarian worker, slow to anger, but now sullenly planting his ill-shod feet on his native ground, who is winning concessions, if not the freedom the intellectuals dreamed of, from the Russians. But Lazlo Szabo is not happy. His pretty wife dared to go to Budapest and has not been heard from since. Friends say she was last seen on her way to the West station to try to get a train to Vac. The West railroad station is one of the points where the Russians assembled Hungarians for deportation.
Lazlo Szabo, Peter Szanto, Ferenc Kocsis, Janos Feher—these are not their real names—are, each in his own way, representative of those anonymous thousands, many of them dead, who fought for their country's freedom against the most brutal tyranny on earth. Taken together, they epitomize the Hungarian Freedom Fighter, the man who made history leap forward in 1956—the Man of the Year.