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Under the wan October sun, Budapest had the appearance of a city ravaged by a full-scale war. The streets were choked by rubble and glass, dangling ends of streetcar cables and the uprooted cobblestones and raveled steel of barricades. The air was full of the fine, powdery dust of shell-chipped brick and mortar. Soviet dead in scores lay in grotesque postures beside burned-out and still smoldering hulks of tanks, armored cars, self-propelled guns. Men in white coats moved from corpse to corpse sprinkling snow-white lime which transformed the dead into marblelike statuary. Where possible, rebel dead had been laid side by side and covered by the red, white and green flag of Hungary; but in one side street a woman wept alone over the body of her coal-miner husband. In another street, a rebel fighter lay in the sun, a wreath of autumn leaves on his chest. The revolution had not yet counted its dead, but a cursory estimate put the total at 15,000 (including 3,000 Soviet soldiers) and twice as many wounded.
The Hated AVH. In the crowded hospitals surgeons and nurses worked the clock round, with anesthetics and medication in desperately short supply. Calls for medical help had gone out to Vienna and Geneva, and convoys of medical supplies had already crossed the border from Austria. But planes bringing supplies from Belgium and Switzerland were turned back from Budapest airport by the Russians. Among the wounded being tenderly treated in the hospitals were many young Russian soldiers. They had been variously told by their commanding officers that they were putting down a revolt inspired by fascists, by Stalinists, and by Western imperialists.
Premier Nagy had disowned the city's 10,000-man Communist security-police force, and the Russians had pulled out leaving the hated AVH men to their fate. Most of them had found temporary ratholes. In a huge concrete bunker below Communist Party headquarters, some 200 were said to be hiding out with political prisoners as hostages. Scores hung from trees and lampposts.
The revolution uncovered terrible evidence of AVH cruelty. On a wooded hill in Buda, in a bright new housing development reserved exclusively for ex-Premier Rakosi and his comrades, rebels found a villa with a built-in torture chamber and prison cells, one padded and soundproofed, another equipped with a powerful lamp beamed on a chair. The rebels remembered having seen closed automobiles driving up to this house at night. At Gyor, in the provinces, Western newsmen were shown an AVH headquarters with tiny 2 ft.-wide standup torture cells, and a secret crematory for victims who did not survive AVH treatment. In the same modern building were technical facilities for monitoring all telephone conversations in western Hungary, including a score of tape recorders working simultaneously.
Realizing that they could expect no mercy, the AVH men fought desperately. But the rebels were merciful to the AVH men's families. At one house, where an AVH group was making a last stand, rebels stopped the shooting for a few minutes while the infant son of an AVH man was passed through a window and taken out of range.