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"Unflagging Violence." Budapesters reaching the Austrian border say that the critical day was the day (Nov. 7) the U.N. debate on Hungary was postponed. Said o'ne: "Up to that time people had been watching from rooftops hoping to see U.S. planes arriving. After that everybody just quit." Some 1,500 rebels holding out in the ruins of the Royal Palace high on Buda Hill surrendered a highly defensible position. After a moving appeal for help from President Eisenhower the day after election ("If during his presidency he would stand by the oppressed, a blessing shall fall on him"), Radio Rakoczi said its last word: "Soviet tanks are attacking . . . The battle continues with unflagging violence . . ."
The violence was mostly Russian. A dispatch brought by courier from a Western embassy reported: "The situation in Budapest is terroristic. Soviet soldiers are stealing and looting everywhere. They get into private homes and apartments on the pretext of looking for partisans and arms and then loot everything. Civilians are being stopped by Soviet soldiers on the street. The soldiers take from them all watches and jewelry. Civilian wounded are being taken to Rokus Hospital, which is very much overcrowded. Dead from the wards are thrown into the hospital courtyard. Wine cellars all over the city are being broken into by Soviet soldiers. Many soldiers are wandering around dead drunk."
Remembering the World War II rape of Budapest by Red army soldiers, Hungarian women obliged to go out seeking food for their families disguised themselves as old hags. On one street in Pest lay the nude, violated body of a pregnant woman. The Soviet commander brought in a field gendarmerie called "R troops." The R men set up house guards, block inspectors and kangaroo courts empowered to execute within 24 hours any Hungarian found guilty of "murder, arson, looting," or concealing arms. The orders were signed by a Major General Grubennyik.
Against this background, Kadar's Radio Budapest played dance music, interspersed with appeals to "progressive youths and mothers not to allow gangsters to enter their homes and fire from windows." Reflected one announcer: "How brutal and inhuman it was that in past days simple party men were attacked because they were party men." But as the week went on and "progressive" Hungarians did not respond, Radio Budapest's tone became hysterical. "If you don't go down into the pits," it told coal miners, "the workers cannot go to work, no bread will be baked, there will be no electrical current." Four days after announcing that peace had been restored, Kadar's Minister of Trade Sandor Ronai pleaded: "Let us put an end to the fighting . . . Let us start work in the factories and fields. Let us begin to build a free, independent, socialist Hungary." At Pecs in south Hungary, miners dynamited the prized uranium mines.