Remembering Hungary's October Uprising

CLEVELAND--The Hungarian Revolution took place five long decades ago, but it lives brightly in the hearts of the 80,000 Hungarian-Americans who call Cleveland home. Many of them gathered here this past weekend to honor more than 50 members of their community who participated in the October 1956 uprising against Soviet tyranny or who witnessed it firsthand.

In the heady early days of the revolt, a 19-year-old Arpad Eder, for instance, helped to break out of prison Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, an outspoken Hungarian nationalist, who had been sentenced by the communists to life imprisonment for treason. When the revolution was crushed by the Soviets a week later, Cardinal Mindszenty fled to the U.S. embassy, where he remained for the next 15 years, until his exile in the West was arranged. Mr. Eder, for his part, was shot trying to flee to Austria. He was dragged unconscious across the border: "I only knew I was free when I woke up and heard nurses speaking German." He ended up being one of some 250,000 Hungarians who left the country once the revolution failed.

The "trail of tears" that Hungarian refugees followed was chronicled by James Michener in his novel "The Bridge at Andau" (1957). Charles Michener, a cousin of the late novelist and a former senior editor at the New Yorker, was on hand for the Cleveland event. "I heard the radio reports [in the U.S.] from Budapest as people were shot down," he told me. Though not Hungarian himself--he has moved back to Cleveland to write a book about his hometown--he has long been fascinated by the events of 1956. "It was at that moment many Americans fully grasped the evil of Communism."

Wall Street Journal