Here we had men. Bricks and Molotov cocktails against tanks and crack infantry. This gave the lie to Khruschev's claims of a liberal Soviet succeeding Stalin, and is the reason there are so many goulash houses in eastern North America.

I actually spoke with a Hungarian-American woman who left Hungary particularly because of what happened in 1956. She even refused the orders of a Soviet soldier and escaped with her life. A family friend is actually writing her story as a book and I look forward to reading it someday.

We really did leave the Hungarians in the lurch. I was a teenager in '56 and can recall trying to figure out how I could get to Hungary with an M1 Garand in my luggage. My folks put a stop to that. At any rate, the Hungarians are to be admired for their stand against the Soviets. There are few monuments in Budapest to the uprising, but the locals sure can tell you where all of the important sites connected with the rebellion are, like the Corvin Cinema, the streets most intimately conncected with the fighting, etc. There still is little love lost between the Magyars and the Russians.

The bitterest part of this terrible episode of the Cold War was that the uprising was encouraged by the West with promises of help, but as the freedom fighters were being gunned down and killed, one building at a time, in downtown Budapest, screaming desperately for aid by shortwave, there was no one to help --for to have done so would have begun WW III.