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Remembering a Hungarian Freedom Fighter

Bruce2229 Wrote: Jul 29, 2009 6:37 AM
As an adolescent- how untrained civilians armed with captured PPsH submachine guns, rifles and Molotov cocktails repeatedly stopped first rate Soviet troops, even capturing their T-34's and turning their guns on their former masters. What struck me and burned into my memory was the incredible cruelty displayed by the despotic Hungarian communists- even exceeding the Soviet troops who were content to merely kill the rebels as opposed to torturing them to death. General Kiraly can teach us all what Winston Churchill uttered during the bleakest period of WWII, i.e., ""If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a...

"I am now only an American professor," Gen. Bela Kiraly said with a grin.

His grin was a survivor's grin -- a charming, elegant East European survivor with a sense of humor about himself and perhaps the end-of-1984 Christmas party. Smile and sip the holiday brew, for we were about to survive George Orwell's ominous year in which The Party prohibits free thought and exerts total control over Oceania -- Orwell's fictional masks for communism crushing Great Britain.

We were in non-fictional Brooklyn, however, in a real friend's home, and we were quite free to speak and think. I...

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