Goodbye to Budapest by Margarita Morris

Life in post-war Hungary is harsh. People live in fear of the Secret Police and their communist masters. Innocent citizens are denounced and imprisoned.

When a student-led demonstration offers hope of a better future, ordinary people rise up and fight against the Russian tanks. Katalin and those she loves must fight for freedom. They must fight to survive.

I was searching for books to read on a trip to Budapest and I stumbled across Goodbye to Budapest, a novel of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. I was aware of the Uprising – I had seen the monuments in Budapest which commemorate its victims, and I recalled vague details about it from learning about it at school – but in truth I was aware only of the bare bones of what happened and why.

Goodbye to Budapest starts with an arrest. It is 1952 and Katalin and her father are visited by the communist Secret Police in the middle of the night. Katalin’s father is taken away for committing unknown crimes and he is imprisoned at 60 Andrássy út, which today is the House of Terror Museum, a memorial to the victims of the brutal communist regime. We are given a flavour of the shocking torture methods used by the Secret Police, the psychological manipulation, and the false confessions they extracted from their prisoners.

This sets the scene for the second half of the book, which jumps ahead to autumn 1956. What follows is a day-by-day account of how the Uprising unfolded, and the part each character plays in it.

I read this book very quickly and I attribute that to Morris’ writing. Her characters are well-written – in books like this, where you have oppressors and victims, characters can often come across as wholly good or wholly bad but Morris manages to convey the complexities of each character’s role and the moral quandaries they each face. The range of characters covers all the different kinds of people involved in the Uprising – students, older freedom fighters who remember Nazi occupation, anxious parents, victims of the regime, secret police officers, informers. There are a lot of characters without it being confusing.

Without revealing spoilers, everything doesn’t come right in the end. It would be unrealistic for it to do so – thousands were killed in the fighting, 200,000 Hungarians fled Hungary, and thousands who stayed were imprisoned and punished for their part in the Uprising. But I would really recommend Goodbye to Budapest not only for the excellent writing but also because it’s a detailed and frank account of an important event which has shaped the history of Hungary.