My Very Own 1956
My Very Own 1956

Summary/Abstract: Like anyone trying to write about the 1956 uprising in Hungary, I was faced from the start with the fact that the main, albeit not exclusive set of events took place during an extremely short period, from 23 October to 4 November that year—a period of less than two weeks, during which the situation changed literally day by day, sometimes even hour by hour. Documentation about that dramatic period is available in the form, for example, of surviving newspapers and transcripts of radio broadcasts, but the journalists who were writing those pages of history, so to say, inevitably had a limited perspective due to the rapidly changing nature of the events and to the physical limitations preventing them from being at all the places where something significant was happening, particularly during the periods of heavy fighting. It is not surprising therefore that accounts of 1956 rely heavily on a wide variety of other sources, notably the various published memoirs of participants, plus the many recorded oral history interviews made with people over the past 20–25 years.[...]

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