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INTRODUCTION In this volume we present the results of oral history research carried out under the title The Second Generation of 1956ers. In the course of our investigations we were looking for answers to the following questions: How were the fates of the children of those executed or imprisoned after the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution affected? And how did the members of a generation that was punished for the revolutionary roles played by their parents grow up with the burden of their heritage? Through our exploration of their personal fates and their experiences in the public and private spheres we also gained valuable information about the micro-history and mentality of Hungarian society as a whole. Documents found in archives that have been opened up since the change of political system in 1989 prove beyond doubt that the crushing of the revolution was followed by a campaign of political retaliation that surpassed anything that had happened in modern Hungarian history. János Kádár and his government, who were appointed by the Soviets in November 1956, had 229 people executed for their activities in 1956, including prime minister Imre Nagy, the leaders of several revolutionary organisations and workers’ councils, armed fighters, and several participants in the intellectual resistance. About twenty-two thousand people were sentenced, thirteen thousand were interned, and tens of thousands more were dismissed from their workplaces and put under police supervision. Following the general amnesty in 1963, the majority of those who had been imprisoned were released, but in many cases discrimination lasted for decades. The revenge, which, besides retaliation against the participants was intended to intimidate society, included the families of the convicts. Children grew up stigmatised and their whole lives were affected by the fact that, because their parents were regarded as enemies by the authorities, they too were being punished. This took place in an atmosphere in which, in order to legitimise the system, the central authorities aimed to control remembrance, forcing people to forget and to remain silent. Their goal was to force members of society to remember things in a particular way. They falsified facts and reinterpreted correlations in keeping with their own goals. They stigmatised the revolution as a counterrevolution and its participants as enemies of the people, murderers and criminals. They rewrote history, and as a result, personal history lost its validity at an official level. They wanted to erase memories that were unwelcome from Introduction the point of view of the system and in order to do so they removed unwanted details, and even people, from film footage, for example. The reinterpretation and falsification of events can also be found in the concepts and language used in the trials that followed the revolution, and in the demagoguery of the so-called White Books, brochures and films, which, especially in the first years of the Kádár regime, portrayed the revolution as a counterrevolution. In 1957, for example, as part of the propaganda campaign, a touring exhibition was organised that tried to prove through documentation the horrors of the “counterrevolution”. The machinery of falsification worked on several levels, starting with the manipulation of the past in school education, the entire rewriting of official history, as well as the new memories, memorial sites and monuments imposed on society and the demolition of former ones. They attempted to undo the revolution and to make its participants non-existent, in such a way that the mere mention of their names would evoke fear. During the consolidation that followed the direct retribution, however, they tried to relegate to oblivion the events of autumn 1956—both the defeat of the revolution and the retribution that followed. Virtually the only exception to this was a series of campaigns on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the revolution, when the radio, television and press flooded the country with lies that promoted the official evaluation of the revolution. According to psychologist Ferenc Mérei, himself a 1956 convict, the crushing of the revolution was followed by “nation-wide repression”. In the atmosphere of dual communication that was forced on society by the authorities, the majority of people apparently accepted the rules and erased from their minds former memories, feelings and opinions: they were silenced and silent. What had happened in 1956 and the retribution that had followed remained taboo, not only in official communication but also in private life, almost until the change of political system in 1989. One reason for this was that the...

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