In the late Autumn of 1956, almost 200.000 Hungarian citizens decided to leave Hungary. The Soviet “Red Army” had taken control over Budapest and other parts of the country. 180.000 people passed the border to Austria, illegally, of course, to gain liberty. Those were very exciting and hard days for the refugees and for the people in Burgenland as well.
Only two weeks before, Austrian army had been reinstalled after World War II and after the strenuous run for national sovereignty. In 1955, Austria had declared itself politically neutral. This is why nobody wanted to provoke the Soviet Union, but it was difficult to find the aurea mediocritas, the golden middle course between keeping neutrality and helping the Hungarian refugees to escape from Russian military power. But people in Burgenland decided to help.
What had happened before? Hungarian people had required reforms within the Communist system, among them students of the Technical University of Budapest, who stood up for free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. In late October, when the huge statue of Josef Stalin (who had died in 1953) was destroyed in Budapest, Imre Nagy was again made head of state by the Soviet Councils. Nagy was known as a reformer among the Hungarian communists and was supposed to calm down the revolutionaries.
In these days, the Western world sympathized with the Hungarian people. Richard Nixon himself, in these days vice-president of the USA, came to Andau into the Northern part of Burgenland to get information about what was really going on at the border.
Ocotober 30th, the Soviet troops actually left Budapest. Imre Nagy declared the People´s Republic of Hungary neutral and announced to withdraw from the Pact of Warsaw. Besides this, he promised to organize free elections in a multiple party system.
November, 4th, the Soviets came back in their tanks and took revenge. Now thousands of Hungarians left their home country, most of them using a very small wooden bridge near the village of Andau. 70.000 reached the village in the course of the following weeks! Many people from Andau, but also from other parts of Austria came to give a helping hand. The American Pulitzer-prize winning novelist James Michener gave a very dense and intensive report about what was happening there (“The Bridge at Andau”, published in 1957). Once he said, that, if he was forced to leave his home country, he would like to be saved by people from Burgenland.
Most of the refugees settled down in the United States, in Canada and Germany, 70.000 stayed in Austria. But they were the lucky ones. 20.000 people died in the days of Hungarian revolution. Imre Nagy was executed in 1958.
The national anthem of Hungary is “Isten meg àldd a magyart” - God save the Hungarians. This is what many Hungarians have been thinking and singing all over the world, reminding of the efforts to escape from Soviet Russian pressure in 1956.

Yours,
Walter Dujmovits, jr.