They always write about fighting breaking out, but fighting, to be honest, was usually something we tried to avoid. At least, not on equal terms. You had a lot of young men ready to pick up a rifle, but mostly we would go to where we knew there were only civilians. That was the point, the politicians had said said, to clean up the land, to ensure that Slavs could live with Slavs. And I guess they were trying to ensure Magyars lived with Magyars, or Romanians with Romanians. In retrospect it's hard to see how it was worth it.
Back then, of course, it was exhilarating. You would come to a village, twenty or thirty men with rifles (…) and you were kings. Rulers of everything. You could take whatever you wanted. (…) But if we knew there were fighters around, we would sneak in at night instead, break windows, steal cattle, set fires or hamstring horses. Anything that would convince them to leave. (...) Come to think of it, that had been happening inside the villages, too, earlier. Two homes had had Magyar families living in them, but they sold their land and left. Nobody would do business with them, their tools kept being broken. We children jeered at them in the market. I didn't see it like that back then, but the whole thing had been brewing for many years.
I think it came from having the private schools everywhere. I mean, who wants to go to a school where you can't understand the teacher? And that was what the state schools were like, after the 1920s, when they started making everyone learn Hungarian again. I think the emperor accepted that only because Budapest agreed to allow private schools in other languages. That was stupid, in retrospect. Of course we all went to schools where we could follow classes. I mean, what peasant child can hope to go to a state university? (…) you got your numbers and letters, your basic science. And they taught us how we were Slavs, oppressed in our own historic homeland by Asian barbarians from the earliest days. How the Hungarians were no better than the Ottomans, steppe nomads all. Which is kind of funny, seeing how the Ottomans were our allies all along. But I guess that's politics for you. (…) And the schools were cheap, they were paid by national clubs and foundations paid for by rich donors. They now say a lot of that money came from Russia, really. Could be. But trust me, we were plenty stupid enough to do that to ourselves back then, and the Hungarians were no different, only they used government money for it.
(…)
Things got pretty bad in about 36. Of course they'd been bad a long time, but for a young man with a gun, there was always a place where you mattered, where you could feel like you were powerful and significant. But now, it was no longer just the police and the thugs. They were bringing in soldiers with cannon and machine guns, and they burned whole villages. (…) we kept hearing that the emperor was against this, that we would be free. The newspapers were full of it – well, ours. Theirs were shouting to high heaven about the treachery of the Germans and the evils of tripartism. But it gave us hope, and when the war happened, we thought that was it.
Except the whole thing just sort of fizzled out. Yes, the raids ended, the elections happened, but there was never a triumphant entry into Budapest. Nothing was ever really decided. (…) Mind, I had a job then and really wasn't young enough for that game. But we had all kept our rifles, which was a good thing because the split in 39 brought the police back into the countryside worse than ever. Somehow all the new officers the local councils had hired disappeared, and the patrolmen all spoke Hungarian. Acted like Huns, too.
(...)
Fact is, it felt like the right thing to do. We had suffered so much, and now that we'd tasted a bit of self-determination and real power, we wouldn't let them take it away again. And any way of fighting back looked good. I never asked where the bombs came from. Dynamite had worked for the Anarchists, we figured the armoury guys just had a source in a mine somewhere. If I had known the stuff came from Russia – I actually don't know if I would have done anything different. Maybe not. I wasn't even thirty, and I was angry. But maybe I would have walked away. This way, well, we got our elected councils in the end, like the Czechs and the Slovaks and Slovenes and Croats did. But we did a lot of damage along the way. Without the big war, the Huns would probably – sorry, Hungarians. They would have killed us. We only survived because the Czar was an idiot. That's history for you.
(Interview with Andrej L. Goretzky, former insurgent leader and Slovak politician)
