Comrades, Mistakes Were Made

1948 - 1956 was one of the saddest periods in the history of Hungary. The communist state's machinery of terror functioned perfectly but the introduced centrally directed incredibly bad functioning economic system did not. The communist party functionaries explained this: "Comrades, on the socialist road to communism some mistakes were made." The real stories described in this book were horrible but today, more than 50 years later, the stupidity of the system is quite amusing.In that scary world, the terror touched everybody. On the other hand the interesting thing was that in those fearful and insecure time oases existed in the midst of terror. Oases were those places, smaller or larger, where everybody preserved human dignity, and facing the terror around them they stayed united. These oases probably existed because they were not detected by the terror system, or the system needed the people working in the oases. This book is about such oases.After the 1956 Hungarian revolution was crushed, 2% of Hungary's population fled from the country. The news of the Revolution caught the writer in East Berlin, he returned to Budapest to pick up his wife and his three year old daughter and in an ancient automobile escaped to the West. Such adventure needed first of all luck, boldness, above average organizational skills and a good dose of humor.