DECEMBER 29, 1997 / JANUARY 5, 1998 VOL. 150 NO. 28	2 0f 12
A Survivor's Tale	By Joshua Cooper Ramo

BUDAPEST: DECEMBER 1956. The Red Army had been streaming into the city for a month, brutalizing Hungary's October revolution. The foggy nights, filled all fall with the sounds of ecstatic students, were now split with the jostle of machinery -- 10 divisions of Soviet tanks -- and the uneven light of Molotov cocktails thrown through the rain. Fear blossomed in the dampness. The Premier vanished. The boy -- lean, striking handsome -- hoped the tumult would pass. During the day he buried himself in schoolwork. Nights he passed at home. But over his books, across his strong Hungarian coffee, he heard rumors: the Russians were rounds up students. Children were disappearing. Trains were leaving for the frontier. Grove, the budding student. At age 4, shortly after this photo was taken, he nearly died from scarlet fever, which left him hard of hearing He longed to ignore the stories. He had already lived through the horror of the Nazis, outsmarting the SS, avoiding Budapest's brownshirts. One day his mother had bundled him into the house of a "courageous acquaintance," where they sweated out the pogroms of 1944. He saw his father return from the labor camps on the Eastern front, a proud, garrulous man shriveled by typhoid fever and chilled by pneumonia. Boys at school mocked him: before the war as a Jew, after the war because his father was a businessman (a dairyman, but that was enough). In his government file the boy was already an "enemy of the classes." He wasn't going to wait for the Soviets.

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