Of all the attractions Budapest has to offer, its palaces and galleries, its baths and its parks, there’s one gem that is charm personified: the Children’s Rail
Hungarian-born Austrian journalist Paul Lendvai was sat in a television studio in Vienna on June 16, 1989, commentating live on the funeral of Imre Nagy, executed by Hungary’s Soviet-backed government after the failure of the 1956 revolution and buried in an unmarked grave.
Like 180,000 other Hungarians, Lendvai had fled his country for Austria after the failed revolution and was working as a journalist and author in Vienna, writing and giving analysis on the epochal changes taking place in his country as communist regimes collapsed across Europe.
Nagy had been a reformist who, as prime minister, had angered Moscow with democratic reforms and the dissolution of Hungary’s hated secret police. On November 1, 1956, he withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact. Three days later, Soviet tanks moved into Budapest and crushed the revolution on the orders of Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev.