Október 23. – olvasott/hallott angol szöveg értése

My grandmother’s 23rd October

Every year on 23rd October, my grandmother puts a small Hungarian flag in her window. It is a national holiday, but for her it is also a very personal day. She was only ten years old in 1956, but she still remembers everything.

“We lived under a hard communist regime,” she once told me. “It was a dictatorship: there was no freedom of speech, and people were afraid to say what they really thought. Soviet troops were stationed in the country, so for many people it felt like an occupation.”

On 23rd October her older brother, a university student, joined a peaceful demonstration in Budapest. Thousands of demonstrators marched through the streets with their demands: free elections, independence and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. “My mother was terribly worried,” my grandmother says. “By the evening the demonstration had turned into an uprising, and the next day we could hear shooting from our flat.”

Her brother became a freedom fighter. For a few days the whole family hoped that the revolution would win. But on 4th November Soviet tanks rolled back into the city, and the uprising was crushed. A few weeks later her brother fled to Austria with two friends. Like about 200,000 other Hungarians, he became a refugee. He started a new life in Canada, and my grandmother didn’t see him again for more than twenty years.

“We were lucky,” she always adds. “He was alive. Many young people were killed, and later some of them were executed.”

Today my grandmother goes to the wreath-laying ceremony in our town every 23rd October. “We commemorate the heroes and the victims,” she says, “so that young people like you never forget what freedom costs.”

Szószedet a szöveghez

• to be stationed – állomásozik (katonaság)
• withdrawal – kivonulás
• to roll back into – visszagördül (valahova)
• flat – lakás
• to start a new life – új életet kezdeni

Válaszolj a kérdésekre!