Hungarian Volunteers in the Spanish People's War of Independence

Hungarian Volunteers in the Spanish People's War of Independence (second edition) was published in Budapest in 1987 by the Association of Hungarian Resistance Fighters and Anti-fascists.  

Several Hungarian members of the International Brigades wrote about their memories of the Spanish Civil War. One of the most important of the memoirs and shorter recollections  that appeared between 1940 and 1990 was Hungarian Volunteers in the Spanish People’s War of Independence, published by the Association of Hungarian Resistance Fighters and Anti-Fascists, first in 1959 and then in an expanded version in 1987 with a detailed historical introduction and commentary. In it we can read short memoirs of Hungarian volunteers who fought in Spain, followed by poems, newspaper articles and reports of the time, and documents related to the policies and decisions of the Hungarian government and political parties in relation to the Spanish Civil War. The publication of the book was an important event because it provided the first comprehensive overview of the Civil War and the role of Hungarians in it. As well as abundant information about their lives during and after the Civil War, including personal accounts of what they consider to be one of the most important events of the conflct, the Battle of the Ebro (July 25 – November 16, 1938), the memoirs also describe the charges brought against them in the 1940s of being under Trotskyist influence even while volunteering in the brigades.  

Together with the volunteers of other nationalities who left Spain, the Hungarians were interned in camps in France, and many of them expressed how they found it disgraceful to be treated so humiliatingly after their self-sacrificing fight against Fascism. After they were allowed to leave France, some of them returned to the country from which they had arrived in Spain, but others continued their anti-fascist struggle in other parts of the world, such as Algeria. The Association of Hungarian Volunteers of the International Brigades was founded in 1945 with the aim of preserving traditions and maintaining contact with Hungarian volunteers living abroad. 

After 1977, comprehensive monographs on the Spanish Civil War and the role of the Hungarian volunteers based on Hungarian and Spanish archival research were published in Hungarian. These monographs often used the memories, interviews and diary entries of survivors, wrote openly about the atrocities the volunteers later suffered in Hungary, something that was no longer a problem to talk about under the Hungarian so-called “soft” dictatorship. From the 1960s, a period also called “Goulash Communism” or the “happiest barrack of Communism”, Hungary moved away from the principles of Marxism-Leninism, the dictatorship “softened” and the regime tolerated more internal criticism. Only in the second half of the 1970s, when the ideological hegemony of the Communist party began to wane did the ex-volunteers begin to tell their stories.