Like anyone trying to write about the 1956 uprising in Hungary, I was faced from the start with the fact that the main, albeit not exclusive set of events took place during an extremely short period, from 23 October to 4 November that year—a period of less than two weeks, during which the situation changed literally day by day, sometimes even hour by hour. Documentation about that dramatic period is available in the form, for example, of surviving newspapers and transcripts of radio broadcasts, but the journalists who were writing those pages of history, so to say, inevitably had a limited perspective due to the rapidly changing nature of the events and to the physical limitations preventing them from being at all the places where something significant was happening, particularly during the periods of heavy fighting. It is not surprising therefore that accounts of 1956 rely heavily on a wide variety of other sources, notably the various published memoirs of participants, plus the many recorded oral history interviews made with people over the past 20–25 years.
I am a great fan of oral history and 'people's history' in general. At best they are a useful counterweight to the history based exclusively on official documents and the letters and written records that (usually powerful) participants have left behind. At the same time, studying Hungary 1956 taught me that you have to be careful with this, as with any other type of historical source. I wanted to write a book which would recount not only the top-level political events of the time, but would also recall the details and the atmosphere of what actually happened on the ground, day by day, in particular locations. For this, the many interviews which had already been made and the many memoirs which had already been published were a great help. In a rapidly evolving situation like that of 1956, with events driven to a large extent from below, and spanning a relatively short period of time, oral history and memoirs of grass-roots participants take on a greater weight than usual.
However, I was soon confronted with the problem that it was not so easy to determine 'the facts' of what actually happened in different places. One eyewitness remembers as fact something which occurred at a certain place on a certain day. Another eyewitness, present in the same location at the same time, remembers something quite different. That is quite understandable in situations of violence. There is usually an element of panic and chaos when bullets begin to fly, which results in contradictory accounts of what actually happened. In the case of 1956, however, I was also confronted with this difficulty in relation to events which were entirely peaceful.
Take the great mass gathering in Bem tér, for example, the first major demonstration, which took place on the afternoon of Tuesday, 23 October. Nobody disputes that such a gathering happened and that it was significant. A few other facts are established, for example that the Writers' Union president Péter Veres spoke there, as is confirmed by documentary film. But what he actually said, and who else spoke and what they said is not so clear. Were the famous Sixteen Points of the students read out, for instance? It depends which source or eyewitness account you consult.
This is what I discovered in relation to an entirely peaceful event on the first day. How much more difficult it was when it came to matters of chaotic violent conflict. What to do? I opted for an unusual but I thought honest solution. Where it seemed that neither one account nor another could be fully confirmed, I offered readers both, or more than two accounts on occasion. In this way, by examining and presenting conflicting versions of events, and by trying to give an appreciation of differing accounts of 1956, the book became, in part, a work about history itself and, by implication, about how history can be very selective and how, therefore, the past can be used for different purposes.

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Bob Dent
is a journalist long resident in Budapest. This is an edited extract from his latest book, Inside Hungary From Outside (Európa, 2008), in which he reflects on the process of writing his Budapest 1956—Locations of Drama (Európa, 2006).