Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
1956
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
My heart is beating slower, nearly powering down to a dead stop. My palms are sweaty. Wiping them on my pants is useless.
With a tinge of voiced resentment, our tour guide Henrik is speaking into his handheld microphone. “The 1956 Hungarian Revolution lasted twelve days before Stalin sent his Red Army to crush it. Not one single Western country, not even the United States, sent help.” When he surveys our tour group, his eyes seem to linger on me, accusingly.
Henrik has a creased, leathery face as if hardened by life. When off in the distance a police siren wails, his shoulders give the impression of a man familiar with crouching, hiding, running, maybe escaping.
We are standing, quietly reverential, near the Hungarian Parliament taking in a monument commemorating the students who resisted Stalin. Earlier in the day, we toured the House of Terror—the police prison and torture cells used by both the Nazis and Communists. This city is well-supplied with memories of personal courage in the face of repression.
For travelers, bravery is a recurring magic show. One moment hidden, then out of nowhere appearing to move us to applauding admiration.
I’m grateful and relieved that I was not a Hungarian college student in 1956. Courage scares me. It can get you hurt, even killed.
The movie replaying in my mind is about the Burgers of Calais by Rodin, a tribute to six principled leaders in the French town of Calais. To save their small town from destruction by the invading English, they volunteered their heads for beheading in the public square. I would have cowered in my thatched-roof house.
My name is Noah. I’m a high school history teacher. My namesake had the biblical courage to go to sea in a wooden ark. Not me.
There’s nothing heroic in my nature. I have no more use for martyrdom than I have for cigarettes or cancer.
In national moments of fevered patriotism, I am not one of those teachers who takes up arms to fight the tyrannies I teach about. The default setting on conscience is perpetual armistice.
I don’t want to die fighting for something I believe in. I want other people to die fighting for something I believe in.
Of course, I know right from wrong, justice from injustice. That’s not hard. Not a day goes by that I haven’t ached for a stronger word for ‘unfair.’ A better phrase for ‘hateful ignorance.’ A more biting description for ‘Trumpian chaos and cruelty.’
My first day sightseeing in Budapest, I saw a shopkeeper loudly accuse a Roma woman, unbathed and dressed in rags, of stealing. In a public act of prejudice, the store owner—an angry, frightening hulk of a man—manhandled her while thundering, “you’re a dirty gypsy.” My chest tightened, my mouth dried out. In the split second when action was needed, I betrayed my conscience.
For all my globe-trotting, unless I look in a mirror—my face flushed and splotchy with embarrassment—I’ve never learned what a coward looks like. There are no statues to honor us, no monuments. No chapters in the history books eulogizing us.
Nothing.
.