Terse, staccato, like a dispatch from the front, Béla Lipták's A 
Testament of Revolution gives readers a vivid, firsthand look at the 
brief, doomed struggle of Hungarian freedom fighters against 
Russian oppressors.

    Written in 1956 in an Austrian refugee camp, where the author 
had fled to escape reprisals for his role in the rebellion, Lipták's 
memoir compellingly sketches the conflict between university 
students, factory workers, and Hungarian nationalists on the one 
side and the hated Hungarian secret police and Russian army 
troops on the other.

    In a memoir that is both history and a saga of his coming of age, 
Lipták relates his transformation from carefree university student to 
impromptu revolutionary leader. His story unfolds with unsparing 
honesty as he makes the reader privy to his conflicts, faults, and 
failures of judgment and courage, laying bare his struggles with the 
enemy and with himself.

_________________________________________________________

BÉLA LIPTÁK immigrated to the United States after the events 
detailed in this book. He holds a bachelor's degree from Stevens 
Institute of Technology and a master's from the City College of 
New York. He now makes his home in Stamford, Connecticut.


Number Thirteen: Eastern European Studies


What people are saying about this book

"A Testament of Revolution will leave no doubt in any reader's 
mind that the communist puppet governments of Eastern Europe 
were tyrannical and thuggish and that the Hungarians, whatever 
their other defects and problems as a nation, deserve full credit 
for their courage in taking on Goliath while the rest of the world 
stood by."—Michael Korda, The Wall Street Journal