Pál Csáky

“The greatest shock as well as experience for me was to see the change of those guys, rank soldiers on that first morning. They were always ready to joke, behaving as soldiers only when they had to do so, but otherwise taking it all casually; even those serving their second year, settled down very well, yet, they as well showed change in their behavior during the line up and loading the tanks with live ammunition. Suddenly they realized the going gets tough and then within fifteen minutes those young witty boys became mature men. They simply began to behave completely differently. Each of them had a feeling, and one could notice it, that they were frightened and that no one knew how was it going to end up. And that could really have ended up very badly. So this was such a weird experience.”

“I recall the atmosphere, mainly in that very first moment especially professional soldiers and officers were really nervous. One could not notice it so much in soldiers, but then the tanks were called up. Those were trained from the commander´s building up to reserve base with the exception of one tank that was under planned repair and didn´t have an engine. The boys were on the tanks and that´s when they started to wonder. I remember it was morning and we started to speculate what´s going on, why did we have to go out, to practice, but we still didn´t realize what was happening. So we waited about until two o´clock in the afternoon, when trucks arrived, they backed up to the tanks and began to load them with live ammunition. That´s when the atmosphere changed. The boys had just had their lunch and that´s when they began to realize something was going on when being armed with ball cartridges.”