A Testament of Revolution

Terse, staccato, like a dispatch from the front, Béla Lipták’s A Testament of Revolution peels away more than four decades of intervening history to give 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 short-lived rebellion, Lipták’s memoir compellingly sketches the conflict between university students, factory...