Switzerland and the Refugees

In 1956, the only agency from Switzerland to report on events in Hungary was Jack Metzger’s small photo agency, Comet, based in Zurich.

On October 30, the Soviet troops began withdrawing from Budapest, and the world press celebrated the Hungarian people for shaking off the communist yoke.

The photographs were likely taken between October 31 and November 3. This was a brief period of peace when it seemed the revolution might triumph.

Metzger was no longer there when the tanks returned to Budapest on November 4 and Imre Nagy’s dramatic announcement was broadcast: “At dawn, Soviet troops launched an attack against our capital… Our troops are fighting. The government is at its post…” By the time Metzger’s photos appeared in the Schweizer Illustrierte Zeitung, the revolution had been crushed.

A few days after the photographer, the first contingent of Hungarian refugees also arrived in Switzerland. A medical train carrying 500 refugees—including patients and the wounded taken on at the Austrian-Hungarian border and in Austrian hospitals — pulled in on the night of November 8. They were initially placed in military hospitals, but thousands more followed in the weeks that came. The majority were healthy — many of them young people and teenagers; in total, 13,000 Hungarians arrived in the country of five million. In proportion to its population, Switzerland became the largest host to Hungarian refugees from 1956.

Metzger documented both the arrival and the reception of the Hungarian refugees. In these photographs taken in Zurich and Buchs, he captured, among other things, the spirit of solidarity that was widespread in Switzerland following the revolution.

On November 20 at 10:30 a.m., church bells rang out across the entire country, followed by three minutes of silence as a mark of respect for the Hungarian struggle for freedom. Traffic came to a halt, and Swiss flags were flown at half-mast.

Along with the Netherlands and Spain, Switzerland was one of the three countries to boycott the Melbourne Olympics due to the Soviet invasion. The Red Cross launched a fundraising campaign. The Hungarian refugees were initially housed in barracks and later in “relief camps.” Many Hungarians who fled in 1956 kept the patchwork quilts made for them by local schoolgirls for the rest of their lives.

His photographs — which are freely available for viewing and download in the online photo archive of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich — were donated to Fortepan in 2020.