People Remembered: Josef S. Miko

József S. Mikó, a Hungarian newsreel cameraman, was returning from a film location in Budapest on October 23, 1956, when he saw a crowd of marching university students. With his hand-held 35-millimeter camera, he photographed the students while they marched into a massive plaza.

József S. Mikó captured dramatic images of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution - demonstrators attacking a toppled statue of Josef Stalin, police shooting into a fleeing crowd, a slain party official hanging in the street.

József S. Mikó, a Hungarian newsreel cameraman, was returning from a film location in Budapest on October 23, 1956, when he saw a crowd of marching university students. With his hand-held 35-millimeter camera, he photographed the students while they marched into a massive plaza. The demonstrations erupted into fighting against the Communist government, and Soviet tanks moved into the city to quell the revolt. Mikó caught the action in his camera: freedom fighters capturing Communist Party headquarters, withdrawal of Soviet troops, return of Soviet forces in November and their crushing of the revolution in which an estimated 2,500 Hungarians died.

Mikó's film was smuggled into the American embassy, and he hid copies of the footage in his locker at the film studio. Fearing for their lives, Miko and his family escaped from Hungary into Austria. From Vienna, he telephoned friends in Budapest and learned that Soviets had found and confiscated his film and were using it to identify Hungarians who had participated in the revolution.

After settling in Calfornia, Mikó worked on a few low-budget independent films, and he bought camera and electronic stores in Santa Monica and Manhattan Beach. The American embassy in Budapest had shipped his film out of Hungary in a U.S. diplomatic pouch. The footage was shown on “The 20th Century,” a CBS documentary series narrated by OPC member Walter Cronkite and later on a segment of a History Channel special, “Caught on Film.” Mikó hid his copy in his garage for decades until 1993, when he donated 177 minutes of it to the Hungarian Film Archive. Tom Foty, a former UPI radio correspondent in New York and Washington who grew up in Budapest, lived through the fighting and now runs the UPI alumni Web site, told the Bulletin: “Some of those scenes [photographed by Miko] were so widely used in every documentary and dramatic program touching on Budapest that they are almost visual clichés about the USSR.” For filming the revolution, the Hungarian government awarded him the Award of Excellence in Achievement, the Hero of Freedom Award and the Cross of the Order of Merit.

József S. Mikó died of blood cancer April 28 at the University of California, Los Angeles, Medical Center. He was 87.