I MUST have been around 14 to 15 years old when I came downstairs to look at the papers, one morning at boarding school, and saw the headline, which revealed something along the lines of: “The Russian tanks are coming. This is the last broadcast from Radio Free Budapest. Please help us. Goodbye.”

Briefly I wondered what it would be like in Hungary after the Russians stamped out any hint of democracy, as they had in East Germany and Poland, and would again in Poland and Czechoslovakia. I then went into the dining room and had my porridge.

I was hungry, but not starving. I had spent a few years as a toddler not knowing what an orange or banana was, and sweets were not readily available because of rationing but it was a comfortable upbringing after the war, which our elders had fought, initially to save Poland. Such headlines as the one about the fall of democratic Hungary in 1956, were a reminder as to how lucky we were.

The hypocrisy of global politics had resulted in Soviet Russia taking over swathes of land belonging to east European countries and then force-feeding them communism. However, one cannot just draw a line after 1945 and blame Russia for everything.

When Chamberlain returned from Munich in 1938 with his piece of paper, which he waved as if it was the panacea for Europe’s problems, he had betrayed Czechoslovakia, of which Germany took a large portion.

Hungary also helped herself to a slice and while at it, absorbed a chunk of Ruthenia as well and, not to be outdone, although not part of the agreement, Poland joined the trough and took another slice of Czechoslovakia.

So, the post 1945 victims had blood on their hands but Russia was about to outdo them all.

The fall of the wall at the end of the 1980s, and the democratic principles adopted by all those former victims, was a triumph of the human spirit, but we were reminded of what they needed to get through, when we visited Budapest recently.

I remembered that moment in time back in 1956, better than I recalled the quality of the porridge, but the thing that hit me even then, was that I was eating my breakfast while ordinary folk were dying at the hands of brutish invaders.

History tells us Hungary has been invaded more than most, and I recall a Hungarian saying: "Being Hungarian is not a nationality, it is an occupation.”

Back in Roman times, the Danube beneath Buda was the barrier between the Romans and the barbarians on the other side, which would become Pest. It is said that at one time Buda ranked alongside Venice and Vienna as Europe’s three most attractive cities, but the Turks burnt it all down, destroying that which the Romans and the Moguls and a few neighbouring nations had been unable to achieve.

We have long-adopted the principle of using hop-on, hop-off bus tours and after our first tour of Budapest, without conferring, mentally each of us had put The House of Terror at the top of our lists.

This is the former home of the Hungarian Nazi Party, which took over the building towards the end of the war and conducted their “interviews” deep in the bowels of the building, where the screams could not be heard, nor the sounds of choking on the hangman’s rope.

Many Hungarians suffered at the hands of the Nazis including three-quarter of a million Jews, but the building did not cease its reign of terror with the capitulation and surrender of the German armies.

The Soviet secret police moved in and, as they did with all the occupied countries, commenced their own interviews and dispensed their own justice on the gallows next door to the interview rooms and torture chambers.

Seventeen per cent of the electorate voted communist at the 1945 Hungarian elections as the country opted for democracy, but Russia had other ideas; only agreeing to the formation of a government with communists in control of all the principle departments.

Democracy went out the window, as did democratic politicians quite literally in other occupied countries. But with 83 per cent of the population voting against communism, the House of Terror came into its own. There were a lot in need of re-training and many unhappy with the powers that be. Neighbours reported on neighbours prompting the resistance to post fliers claiming: Look out snitch, we are watching you.

The Russians eulogised a young child who shopped his father to the authorities for harbouring an extra hoard of grain.

Happily those days and the times when certain ridiculous UK organisations praised Stalin for his "brave communist experiment", are behind us all and we can see clearly now The Wall has gone, that the Russians spent some 44 years attempting brutally to suppress so many people, like a man trying to plug with his finger the dyke holding back humanity’s need for freedom and self-expression.

There were many videoed recollections and classic examples of communist double speak. There were hundreds of thousands of victims, while the propaganda newsreels congratulated the key workers who had increased their personal productivity 324 per cent or contributed a percentage of their wages to the Peace Fund, so boosting the potential of another Government five-year plan.

There were hundreds of thousands of Czechs, Germans etc in Hungary, some of whom had lived there for many decades. But, said the government spokesmen in the newsreels, they would be resettled in a humane and supportive way. Their tools and farming machinery, along with their livestock and money would be transported with them.

The “humane way” was to transport them in closed cattle-trucks with standing room only and undertake a journey that took days. They were then placed in work-camps and almost all of them saw nothing of their plant, machinery or livestock. They had to start from scratch, without housing, money or land. The museum contained so many filmed interviews of people who had experienced the humane re-settlement at the hands of the Soviets.

The walls are covered with head and shoulder photographs of those who perished in the Loyalty House as the authorities called the House of Terror.

We left with two thoughts uppermost in our minds: how fortunate we were through accidents of birth to have been born in the UK and not eastern Europe, where we went without oranges for a few years and electricity for a few hours every day and called it hardship.

The second thought that occurred to me is that it was so unfair that people such as Hitler, Stalin and all their unpleasant, brutal acolytes, only died once. It seems so inadequate.

Of course many will probably dismiss this as re-stating that which is already well known, but our visit put names and faces and voices to the heinous acts of Hitler and Stalin and company.

Reading that Ed Miliband was heckled so fiercely in Scotland he was unable to get his message across and then seeing the excesses of ISIS reminds us that political dialogue and toleration are only skin deep. To my mind the excesses of extremism on the right and left cannot be restated enough, lest we forget.