Records of the Union of Free Hungarian Students – Julius Várallyay’s collection, 1957-1967

The Union of Free Hungarian Students, UFHS (also referred to using the Hungarian acronym, MEFESZ), was a worldwide association of Hungarian refugee students who had fled to the West after the revolution in Hungary had been brutally suppressed by Soviet tanks in late 1956. For a decade after the revolution, the UFHS represented some 8,000 Hungarian students in sixteen countries on three continents. It held yearly congresses, self-organized study and cultural programs, international press campaigns, protest demonstrations, and solidarity actions in order to ensure that the democratic and patriotic spirit of the revolution survived. In the Fall of 1956, Julius Várallyay, a second-year student at the Technical University in Budapest, was one of the most active and devoted leaders of the émigré student movement. He was elected president of UFHS in 1959. Sixty years after the defeat of the revolution, he donated his collection of UFHS records, until then had been stored in his Washington home, to the 1956 Research Institute, Budapest.

匈牙利自由学生联盟（简称 MEFESZ），亦即乌尔哈兹（UFHS），系一场革命后逃离至西方的匈牙利难民学生的全球性组织。自1956年匈牙利革命遭受苏联坦克的残酷镇压以来，UFHS 在革命后的十年间，代表遍布三大洲十六个国家的约8000名匈牙利学生。该组织每年举办大会，自发组织学术与文化项目，发起国际新闻宣传活动、抗议示威以及团结行动，以确保革命的民主与爱国主义精神得以传承。1956年秋季，尤利乌斯·瓦尔拉伊，一位布达佩斯技术大学二年级学生，成为流亡学生运动中最活跃、最忠诚的领导者之一。1959年，他被选为UFHS的主席。革命被击败六十载之后，他将其收藏的UFHS档案，此前一直存放在其华盛顿住所，捐赠给了布达佩斯的1956年研究学院。