Erika Szeles: The 15-Year-Old Who Became the Face of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution
On 13 November 1956, readers of the Danish weekly Billed Bladet opened their copies and found a teenage girl staring back at them from the cover. Red hair, freckles, a quilted jacket, and a Soviet submachine gun slung over her shoulder. She wasn't smiling. She looked serious and steady, like she knew exactly what she was doing there.
Across Europe, people looked at that photo and saw the whole Hungarian Revolution in one face. What nobody realised was that by the time the magazine hit the shelves, the girl was already dead.
Her name was Erika Szeles. It took the world more than 50 years to find that out.
Who Was Erika Szeles?
Erika Kornélia Szeles was born in Budapest on 6 January 1941 into a Jewish family. She lost her father when she was three. Accounts differ on whether he died in the Budapest ghetto or a concentration camp, but either way the Holocaust took him, and Erika was brought up by her mother.
In the late 1940s she spent a few months in Denmark with Red Barnet, a charity that gave children from war-ravaged countries a break from the rubble. She picked up some Danish while she was there, and that little detail would end up mattering a lot.
By the autumn of 1956 she was 15, training as a cook and working at the Béke Hotel, and living with her mother on Bezerédj utca in Budapest's 8th district. Friends from her folk dance group remembered her as shy and reserved. But journalist Tamás Földes, who knew her through her uncle's literary circle, remembered something else: a girl with sharp opinions about the reform debates of the day and a real hope that Hungary could become a democracy.
Joining the Revolution
When the Hungarian Revolution broke out on 23 October 1956, students and workers poured onto the streets of Budapest demanding free elections and an end to Soviet control. Within hours it had turned into street fighting.
Erika was pulled in by an older friend, József Árki, who'd been at the same cookery school. Like thousands of other teenagers, she joined the insurgents. That's not as unusual as it sounds. Nearly half of those killed in Budapest during the uprising were under 25, according to research summarised by We Love Budapest.
Teenagers taking on an occupying army wasn't new in Europe, either. In 1943 the Nazis hanged Lepa Radić at 17 for refusing to give up her fellow Partisans, and in the Netherlands Freddie Oversteegen was just 14 when she joined the resistance.
The Photo That Went Around the World
Danish journalist Paul Raae and photographer Vagn Hansen had made it into Hungary without any official permission, tagging along with a Red Cross convoy in a little Volkswagen. Once in Budapest they documented everything: crowds, barricades, the dead, the young fighters.
Somewhere in the middle of it, Hansen spotted Erika. He later said he saw a serious, striking girl with a Russian gun on her shoulder and talked her into posing for a few shots. Her bit of Danish probably helped break the ice. Looking back decades later, he said: "I accidentally managed to take a photo, which went around the world."
The exact date is a bit murky. English-language accounts usually put it around 1 November, while Hungarian research places it closer to 7 November. Hansen was clear about one thing, though. The gun wasn't a prop he handed her for the picture. It was already on her shoulder when he saw her.
The photo ran on the cover of Billed Bladet on 13 November with nothing but her first name. Danish teenagers were hooked. To them she was simply "the cover girl."
How Erika Died
On 4 November, the Soviet armyrolled back into Budapest in overwhelming force. The popular version of Erika's story says that around this time, friends convinced her she was too young to fight. She swapped her gun for a Red Cross armband and started treating the wounded instead. Hungarian researchers point out that the nurse part isn't certain, but most accounts agree on what happened next.
Near Blaha Lujza Square, a friend of hers was shot. Erika crawled out from behind a barricade to drag him to safety, and a Soviet tank opened fire on her. Her death certificate, issued by the hospital on Péterfy Sándor Street, records a gunshot wound to the neck. She died on the spot.
Most English sources give the date as 8 November, but her gravestone and the official records say 7 November. She was buried at Kerepesi Cemetery in Budapest, in the plot set aside for victims of 1956. Her mother's inscription calls her "my dear little girl, my Erika, never to be forgotten."
A week later her face was on newsstands across Denmark.
The 50-Year Search for the Cover Girl
One of those Danish teenagers was Henning Schultz, who was also 15 in 1956. He never forgot the girl on the cover. In 2006, by then a retired geographer, he came across his old copies of the magazine while sorting through his things and decided to find out what had happened to her.
He trawled internet forums, travelled to Hungary, visited the Hungarian National Museum, and got the Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet to print an appeal. None of it brought a breakthrough at first. Then he turned up a 1981 article in which József Árki said the girl in the photo had been killed in the fighting.
Hungarian journalist Adél Tossenberger, working with Schultz's research and Földes's memories, finally pieced together Erika's surname and found her grave. In 2008, Schultz donated his magazines to the Hungarian National Museum, and two Danish foundations funded the museum's acquisition of Hansen's 1956 photographs. As Jefferson Flanders notes, the girl with the submachine gun had stayed nameless until well into the 21st century.
Remembering Erika Today
Erika's photo has never really gone away. It appeared in a Danish history textbook in the 1960s and a British one in 2001. In 2016 she was the central figure on Hungary's stamp marking the 60th anniversary of the revolution. A plaque went up at her old primary school in 2019, and since 2021 a square in Józsefváros, near the home she shared with her mother, has officially been called Szeles Erika tér.
November 2026 marks 70 years since she died. She'd have been 85. Instead she's frozen at 15 in one photo, taken almost by accident, that told the world what Hungary was fighting for before anyone even knew her name.
Sources
We Love Budapest: A lány, aki a forradalom jelképe lett világszerte (in Hungarian)
Museum.hu: Donation from Denmark, Vagn Hansen's pictures of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution
5 Perc Angol: Heroes of 1956, the girl whose photo was on covers around the world
Józsefváros Újság: Teret neveztek el Szeles Erikáról (in Hungarian)
Further Reading
If you want the full story of those twelve days in Budapest, Victor Sebestyen's Twelve Days: Revolution 1956 is one of the best accounts out there, packed with first-hand testimony from fighters, diplomats and ordinary Hungarians.
