THE PICTURES are grainy, grey, and evocative of the dramatic and doomed events they sought to capture.
Students with small cameras, euphoric, frantically snapped scenes of protest, of hated statues being pulled down, of defiant speeches being read out. But soon their frames were capturing the military hardware of the Soviet state, impatient with the gnat bites of an impudent subject people.
The scenes are from the Hungarian uprising against Moscow's rule in October 1956. The revolt soared briefly across the leaden skies of eastern Europe, a place battered by the recent global holocaust and subjugated to the increasing megalomania of Josef Stalin.
Budapest, the loyely city on the Dahdbe, was the scene of much of the gallant resistance, and Uncompromising crushing, that the world watched from a safe distance. (Suez was happening elsewhere, distracting Britain and France, and the US was not going to risk a confrontation with Russia.)
But elsewhere, although the governments did nothing, the ordinary people marched in solidarity with the citizens of Hungary. Dublin was one of these places, as was Paris, with students of the Sorhonne loud in their protests.
Today in the peaceful library of St Patrick's College, Maynooth, the tumult and the shouting of those anguished hopeful days of October 1956 are distant. But in the mind of Maynooth's librarian, Mr Thomas Kabdebo, the Hungarian uprising is never far away.
Mr Kabdebo, a scholar and linguist who has been in charge at Maynooth since 1983, was a university student in Budapest when Hungary tried to shake off the Soviet shackles. His book about the uprising, A Time For Everything: 1956, has been translated into English 20 years after it first appeared in his native tongue.
"When it appeared for the 20th anniversary of the 1956 revolt it was banned in Hungary," Mr Kabdebo says. "You would be imprisoned for circulating it. But after the liberation of 1989 it was republished, and the German publisher was awarded a prize in 1992."
The book is "faction", he says, with fictional characters living out the events he witnessed 40 years ago. "At the time I was writing it was still dangerous to use the names of real people."
Mr Kabdebo went underground after 1,000 Russian tanks crushed the rebellion at the beginning of November, and made his way to England via Austria by the end of the year. He was one of the lucky ones - estimates of the Hungarian dead vary wildly, but the lowest assessment is around 2,000.
He finished his education in England, and has since lived in Italy, Britain and South America before seeing the job at Maynooth advertised in 1983. (Much of the attraction of living in Ireland, he says, was "the fishing".)
Currently an exhibition of memorabilia of the heady, short lived days of October November 1956 is on display at the Maynooth library. This, and the republishing of his book, is important for Mr Kabdebo, but he says this year is really no different for him. "Just because it is 40 years does not mean anything special to me. I live in that memory always. It has shaped and changed my life completely.
"It is for me like the French Revolution was for the French fighting in Napoleon's army. It was the first crack in the communist system, the first sign that turned western communists away from Moscow."
A Time for Everything is published by Cardinal Press Ltd, Dunboyne Road, Maynooth, Co Kildare.