Imre Mecs will don his habitual bow tie on Sunday evening and make his way to the opera house in Budapest, one of the finest buildings in the Hungarian capital, to recall the event that marked him for life and shook the world 50 years ago - the Hungarian revolution.
Mr Mecs sat on death row in a dungeon in Budapest for six years as a result of his revolutionary youth. He fully expected to be strung up on wooden gallows by communist henchmen. For a long time, Mr Mecs, now a 73-year-old liberal MP, could not imagine winning free elections in a democracy or attending solemn ceremonies at the opera.
"The statistics were very bad," Mr Mecs recalled. "Almost 400 of us were sentenced to death and 233 were executed. At one point 19 out of 20 of the condemned were being executed, so I didn't think I would make it."
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