Seventy-year-old Pacifica resident Les Mohacsy stared at a black-and-white photograph of a barricade built out of cobblestones in Budapest's Moricz Zsigmond Circle during the 1956 revolution. He was looking for the part of the barricade that he built.

"A tank appeared at the top of the street," he recalled of a day early in the uprising, when Soviet tanks were few and unprepared for the resistance they encountered. "They saw a pipe in the cobblestones, and they thought it was a cannon or something, so they shot into the cobblestones. My luck was that I was on the left side, and when the tank shell hit, it sprayed all the cobblestones to the right. I wasn't hit, but those who were on the right side died."

The exhibit at the Hungarian National Museum is one of many marking the revolution's 50th anniversary. Mementos of the uprising hidden away for decades for fear of reprisal from the communist government -- which resumed power two weeks after the outbreak of revolution on Oct. 23, 1956 -- are finally on public display.