On this date in 1958, Angyal Istvan was hanged for the failed 1956 Hungarian revolution.

A working-class Jew who survived Auschwitz as a boy — his mother and sister were not so fortunate — Angyal was a convinced leftist who became disaffected with the Hungarian regime not because of its Communism but because of its failure to realize the democratic and egalitarian aspirations of that ideology.

A fixture on the youthful intellectual ferment in Budapest in the early 1950s, he was one of the leaders of street protests against Soviet domination during the doomed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, even conferring personally with Prime Minister Imre Nagy during its last days. In a gesture that not all of his comrades would have supprted, he set out the hammer and sickle along with the Hungarian national flag on November 7, the very eve of the revolution’s defeat, arguing to Soviet troops that they were fighting against true communism.

He’s commemorated today at an Angyal István Park in Budapest; it’s evidently “a modern social place with free Internet” and a nifty paper plane art installation.

On this day..

• 1892: Jozef Lippens and Henri De Bruyne, Congo Free State hostages
• 1671: Hans Erasmus, Count of Tattenbach
• 1944: Charlie Kerins, IRA Chief of Staff
• 1848: James Langford, violent drunk
• 1865: The Jacksonville Mutineers
• 1922: James Mahoney, Seattle spouse slayer
• 1868: Sam Dugan lynched in Denver
• 2010: Shahla Jahed, the footballer's lover
• 1327: Adso's lover in The Name of the Rose
• 1945: Anton Dostler, gone commando
• 1842: Philip Spencer, Samuel Cromwell and Elisha Small, on the ship yardarm
• 1581: Edmund Campion, Ralph Sherwin and Alexander Briant