[This is an excerpt from the autobiography of my father, Ervin Williger-Varnagy), who died in 2003. It was December 1956, and Bela Barsony, my mother Ily’s brother, and his wife Erzsi had just fled Hungary. This is how they went from Hungarian refugees with a dime to getting a job in Canada.]

Now it was our turn. At Ily’s office a small group of people finalized their plans to leave the country. They asked us to go along.

Ilys parents had no qualms. They offered to keep our baby until there was an opportunity to follow us without risking her life. How long would that take? Nobody knew. We did not even know whether such an opportunity would ever exist.

It was obvious that we had to leave before the first snowfall. With snow on the ground the danger of detection and capture was almost inevitable.

There were new rumors about people disappearing from their homes in the middle of the night. The terror had started again. As usual, the arrests were random. Nobody was safe. My colleagues from the Chemical Society had almost all gone to the West. Even the secretary who typed our “declaration of solidarity” to the revolutionary government was gone. That declaration was but one potential reason for my arrest.

I asked my mother to come and talk to me. We did not dare to go to Buda, since there were police checkpoints on the bridges. She volunteered to come and meet me in the Pest side of the city. My brother Karcsi was with her.

We talked on a bench on Andrassy ut, the same road we walked on with Ily on our wedding day. To me it seemed that this was the road of destiny, once more. Mom told me that she had talked with my stepfather. They did not tell me to stay, they did not advise to go. It was up to me. I sat there on the bench, thinking. Inside I heard a voice: “you must go…” I asked Karcsi what he would do in my place.

He said that his position was different. Neither he or his wife had a college degree. And Panni would not leave her aging parents. When Karcsi and I hugged each other, Mom had tears in her eyes. They turned around and walked away quickly, without ever looking back. I suspect they did not want to give me a chance to change my mind.

It was nearly forty years later that Karcsi and Panni visited us in our home in Ohio, and met our children. They stayed with us for two months. When it was time to return to Hungary, he asked me in private: “why did you not insist that we come along with you?”

…Water under the bridge… Besides: how could I?

The agony of separation

I went home and told Ily that we are leaving. Now came the hard decision: Should we take the baby with us or leave her with her grandparents? We both felt that we would go mad from this decision. This is a decision I would not want any parent to face. But we had to decide, and decide soon.

We made one more round of phone calls to people who had relatives already in Austria or had news from the situation on the border. Most people told us that it was extremely risky to travel with a child. We had waited too long, it was already the middle of December. The weather had turned wintery, the roads were dangerous.

We were told about groups of would-be escapees who were arrested and returned because the baby’s cry gave them away to the border patrol. At this point, no one wanted to travel with a family with small children. There were stories of others who had given their infants sleeping pills, but misjudged the dose. The babies never woke up on the other side of the border. They told us about one mother who had a nervous breakdown after she discovered that she had carried a dead child in her arms for hours.

Later, when I served as an interpreter at a red-cross station in Austria I saw one little blue corpse in the arms of the mother.

Back in Budapest, we did not know any of this for sure. We were not even certain that we could make it safely to Austria. We were torn apart. It was my Grandma who made up our minds for us. She swore to us that she would take care of our baby no matter what, and that she would stop at no sacrifice to bring her out safely to us as soon as the situation permitted. I had seen her fight with the AVO, and I knew she would be true to her word.

We spent the last night doting over our baby. We fed her supper, gave her a bath and Ily held her on her knees for a long time, talking to her, reassuring her that we loved her very much, and we would be together again very soon.

We both kissed her and put her to bed. Ily said, “Goodby my little darling…” We both sobbed and Grandma cried with us.

It was time to gather up our few possessions and leave. We would never see our home, our furniture, our mementos again. Being caught with gold, jewelry or papers was proof to the police that we were planning to escape; so we could not take anything like that. We had on two sets of underwear, two suits of clothes and carried a small briefcase with some documents and personal belongings. Our most precious possession was invisible, imprinted on our brains: a degree in chemical engineering and a degree in architecture. It was enough to provide us comfortably with everything we needed in our new life. We had practically no material possessions as we hugged Ily’s parents one last time and under the cover of darkness we stole out of the apartment. It was the l8th of December 1956.

Goodbye to our home

We spent the night at the Juhász’s apartment so we coul have one last planning session for the trip. There were five of us in the group. Two couples: Ily and I, Leslie and Mártha Juhász. The fifth was Joe Hecks, who left his estranged wife and their one child behind. Leslie, Joe and Helen were colleagues from the same office. Leslie’s wife and I were the outsiders. At twenty-nine years of age, I was the oldest of the five.

Our cover story was that we are going to relatives of Mártha Juhász, to attend a wedding in western Hungary, at Zalaegerszeg, a town near to the Austrian border. We chose our route, because it was out of the way of the direct traffic to the border. Mártha’s parents lived there, and since Ily had spent many summer vacations there, she was quite familiar with the Rába river and the border area.

The main railroad stations in Budapest were patrolled by the Soviets, so we decided to use the less popular Kelenföld station, the same one where we arrived from Austria in 1945. I could not help but notice the irony…

There were eight seats in the compartment. Our party plus three other passengers who were already seated there, filled it all. Hungarians are a talkative people. Under normal circumstances, there would have been introductions and exchange of information about who is traveling where and why. That evening we all sat there without saying a single word.

We left the station more or less on time, without any questions from the authorities. But as the conductor came along to check our tickets, he was accompanied by two armed AVO man. Those who had tickets to Györ, a major railroad cross-point, and further west, were questioned by the AVO man. Identities were checked. Since we were going southwest, they left us alone. They accepted the story about the wedding, because Mártha’s parents lived in Zalaegerszeg.

We arrived late at night and walked the short distance to the house. They were expecting us, although they did not know which day we were coming. We had supper and bedded down for the night. The two women and Leslie slept in the parents large bedroom, while Joe and I slept on folding beds in the dining room. Before I fell asleep, I noticed that Joe and Magda whispered together for a long time in low voices so I could not understand. Before she went to bed Mártha kissed Joe goodnight.

The next morning we had a conference with our hosts about the next move. We were a mere twenty-five miles from the border. But we could not use the major roads since they were patrolled by the Russians. Also the roads ran east-west and the border was to the north. Martha’s father arranged with a farmer whom he trusted to drive us on the backroads to a village South of the Rába river, only a few miles from the border. Since it gets dark early in December in Hungary, it was dark when we took of in the wagon. Mártha’s dad came along.

We spent the night with another peasant family. They were friends of Mártha’s father’s. I think the village was called Rábafüzes. They took a considerable risk by sheltering us since those who helped escapees risked being sent to concentration camp or worse. Bless their heart, they did it anyway. This time we slept four to the bed, fully clothed, under a heavy comforter. I did not sleep too well.

After breakfast our host hitched his wagon and we took off for our final leg to the border. After driving through dirt roads for hours, we finally reached the river Rába. It was not too deep, we guessed it would reach just above our knees at that point; it was fordable. But, being December, it was freezing cold.

We said goodbye to Mártha’s dad. Looking back after all these years, I realize he was another Messenger sent to us by God. Then we stripped to our underwear for the river crossing. The old man stood at the riverbank, crying. He kept calling after me: “Take care of my little daughter!” I assured him that I would. Alas that was one promise I could not keep.

Leslie went in the water first and Joe followed. Mártha whispered to Ily that she could not get wet, so I volunteered to carry her over on my back. I handed my briefcase to Ily who was the last in the water.

We were all in a somber mood, but I could not help noticing the way Joe was crossing the river. He was a short person to begin with. He was bare footed and in his boxer shorts, wearing his jacket, white shirt and tie. Joe waded in the water, carrying his briefcase. His strides were that of a businessman going to the office in the morning. And at every step he dunked the briefcase with all his earthly possessions in the water. I found the way he walked, the water soaking his jacket, with an “I don’t give a damn!” expression on his face was hilarious.

On the far side we gathered together, our legs frozen blue, shivering. A young gypsy boy of about nine or ten years old came along and sold to us three sticks of matches for a hundred forints. (In the store an entire box was sold for half a forint.) We gathered some driftwood and made a small fire to dry and warm up a little. After that we got dressed and headed for the small farmhouse and barn that our host with the wagon had pointed out to us. We were told that they were friendly people and frequently guided refugees across the border.

First we entered the house but the farmer told us to go to the barn. We found a dozen people already there, waiting to cross the border. The main rail line to Austria, also a principal highway, ran between the farm and the border. It was frequently patrolled by Soviet armored carriers, which carried a squad of infantry inside. There was nothing to do but to wait until darkness fell to cross these barriers. Again, nobody made small talk. We did not want to know our traveling companions in case we were captured. We just sat in the hay and ate the sandwiches we carried with us.

By seven o’clock it was sufficiently dark to risk crossing. A young man from the house collected all the Hungarian money we carried, about a thousand forints each. That was two week’s wages for a well-paid tradesman. He led us out of the barn, pointed toward the railroad tracks and warned us about the patrols which he said came “about every half an hour.” He also told us to always bear to the left, westward, and remember not to go north, because we might walk right back to Hungary. With that said, he turned around and went back to the house, leaving us on our own. Not much guidance for almost twelve thousand forints… But he had risked a lot just by talking to us.

We walked to the banks of the railroad tracks, and crossed to the other side. The land was flat. About a hundred yards ahead of us was the highway. There was a fairly large well nearby, really a large concrete ring, the only place to take cover. We ducked behind it and waited for the patrol to pass.

After about fifteen minutes we saw the headlights of two oncoming vehicles. They traveled slowly, with the top open to allow one solder to scan the landscape with binoculars. By some miracle they did not notice us. They passed and darkness fell on the countryside.

We crossed the highway in a hurry. On the other side there was a grassy slope, that looked like a cornfield in the darkness. The crop had been harvested. Past the field was a wide, muddy strip that used to be the minefield. The mines had recently been removed because of the elections in Austria. The communists took a terrible beating at the polls, because the opposition transported busloads of people to the border to show them the brutal reality of the Iron Curtain. After their Austrian comrades complained, the Hungarians removed the mines.

We started to walk in the direction we were told. There was not one star in the sky, no light anywhere, not a sound in the darkness. It was hard walking in the mud, so we made slow progress. Others started to fall behind, but the five of us were young, and we continued on at a brisk pace. We did not ask for or offer help to anyone else. It was every man for himself.

After about a half a mile we found a dirt path that led into a small growth of trees. Gradually we entered the forest, but here we found another obstacle. The trees had been cut so that they fell into our path from both directions. We were forced to climb over them. In the darkness that was not easy, and we kept sliding and falling. Although no one had a compass, someone knew that moss grows on the northern side of a tree. Would did not dare risk using our small flashlight, so we groped around in the darkness to feel for the moss on the bark of the trees. All the time we were moving westward – or what we thought was West – to avoid going back into Hungary. The group spread out even more and soon there were only the five of us left together.

It seemed that we had been wandering among the trees forever. We were not even sure the path was still there. Every so often one of us bumped into a tree, and there was a muffled outcry of pain. We would stop and wait, join up together and keep walking in the darkness. Since I had lost my watch in one of my many falls, I did not know what time it was.

Suddenly Leslie cried out. He had walked headfirst into something, almost knocking himself out. As we gathered around him, I noticed that he had bumped into a concrete post. Cautiously we shined our small flashlight on it to se what it was. It was a border marker to Austria. It was December 21, 1956, about ten o’clock at night when I left Hungary for the second time. [The first was in 1944.]

Once more a homeless refugee

We arrived to freedom exhausted, cold, penniless, stateless, but exhilarated.
We were young, healthy and full of hope.

We had another half hour of slipping and sliding ahead of us, but guided by the barking of some dogs we reached the outskirts of the Austrian village of Deutschbilling. I have loved dogs since that night…

I also noticed that by morning we had the first snowfall of the year. We were lucky in that respect too. Those who tried to escape after us left their footprints in the snow, making it easier for the Soviets to track them down. It also showed the routes that volunteer guides had used to help other refugees. The snow made escaping much more dangerous and difficult.

In the dining area, a mountain of sandwiches and more hot chocolate waited for us. I learned that they had all been made by a young Swiss girl, who slept on the top of a table, and had made up to five hundred sandwiches every day for Hungarian refugees for the past four weeks. Her hands were raw. They told us that she was a concert pianist. May God bless her for this labor of love.

Early afternoon the buses arrived and we were transported to Güssing, a larger community nearby. The Franciscan fathers opened their monastery for us. There were several large halls, probably their working area or assembly hall. Men and women were separated and we all slept on the floor on blankets. Christmas was only two days away.

It is hard to recall all of the many acts of kindness we received from the Austrian population. There was one incident however which I will never forget. It was winter and Joe was very lightly dressed, and had no overcoat. When one farmer noticed this, he called Joe to his house, took out his “best” coat from the cabinet and gave it to him. For centuries the Austrians and Hungarians were at war with each other, but from that point, I knew with certainty that we had become brothers.

My fluency in German and familiarity with the local customs came in handy. We had been on the road for many days at that point, without any opportunity to bathe. When I found out there was a small hospital in the town, I walked in and asked them if I could have a bath. They let me use one of their bathrooms and I soaked in the hot water for a long time. I never enjoyed a bath so much.

Christmas was a bittersweet event since we missed our loved ones. They did not know yet whether we had made it successfully to freedom. But the Christmas dinner… I don’t think our hosts really appreciated our hunger for “luxury ” food like oranges. They peeled a large amount of oranges for fruit salad. The smell of oranges was all over the building. We found the mound of orange peels and ate them as if we were starving. During dinner an elderly gentleman, possibly from the Red Cross, amused himself by tossing us snacks, as if we were monkeys in the Zoo. It did not matter. We grabbed them and enjoyed them like never before.

The next day at lunchtime another visitor came by. It was another “messenger,” although I did not realize it. It was the Hungarian Count Szechy, who left Hungary in 1945 and never returned. He had enough land and property in Austria to live on. But he was a patriot and cared for the refugees. He walked around by the tables, and talked to the people. When he came to us, he asked me if we were well looked after. I said yes, but I had a problem. I explained to him that I had friends in Vienna, and wanted to get in touch with them but had no money for bus fare. He said something like “we’ll see what can be done” and moved on.

The next morning the Pryor called me to the office. I was told that the Count had left bus fare for us so we could travel to Vienna. It was for all five of us. Before he gave me the money, he asked for our identity cards so he cold make sure that we were really married couples…

We said our thanks and bid goodbye to our hosts, and left Gussing. (About a year later I made it a point to send a hundred dollars to the abbey – quite a bit of money for us – as a gift of gratitude.)

We were eager to move on, as far away as possible. Australia and South America were the popular destinies, but anything overseas was OK. Not that we had much choice. Many western European countries wanted no part of us. Others had stringent health restrictions. An appendectomy scar was enough to be rejected for “medical reasons” Béla was not accepted for Australia because he was too short-sighted. He went to England, which was, as it turned out later, a much better choice.

The U.S., my current adopted country, was the most bureaucratic and hypocritical of all. At first they airlifted a few thousand people from the camps, but after that, they only admitted those who had American citizens or institutions “sponsoring” them. That meant that the sponsor accepted total financial responsibility for the new immigrants until they could support themselves. The only ethnic group that took such responsibility was the Jewish community which meant that for a long period of time, the only people accepted for US immigration were Jews.

It could be that someone remembered that in 1939 America refused to admit Jews seeking refuge from Hitler.

It was most surprising to meet among the refugees some Russian solders who fought alongside the Hungarian freedom fighters against Khrushchev’s Bolsheviks. Nobody knew it at that point, but the end of the “glorious” Soviet Union was near. (During our visit to Budapest some thirty years later we also saw the graves of Russian soldiers who gave their lives fighting for a free Hungary.)

On January 21st, we received five dollars in spending money, boarded the train, and left friendly Austria for Trieste, Italy, to embark for the New World.

A cruise-ship to remember

After the rundown, threadbare communist trains we were used to riding on, the train ride on the plush Austrian express was a dream. We arrived to Trieste on the evening of January 22nd, 1957. We were treated to the best Italian dinner in my memory (including a paid Italian cruise forty years later). We slept in a small but comfortable hotel and in the morning, took buses to the harbor. Time to embark! This was the first time I have seen the good ship SATURNIA.

The Saturnia was a 26,000 ton displacement cruise ship, of Italian registry. Its prime functions were Mediterranean cruises and to transport Italian immigrants to the New World. The immigrants traveled third class. We were booked in the second class. We had a two-bunk cabin with a private bath and a porthole, which was nice. In good weather we could have some fresh air, which we did not appreciate until we discovered that the ship’s ventilation system did not work too well. Below us the third class passengers did some of their own cooking, so our cabin was soon saturated with what we called “Saturnia-stench” – it was a mixture of burned vegetable oil, garlic and human odor. (Third class did not have the luxury of shower stalls in every cabin, like we did.)

When the ship departed, the orchestra played the then very popular song: “Arrivederci Roma”, say goodbye Rome… While the Italians cried their hearts out, we spat in the water and shouted: good riddance Europe! We did not want
to see that place again, full of so many bad memories.

Then we went to Barcelona, Spain. Despite the fact that it was late January, the sea was deep blue, the dolphins were playing around the ship and people were swimming in the pool on the deck. The water was smooth like glass. In Barcelona we were shipbound once more – no shore leave for stateless people… But at least we could see a little of that beautiful city from the ship.

When we crossed into the Atlantic, the color of the water turned grayish black and the waves became noticeable. The ship sailed along the coast to Lisbon, Portugal. Here the local Hungarian colony visited the ship (again, no shore leave for us). These were the families who arrived in 1945 with admiral Horthy, who took political asylum in Portugal from the western Allies. (He was considered to be at the very least a participant in the war, and possibly a war criminal. He could have ended up in Soviet hands which meant either being shipped to Siberia or the rope. Our countrymen were warm and loving but having lived in Portugal so long did not really appreciate our predicament. They asked us about the situation in Hungary, gave us rosaries and religious articles and wished us all the best for our new life. At that time we did not realize that these Hungarians were very poor and had had a tough life in exile.

We left Lisbon at night. The next morning the storm started.

Helen [Ily] must come from a long line of seafaring people since she was never seasick at all. She had an excellent appetite for the entire trip, and ate breakfast with gusto. It never bothered her that some of the waiters were even a little green when they brought the food to our table.

I did not eat at all. I found out the hard way just how sensitive I was to motion sickness. Soon I was on deck, by the rail, feeding the fish. Next to me an Italian sailor stood, in uniform, with a chest full of medals. I asked him, that with his naval service, why he still had motion sickness? He just pointed to the submariner’s dolphin on his chest, the poor devil.

The humor of the situation came the next morning. Helen told me that she had a sore throat which I mentioned it to our cabin steward, who only understood that the signora is “sick,” which at that time could only mean seasickness. At mealtime, he showed up with a glass of milk and a single piece of toast. Helen starved all day. She was probably the only one on the whole ship who had enjoyed a good meal.

We kept setting our clocks backwards as we moved through the western longitudes. One morning we awoke to the sight of the ship’s deck covered with a thick coating of ice. Our new country, Canada extended her frosty welcome to us.

We land on the shores of the New World

Our ship set anchor in the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, on the 12th of
February 1957.

Before we left the ship we took advantage of the duty free bar on the Ship one more time. Our already depleted fortunes yielded two more drinks per person. We set foot in Canada with two suitcases, and 10 cents (US) in our pockets. The Canadian dollar was at the time the worlds hardest currency, at 113 U.S. cents. That meant that our fortune was less than 10 Canadian cents.

In contrast to what I have heard of the U.S. Immigration service, the Canadians were friendly, quick and efficient. They had translators on hand and processed approx. 800 Hungarians and I don’t know how many Italians, in just a few hours. We were told that unless we had friends and relatives who could take care of us for a while, that our best bet was to accept the government’s hospitality. They gave us food and lodging for a month, but at a location of their choice. As a policy they channeled new immigrants to the sparsely populated prairie provinces. Our destiny was Winnipeg, Manitoba. Since we had no preference,this was fine with us.

Winnipeg

We arrived to Winnipeg in the middle of winter. Just the week before, we had enjoyed the balmy Mediterranean climate, but now we had to cope with sub-zero weather.

We were billeted in the “immigration hall,” maintained for newcomers like us by the Canadian government. The idea was to keep us alive until we learned enough English to be able to hold down a job and support ourselves. That was more than we expected. Although, to admit it as it was, we were a very cocky bunch, hot from being the “heroes of the uprising,” and we thought that the world owed us one since everyone had let us down against the Russkies.

Soon we learned a few facts of life. First, a large number of “old” Hungarians, who escaped AFTER the 1919 communist revolution lived in Winnipeg. Even after thirty years, hey remained confirmed Marxists. The local office of the “Hungarian Communist Party” still had a picture of the hated Soviet vassal Rákosi in the window. During the Russian occupation he was Stalin’s proconsul, but by that time he was even “out” in Hungary

There were also people who had left Hungary in 1945, but never returned to the country. They spent a rough time in the “Dipi” (displaced persons) camps, where they were treated as suspected war criminals. After they crossed the Ocean,(the lucky ones) they had to repay their transportation costs to the Canadian government. They never received any special favors from anyone and because of this, they were jealous of us and disliked us.

Then we had to cope with the bad reputation that some of our own comrades Had earned for us. There are bad apples in every barrel, and there were those who believed the Hollywood myth that in “America” it is enough to pretend that you are a doctor or engineer and you can get away with it. (Under the years of Soviet rule, lying to the authorities, stealing and cheating became acceptable behavior as long as you did not do it to your own people.) They soon found discovered the consequences of their behavior, but we had already started to see a certain new bias toward us, thanks to those hooligans.

Our future was far from certain, but suddenly a whole string of “messengers” came into our life.

Someone is looking out for us

Even today I cannot recall those first days in Winnipeg without awe. Around us many of our people were swept away to poverty, uncertainty and trouble, but ours followed the straight path.

It all started with the notice that a free English course was available in the dining hall. French language is seldom used in Canada outside Quebec, except where it is required by law (like in writing on toothpaste tubes). Realizing the importance of speaking the main Canadian language, we made an effort to learn English as fast as we could. Our teacher was a volunteer, a nice retired schoolteacher named Mrs. Wilson. We took to each other and became fast friends. After a few weeks we managed to converse with her. She learned of our adventures and how we left our baby behind. She understood our loss and shared our grief.

One day she invited us to their home for dinner. Her husband was a very nice old gentleman of the “British” mold, with Scottish background. He was also a “messenger” to take care of us.

He was very interested in everything we had to say, particularly when he found out about our academic backgrounds. We talked at length about my work at the Plastics Institute at Budapest, and about my knowledge of polymer science. As it turned out he was the owner-manager of a placement firm for technical people. (I never heard that such a thing existed! I had just been looking for a job as a photographer’s apprentice the day before.) He composed a resume for me and sent it out to a number of firms who had previous contact with him.

He was also a member of the local Rotary club and thought that I had enough English to give a presentation at the next monthly dinner. He helped me to write a speech, which included the fact that we had to leave without our baby girl. This had a very great emotional appeal on the good people of Canada.

My speech was a success. I even managed to answer a few questions about Hungary in general and myself in particular. It came out that I was a chemical engineer.

After the meeting a gentleman came to me and gave me a card with his phone number. He was the director of Ogilvie flour mills, a large conglomerate in flour milling and food processing, and also one of my “messengers.”

I showed up for the interview in my “best” outfit (which did not amount to much). The first thing he did was to make me write down the Arabic numerals from one to ten, explaining that in English speaking countries one NEVER crosses the number seven. (With the arrival of computers that is changed by now). Next I was escorted to the lab. It was surprisingly large for what I knew about flour milling, but entirely familiar. I was shown to a rather old analytical balance, just like the one we had in the lab back at the University. He asked me if I could take it apart and calibrate it. Could I ever! I also promptly recognized a battery of Kjeldahl flask which were set up for testing the nitrogen (protein) content in the flour.

They must have been properly impressed with my expertise because I was offered a job on the spot, beginning the next morning. My salary was a princely sum for a freshly arrived refugee: Can $150.00 per month. My benefactor shook hands with me and asked me if we had any place to stay? I told him that we had none.

The next morning a very dignified Canadian lady came into the room smiling. She introduced herself as Mrs. Ella Gibson and invited us to stay with them – as house guests and family members. I did not realize it, but we had just met our Canadian mom.

In less than three weeks in Canada I had a professional job, a home with a well to do Canadian family and a placement agency working for me to get me a permanent job. You may call it luck or coincidence. Knowing what happened to others in Vienna, to me this was no coincidence. Divine Providence was guiding us, every step at the way.

Now that the 50th anniversary of the Revolution and Freedom Fight of 1956 approaches, I reread the relevant books that through the years have found their way onto my bookshelves. I consider myself lucky to have lived to see the regime change in 1989, and am glad to see that Hungary finally has a chance to control its own destiny.

Unfortunately, my father was not able to have rejoiced in this. As he lay gravely ill with dementia in a Pennsylvania hospital in 1986, during my visit, he pointed outside the window, where he could just see a small, red weather flag fluttering in the wind and said, “Commies,” disgustedly. I was shocked as I realized how deep a humiliating experience can be.

I thought of the time in Mosonmagyaróvár where I was born, when, in 1956 the Russian tanks ground the asphalt with their monotone rumbling in the streets around the city block where we lived. When my father came home from work he said to my mother, “Ibi, pack the children’s things; we’re going to the West.” “Lajos, have you gone mad? With three children, no language skills, no useful profession, what are we going to do there?” replied my mother. “I don’t care, I am doomed to manual labor for the rest of my life anyway, but at least the children will have a future.” We children, who were 15, 13, and 11 at the time, understood what he was talking about. Our father, who had refused to become a member of the communist party, after 35 years as a teacher, was reduced to earning our living as a rubble-cleaner, road worker, and warehouse loader.

And so it happened. Our path led to America, where nothing stood in the way of our ambitions; we could go in any direction we desired. It just needed some hard work and perseverance. And so my father retired, and died, as a factory worker.

A flood of memories bursts forth, not only in me, but in anyone who lived through the events of 1956. A couple days ago a representative of the local Hungarian Engineers, Scholars and Technicians Friendship Society asked me to help organize the 1956 commemoration here in Berkeley.

The University of California at Berkeley excelled in helping refugee students at the time. The University provided opportunities for study for over 120 young refugees, mostly in engineering and science, and these graduates went on to become successful builders and contributors to the American economy. They value and appreciate Berkeley’s help at the beginning, and it is for this reason that we will commemorate the events of 1956 with an academic colloquium here. We want to convey to today’s students that in 1956, students of similar ages were willing to sacrifice their lives for those ideals and freedoms that we so often take for granted here in the United States.


Katalin Vörös
After fleeing Hungary, her family lived in Switzerland and she attended the Hungarian secondary school in Burg Kastl, Germany. The family moved to the United States in 1960, and settled in Pennsylvania. She studied at Philadelphia’s Drexel University and worked as an electrical engineer at Philco-Ford and at RCA. She and her husband took leading roles in the Philadelphia Hungarian community, and both lead scout troops. She moved to California in 1982 and continued her studies at UC Berkeley. Katalin is currently the manager of the microfabrication research laboratory at the University and in her spare time coordinates a listserve for the Hungarian community of the San Francisco Bay Area. All six of her grandchildren speak Hungarian.

I was a first year student at Kossuth Lajos Tudományegyetem in Debrecen, studying nuclear physics. Students from Szeged University came to our Univesity on the 21st and reported their 16 points for university autonomy and asked our support. Next day there was a university-wide meeting and a decision to demonstrate. On tIn the fall of 1956 I was a second-year student at the Petõfi High School of Buda. In those days we did not talk much about politics. It was maybe because we brought our political views from home and the politics beyond that – even in school – was just communist junk that we were trying to ignore. The Writers’ Association and the Petõfi Circle were far beyond our interest. The only place I noticed some changes was the newspaper called Free Youth (Szabad Ifjúság). This was the weekly of the communist youth association (DISZ). It was the only newspaper we could read on issues teenagers were interested in. In the fall of 1956 the newspaper was definitely opening toward Western culture. At that time I had already been an enthusiastic jazz fan. Every evening I listened to the 45-minute jazz program of the Voice of America. I was happy to suddenly read positive articles on Louis Armstrong and the rather new rock-and roll, e.g. Elvis Presley which was also of my interest at that time.

So the Revolution was totally unexpected for me. Hereinafter I am not going much into the details of the events of October and November of 1956. On the one hand, they have already been told by many, more competently and authentically. On the other hand, because my role in the events was scarcely more than „a face in the crowd.” So, I am going to deal mostly with those events that are of some special individual or general interest.

In the afternoon of 23 October, 1956, I sat down with a big sigh to do my homework in the apartment of our family in Attila Street (it had a view of the Vérmezõ park, opposite the Déli railway station). I was a smart kid, so the school, set to the average (or low) intelligence, made me immensely bored. Although I was reading books voraciously – good literature but trash as well – I did not feel any challenge to excel at school. As I was writing my homework, I looked up and saw that a group of 20-30 people with our national flags were marching through the Vérmezõ from left to right, namely towards Széll Kálmán Square. I was surprised, although I had already known that some kind of a peaceful demonstration had been planned. In those days I could get distracted from homework even by a sparrow flying by the window, so I quickly jumped up and ran downstairs to see what was going on. I wasn’t suspecting that by the time I would return home, I would become a (tiny) part of world history.

The gathering storm
We were heading toward Bem Square. Somewhere on our way I came across my classmate, Béla Leisz and we spent a few hours together. On Bem Square there was already a large crowd. What happened there has been told by many. When the soldiers displayed the Hungarian flag on the barracks behind the Bem statue (the building used to be the MDF headquarters in the early 90’s), people broke out in a huge cheer. And now a side comment: I think, usually there is not enough awareness about how splendidly the Hungarian Army and the common, so called „blue-uniformed” police performed during the Revolution. The peasant boys of the Army did not hesitate even for a moment which side to join in this fight. The same applied to the regular police. They were mainly prole bumpkins who kept intimidating the civilians as it was expected of them. But when they had to make this decision, they knew exactly where to stand. I saw blue-uniformed policemen patrolling in the streets as members of the National Guard many times during the Revolution, but no one gave them a dirty look.

One more thing about Bem Square: sometimes there is a confusion about who recited the poem “Nemzeti dal” (National Song) there. It was Ferenc Bessenyei. Our other great actor, Imre Sinkovits, later an unforgettable friend of mine, wrote his name – not the last time -into the glorious pages of Hungarian history at the Petõfi statue.

At the Parliament
From here we went to the Parliament. This is a well-known story, too. What I remember clearly is how astonished I was that when the crowd was already repeatedly shouting: „Russkies, go home!”, „Out with the Russians!”, and Imre Nagy appeared on the balcony of the Parliament, calling us „Comrades!”. Then the crowd, as if it had been trained to do it, shouted back as one: “We are not comrades!” So I thought: „Is he really that dumb? Doesn’t he understand what this is all about?” Of course Imre Nagy has to be put in his place. There was no one else. The least beastly Moscovite was demanded by the crowd, because they did not know of anyone else. And Imre Nagy was not prepared at all to lead such a revolutionary movement, he was swept along by the events. As a matter of fact, in this situation even a Winston Churchill would not have been able to avert the predictable brutal Soviet retribution. To the end of his life Imre Nagy identified with the Revolution. If he had behaved in a cowardly fashion, like others, very likely he could have saved his neck. He chose otherwise. Although I do not think much of his life, as a good Christian, I believe that he redeemed himself with his martyrdom and I bow deeply before his memory.

One more thing I remember from Kossuth Square: at some point the ÁVH goons, or who else, turned off the street lights supposing that we would be frightened in the darkness. We enjoyed an early October evening. The people in the crowd set fire to their newspapers almost simultaneously and these lit up the square for a few minutes. It was heartwarming to see so many issues of the communist daily burning.

To the Radio!
In the meanwhile the „red” working class got in motion. When somebody issued the word: „To the Radio!”, dozens of the then standard Csepel trucks appeared. (It must have been the evil CIA who organized it so well!) I was sitting on the front right fender of one of the first Csepels and kept holding hands tightly with the guy sitting on the left fender. Otherwise we would have fallen off, maybe under the wheels. People were sitting on the top of the driving cab as well, and I remember the driver shouting at them to keep their feet apart because he could not see the road. One of the most memorable moment to me, albeit very small, happened during this drive. We were driving along today’s Károly Boulevard toward the Radio. I think the Csepel I was sitting on was close to the front of the procession. Ahead of us, there was an old couple standing at a streetcar stop. By their appearance and their attitude they looked to me like old style gentlefolk, to the communists they were probably just old “reactionaries.” As we were approaching them, a truckful of howling beasts, the man was looking at us with open disgust. „What is this damned communist circus again?” – he probably thought. Then, as we got closer, the old gentleman realized that we were shouting: „Russians go home!” and „We want freedom!”, etc., and in a second a heavenly joy spread over his face. He almost started to jump up and down as he was waving to us with both hands. This small highlight is one of the most important memories that I have of 1956, showing what it was all about.

When we arrived to the Radio there had already been a huge crowd there. From the Múzeum Boulevard we could hardly get into Bródy Sándor Street. By that time the ÁVH soldiers had already been shooting tear-gas grenades. It was the first time of my life that I tasted tear gas. The second time occurred at Columbia University in 1971-72, during the anti-Vietnam demonstrations. Then, of course, I had fights only with the Ho-Ho-Ho-Shi-Minh-type hippies. At the Radio, even the Army joined in. Dozens of young soldiers were arriving, probably from the nearby Kilian barracks. They were hugging stacks of rifles, like brushwood, 6-8 together. I thought I would take one home for later use, but on second thought, I realized that it would have given the willies to my Mother. Than the bullets started their odd patter. I was holed up in a streetcar on Múzeum Boulevard opposite to Bródy Sándor Street, and we were definitely taking incoming fire.

I started to feel terribly guilty because of my Mother. My parents were divorced by then and I lived with my Mother and my little sister. I knew that my Mother was in a fright. She was convinced that where the biggest mess in the city was, that’s where her little son would be. And she was right. By that time the shooting could be heard all over the town, even on the other side of the Danube, in Buda. I also thought that to die a hero’s death would be a bit premature. This battle is not going to end here, at the Radio. One more thing: according to my Christian belief, the heroes killed there, such as István Hegedûs, the great pentathlete, are sitting at the right of the Lord. May their memory be blessed!

So I went home to reassure my mother, but I was pushing her to let me go back. She agreed only if she came with me. We did reach Kálvin Square, but there was no going further from that point, unless I wanted to drag my mother into the middle of the shootings.

Grounded for a day, then roaming all over town
For October 23 I got my reward: I was ordered not to leave our apartment. I could have snuck out, but my Mother, besides all her love and tenderness, knew exactly how to use an iron fist with her beloved son, if needed. By the 25th the fights stopped, so after a long begging my mother let me out to look around in town. I was strictly ordered to be back at a specific hour of early afternoon. This may have saved my life.

In my curiosity I covered enormous distances that day. Of course, there was no public transportation. I visited my father who then lived in Visegrádi Street. At that time, opposite to the Nyugati railway station – at the place of the underpass that is in front of the present department store, there was a row of bazaar shops with the notorious Ilkovics bar at the end – I saw dead corpses for the first time in my life. One of them was that of an elderly gentleman who even had his hat on and was shot in the middle of his forehead. The other was a young soldier who was sitting peacefully on the entrance stair of a shop, leaning to the wall. The bullet went through his chin and then his throat. I hope it does not sound too morbid, but I could not tear myself away from the sight of this young soldier. I couldn’t possibly understand that this good-looking, presumably peasant boy who must have lived, hoped and loved and certainly risked his life 1 or 2 days ago, could just pass away so easily. It was extremely hard to leave that place, though I said my prayers for both of them.

Downtown I passed the Gorkij bookstore. The store, which had been promoting the Soviet culture, was now burnt out. Books and records were thrown in the street. I am not a fan of burning books and records at all, but the „Sovietskaya cultura” much deserved this. I think the same of the lynching of the ÁVH’s murderous thugs, that was committed on Köztársaság Square. My guiding principle on this is that in a revolution, the system being overthrown reaps the fruits of its own bestiality. They’ve asked for it! Nothing happened on Köztársaság Square that came close to the brutality of the previous Rákosi regime. I accept the lynching that happened there, approve of them even today. I was not there, though.

On my way home I joined a peaceful demonstration near Károly Boulevard. It was an unarmed procession to the Parliament. I walked with them a few hundred meters, but then I remembered my mother’s strict order, so I headed home. Once again, this was Thursday, the 25th. Later on Kossuth Square this demonstration was strafed with machine guns by the ÁVH, killing some 110 people. If I had stayed with them, I might have gotten a bullet in my butt, not to mention worse places.

About Radio Free Europe
Then almost 10 days passed without any fights and we thought that everything would be all right. We were listening to the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe and hoped. Now I would like to tell off a rather generally accepted lie. Radio Free Europe never instigated anyone to fight with weapons. They gave advice, encouragement, but only to the effect that we should not be fooled by the communists, and should not give up what we already achieved that far. Anybody who says otherwise is either ignorant, or a liar. What else could they have said then from Munich? „People, don’t be silly. Go home and lay down the arms. The nice Soviets will come back and everything will be all right??” Who would have believed this bunk? To my opinion it is a profound disesteem of the heroes of ’56 to state that the reason they took up arms was that they were fooled by Radio Free Europe. Well, one more thing is that I naively believed, together with many others, in a possible U.S. intervention. The fact that it did not occur doesn’t show how cynical and deceptive the U.S was. It only shows how ignorant and uninformed we were.

During my 12-year service in the U.S. Senate, one of my most difficult tasks was to explain to my homeland compatriots what a small spot Hungary is on the map of world politics. To expect the U.S. to risk another world war for this small „real estate” was nonsense. The Red Army stayed in the country all along, although there was a temporary ceasefire. After the revolution the U.S. sent us tons of aid, tinned food, cheese, chocolate, even chewing gum and cigarettes (I smoked Chesterfields and Camels for the first time in my life, although later I wisely gave that up). I could get dressed partly from the clothes they sent. The U.S. welcomed the tens of thousands of refugees from Hungary with love, jobs, and scholarships. Anyone who expected more than that, e.g. a U.S. invasion, had no idea of the realities of world politics.

The battle of Vérmezõ
Early Sunday morning, November 4th, we were awakened by cannonfire. Although we had heard Nagy Imre’s dramatic radio address, replayed a hundred times since then, we soon realized that we had to seek shelter in the basement of our building. Vérmezõ turned into a battlefield. Some 8-10 Soviet tanks camped out there. There was infantry too; they were cowering behind the tanks. Their presence had two reasons. In the huge postal service building over Széll Kálmán Square freedom fighters had taken up positions. On the other side, the Soviets streaming in from Alkotás Street received a drastic welcome from the ramparts of the Castle Hill, above us. Two of my friends excelled at this fight, Öcsi and Dódi Kolompár. They were sons of a gypsy family who a few years before had moved to a flat in Logodi Street, above Attila Street on the hill. They had 4-5 brothers or sisters. Öcsi and Dódi were 2-3 years older than me. This is a big gap at this age, so we weren’t really close. Anyway, they were extremely friendly fellows who never made their apparent physical power felt. They fought heroically among the freedom fighters of the Castle Hill area, which taught me a new lesson. Namely, that the trustworthy and honest patriotic gypsy is just as good a Hungarian brother of mine as anybody else meeting this description. The Kolompár brothers were given heavy prison sentences. The last time I saw their mother was in 1957, when we were in line in the yard of the prison of Markó Street to pass in „cleaning packages.” I was there for my father, who was also jailed there at that time.

During the battle of Vérmezõ, the “liberating” Red Army set our clothing closet on fire by a phosphorous incendiary bullet, shooting through the apartment next to ours. I always wanted to ask Nikita Sergeyevich Khruschev why that was necessary, but I never had a chance. Fortunately, we were regularly patrolling in the house so the fire was soon noticed and put out. By then all of our winter clothes, coats, scarves, hats had been burnt and become useless. The burnt smell had been biting our noses for months, even after cleaning up the ruins. Also at night, when the gunfire largely ceased, we were peeking out at the Russkies. We saw that this rabble called the Red Army broke into all the shops around Alkotás Street, on the other side of Vérmezõ. They broke into the sweet-shop (liqueurs), the flower shop, the bar (of course!) and even the stationery store. The one shop they did not touch was selling watches and jewelry. Obviously they couldn’t read the sign-board and the employees had previously taken out every giveaway item from the store windows, so the place looked rather poor and shoddy. Also it may have had better locks.

Ceasefire and breadline
In the morning of November 7th we woke up to total silence. The Soviets seemed to have ordered a ceasefire in honor of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Along with 2-3 men we decided to get some bread. Somehow we learned that the bakery at the corner of Kékgolyó and Ráth György Streets was working. I did not dare to tell my mother that I was leaving, I just sent word to her to the basement that I left for bread. We did not dare to cross Vérmezõ because of the Soviets. We rather got around it toward Krisztina Boulevard. I was really scared that we would get shot, but fortunately we managed to reach the bakery. There was already a very long line standing there, almost half of Buda. We had to stand in line for almost 8 hours, but we passed the time talking. I went home triumphantly carrying two loaves of bread, 2-kilo each, still warm, under my arms.. Although I think my Mother was much more happy to see me than the bread. I gave a half kilo each to two friendly families, but I did not even think of sharing the rest. “Just let your stomachs rumble. I was the one risking my skin, and waiting for 8 hours,” – I thought.

Lastly, I want to recall one more episode. In the days of November, the city was still occupied physically by the Soviets. By the Nyugati railway station at a street identity check a Soviet soldier gave my father a giant kick with his boot, where it hurts the most. Though he did not live far from there, he could hardly drag himself home, almost crawling. After that, for several days I went to his place in Visegrádi Street by bicycle to start the fire in his stove, to get him food, etc. One day I was riding home along Szent István Boulevard toward the Margaret Bridge. By that time a few of the buses were running, but not the streetcars because the rails had been torn up. I was passing by a crowded bus, on the back stair of which the actor Imre Sinkovits was standing. At that time the back platforms of the buses were still open. One could travel on the steps if the bus was too crowded. At both sides of the bridgehead Soviet tanks were posted. On our side a Soviet soldier was standing in front of the tank. As the bus got there – I was about 5 meters behind them – Imre delivered a huge spit to the Russki’s feet. The Russki never batted an eyelid. He might have thought that in Hungary too, this was the way of greeting each other. Of course, at that time I did not know Imre personally, but many years later I shared this story with him at his great pleasure.

In 1957, in my high school, I joined an anti-communist conspiracy and later I spent time in prison. I hesitated whether to write up that story or the one above, and I chose the latter. That’s because the previous one had already been written several times, e.g. in an excellent, long interview with me and five of my co-conspirators in the March 11, 2006 issue of Magyar Nemzet. The interview entitled „A Népköztársaság nevében…” can be found in Hungarian on the Internet. It was written by István Stefka. I cannot add much to that.


Bulcsú Veresshe 23rd we marched from the University to the city center, singing the Mardeillese! I sang it in French, since I studied in a Licee Francais in Gödöllõ when I was 10 years old, run by the Norbertine Fathers. The school was closed two years later and the buildings later became the Agricultural University where my mother worked in 1956 as a laboratory assistant and where I participated in gymmnastics and skiing university sports while still in high-school at Petõfi Gimnázium in the village of Aszod. I graduated in June of 1956 and was admitted to Debrecen, where I joined the new nuclear physics program, being one of 16 admitted from over 200 applicants.

After the demonstration on the 23rd, news came that in Budapest shots were fired that same evening, so we regrouped and defended our university with the armory of the ROTC corps that we were all members of. We had, however, no ammunition and hoped that whoever would attack us would not know this! At the same time the student council contacted the Hungarian Army barracks in the city and they decided to support us. News came that in Budapest the revolution succeeded — we thought we were the only ones doing a revolution, as a postcard I wrote to my parents would have testified. However, they never received the postcard.

TOWN MEETINGS
I volunteered to the student council with a friend from the same dormitory, Zoltán Bódy (may he rest in peace; he died about 10 years ago after becoming a professor at our alma mater in Debrecen that I visited again some 5 years ago…). A bus picked us up in the morning at the student dorm and at each village around Debrecen 2 students and a soldier (whom we picked up at the barracks, similarly volunteers but with official Hungarian Army approval) were dropped to organize a town meeting, inform the people of events in Budapest, disarm the police, and organize the national guard with their help. As young and enthusiastic eighteen year-olds we did this without a hitch and even without any sense of danger, ending up with the whole village singing the Hungarian National anthem, then they invited us to a wedding where the bus on its return picked us up around 10 . p,m. to take all 36 of us back to Debrecen.

My village was Görbeháza where I visited again last year after 49 years and hardly recognized the town — the church and the Cultural Hall where I held the meeting were still there, but the deep mud was gone, all paved roads, many new buildings. The other 11 teams of soldiers and students were in other surrounding villages of the district, were similarly tired but succesful.

GDYE SUEZ?
The next day (Thursday) I decided to hitch-hike to Budapest to find my parents in Gödöllõ. As I hitched a ride on food-trucks carrying pigs and wheat to feed the capital, at night convoys of Russian Army trucks passed us. Someone shouted at us: GDYE SUEZ? [Where is the Suez Canal?] This was supposed to be the withdrawal of the Soviet troops agreed with the new Hungarian Government… I arrived about 10 o’clock at night to Budapest to Üllõi út where the food was offloaded. I started to walk, then heard some shots in the distance. A patrol stopped me : who are you? A student from Debrecen — I showed my student ID. They were revolutionaries patrolling the streets, trying to capture any secret police in hiding or trying to escape. This happened to me about three times in the dark streets before reaching my cousin’s house near Kálvin Tér. My pants were completely wet when I climbed the stairs to the third floor and they let me in…

Next day was the 1st of November and I took the electric train to Gödöllõ, picking up all the free newspapers on the way to the Keleti train station. It was euphoria… we had finally won! My mother and father were happy to see me. In fact, my father had gone by motorcycle to my dorm to try to pick me up — only to be told that I had left! He could at least bring back my clothes and books! I could not, however, forget the ominous Russian convoys coming towards Budapest that passed us: Will this last? I thought to myself, Imre Nagy just declared Hungary’s neutrality — will they respect it?

The Revolution really threw me into the world at 18 to fend for myself. I believe it is perhaps the single most important event in the 20th century that turned the tide on communism.

WALKING TO AUSTRIA
We decided with a high school friend to go into hiding at the state farm where my father worked, in Balatonfenyves, near the lake Balaton, after the Russian invasion on November 4th., Around the 10th of November, when we saw that no help was forthcoming, we feared for our safety. Then, on the 23rd, we started walking toward the border, after my father went there on a motorcycle the day before to see that if it was still possible to cross. From Keszthely it was a walk of some 120 km, however we could hitch some bus rides as far as Zalaegerszeg. There the driver told us to get out and walk around the hills towards Zalalövõ since Zalaegerszeg was already controlled by the Russians This we did and the evening w arrived to a house where my father had been the previous day and where they put us up for the night. It was a wedding feast that night; we drank and danced and the people who knew where we were going told us “Go and tell them: we are very disappointed!”. I still remember the face of the little old lady who could have been my grandmother who told me this.

The next day we started walking early through the fields and reached the river Mura in the afternoon that we had to cross to get to the border. Incidentally, there was fresh snow and fog and we got lost — my father thought we could only cross out towards Yugoslavia but we wound up by the river, highway, forest and railway line near the Austrian border. There was a patrol on the bridge, so we walked a bit downriver where a man with a boat took us across and hid us in a barn. The highway and rail line were already guarded so he suggested we wait till night when he would try to take us across. By the time midnight came instead of the 2 of us there were a dozen of us hiding in the barn, similarly picked up by the man with the boat during the day as they were coming across the fields. Some were Hungarian soldiers, some students, some families.

At midnight we filed in a single file towards the border. First a patrol vehicle passed the highway and we rushed across after it left. On the railway two Russian soldiers were patrolling on foot. However, we were 12 and they did not know whether we were armed (we were not) so they turned back and let us pass. Then in the forest in the snow we walked towards the border. The guide with us turned back, we gave him all the Hungarian currency we had with us as our gratitude. He warned us to turn west and not north, since then we might cross back to Hungary. We crossed the border at Deutshcbillings near Csáktornya on the night of the 24th of November. W reached an Austrian border post, I greeted them in German, and they took us to a schoolhouse where there were already about a hundred people they gathered during the night. They showed us a movie that I still remember: “Ferien in Tyrol…” They then took us to a makeshift quarter at the school where I started the cheese my father had packed for me… I was safe!

Dr. Steven Julius Török
Born in 1938, he took part in the events in Debrecen and Budapest. After escaping to the West via Austria, he lived in Japan, where this story was published in his 1963 high school magazine, Koni Course. He became a friend of the bestselling author Shiba Ryotaro in Osaka, who modeled the hero of his novel “Ryomaga Yuku” about Dr. Török. Shiba only told him this later, after the novel had sold 17 million copies in Japan. His friend passed away 10 years ago, but he is now writing a historical novel about the 13th century in Hungary dedicated to Shiba’s memory. The novel features Prince Kálmán of the Árpád Dynasty and will be published this year, possibly in China, in English. Dr. Török also lived in the United States, attending Stanford University in California and earning a PhD from Columbia University in 1976. After his retirement from the United Nations in 1998 he repatriated to Hungary, where he now lives in his ancestral home.

I was a first year student at Kossuth Lajos Tudományegyetem in Debrecen, studying nuclear physics. Students from Szeged University came to our Univesity on the 21st and reported their 16 points for university autonomy and asked our support. Next day there was a university-wide meeting and a decision to demonstrate. On the 23rd we marched from the University to the city center, singing the Mardeillese! I sang it in French, since I studied in a Licee Francais in Gödöllõ when I was 10 years old, run by the Norbertine Fathers. The school was closed two years later and the buildings later became the Agricultural University where my mother worked in 1956 as a laboratory assistant and where I participated in gymmnastics and skiing university sports while still in high-school at Petõfi Gimnázium in the village of Aszod. I graduated in June of 1956 and was admitted to Debrecen, where I joined the new nuclear physics program, being one of 16 admitted from over 200 applicants.

After the demonstration on the 23rd, news came that in Budapest shots were fired that same evening, so we regrouped and defended our university with the armory of the ROTC corps that we were all members of. We had, however, no ammunition and hoped that whoever would attack us would not know this! At the same time the student council contacted the Hungarian Army barracks in the city and they decided to support us. News came that in Budapest the revolution succeeded — we thought we were the only ones doing a revolution, as a postcard I wrote to my parents would have testified. However, they never received the postcard.

TOWN MEETINGS
I volunteered to the student council with a friend from the same dormitory, Zoltán Bódy (may he rest in peace; he died about 10 years ago after becoming a professor at our alma mater in Debrecen that I visited again some 5 years ago…). A bus picked us up in the morning at the student dorm and at each village around Debrecen 2 students and a soldier (whom we picked up at the barracks, similarly volunteers but with official Hungarian Army approval) were dropped to organize a town meeting, inform the people of events in Budapest, disarm the police, and organize the national guard with their help. As young and enthusiastic eighteen year-olds we did this without a hitch and even without any sense of danger, ending up with the whole village singing the Hungarian National anthem, then they invited us to a wedding where the bus on its return picked us up around 10 . p,m. to take all 36 of us back to Debrecen.

My village was Görbeháza where I visited again last year after 49 years and hardly recognized the town — the church and the Cultural Hall where I held the meeting were still there, but the deep mud was gone, all paved roads, many new buildings. The other 11 teams of soldiers and students were in other surrounding villages of the district, were similarly tired but succesful.

GDYE SUEZ?
The next day (Thursday) I decided to hitch-hike to Budapest to find my parents in Gödöllõ. As I hitched a ride on food-trucks carrying pigs and wheat to feed the capital, at night convoys of Russian Army trucks passed us. Someone shouted at us: GDYE SUEZ? [Where is the Suez Canal?] This was supposed to be the withdrawal of the Soviet troops agreed with the new Hungarian Government… I arrived about 10 o’clock at night to Budapest to Üllõi út where the food was offloaded. I started to walk, then heard some shots in the distance. A patrol stopped me : who are you? A student from Debrecen — I showed my student ID. They were revolutionaries patrolling the streets, trying to capture any secret police in hiding or trying to escape. This happened to me about three times in the dark streets before reaching my cousin’s house near Kálvin Tér. My pants were completely wet when I climbed the stairs to the third floor and they let me in…

Next day was the 1st of November and I took the electric train to Gödöllõ, picking up all the free newspapers on the way to the Keleti train station. It was euphoria… we had finally won! My mother and father were happy to see me. In fact, my father had gone by motorcycle to my dorm to try to pick me up — only to be told that I had left! He could at least bring back my clothes and books! I could not, however, forget the ominous Russian convoys coming towards Budapest that passed us: Will this last? I thought to myself, Imre Nagy just declared Hungary’s neutrality — will they respect it?

The Revolution really threw me into the world at 18 to fend for myself. I believe it is perhaps the single most important event in the 20th century that turned the tide on communism.

WALKING TO AUSTRIA
We decided with a high school friend to go into hiding at the state farm where my father worked, in Balatonfenyves, near the lake Balaton, after the Russian invasion on November 4th., Around the 10th of November, when we saw that no help was forthcoming, we feared for our safety. Then, on the 23rd, we started walking toward the border, after my father went there on a motorcycle the day before to see that if it was still possible to cross. From Keszthely it was a walk of some 120 km, however we could hitch some bus rides as far as Zalaegerszeg. There the driver told us to get out and walk around the hills towards Zalalövõ since Zalaegerszeg was already controlled by the Russians This we did and the evening w arrived to a house where my father had been the previous day and where they put us up for the night. It was a wedding feast that night; we drank and danced and the people who knew where we were going told us “Go and tell them: we are very disappointed!”. I still remember the face of the little old lady who could have been my grandmother who told me this.

The next day we started walking early through the fields and reached the river Mura in the afternoon that we had to cross to get to the border. Incidentally, there was fresh snow and fog and we got lost — my father thought we could only cross out towards Yugoslavia but we wound up by the river, highway, forest and railway line near the Austrian border. There was a patrol on the bridge, so we walked a bit downriver where a man with a boat took us across and hid us in a barn. The highway and rail line were already guarded so he suggested we wait till night when he would try to take us across. By the time midnight came instead of the 2 of us there were a dozen of us hiding in the barn, similarly picked up by the man with the boat during the day as they were coming across the fields. Some were Hungarian soldiers, some students, some families.

At midnight we filed in a single file towards the border. First a patrol vehicle passed the highway and we rushed across after it left. On the railway two Russian soldiers were patrolling on foot. However, we were 12 and they did not know whether we were armed (we were not) so they turned back and let us pass. Then in the forest in the snow we walked towards the border. The guide with us turned back, we gave him all the Hungarian currency we had with us as our gratitude. He warned us to turn west and not north, since then we might cross back to Hungary. We crossed the border at Deutshcbillings near Csáktornya on the night of the 24th of November. W reached an Austrian border post, I greeted them in German, and they took us to a schoolhouse where there were already about a hundred people they gathered during the night. They showed us a movie that I still remember: “Ferien in Tyrol…” They then took us to a makeshift quarter at the school where I started the cheese my father had packed for me… I was safe!


Dr. Steven Julius Török
Born in 1938, he took part in the events in Debrecen and Budapest. After escaping to the West via Austria, he lived in Japan, where this story was published in his 1963 high school magazine, Koni Course. He became a friend of the bestselling author Shiba Ryotaro in Osaka, who modeled the hero of his novel “Ryomaga Yuku” about Dr. Török. Shiba only told him this later, after the novel had sold 17 million copies in Japan. His friend passed away 10 years ago, but he is now writing a historical novel about the 13th century in Hungary dedicated to Shiba’s memory. The novel features Prince Kálmán of the Árpád Dynasty and will be published this year, possibly in China, in English. Dr. Török also lived in the United States, attending Stanford University in California and earning a PhD from Columbia University in 1976. After his retirement from the United Nations in 1998 he repatriated to Hungary, where he now lives in his ancestral home.

On October 23, 1956, in Budapest, the largest demonstration occurred in front of the Parliament. In the large square in front of the monumental building there was room for tens of thousands of people. I went there by myself, not with an organized group, to demand with the other demonstrators the appearance of Imre Nagy. We wanted reassurance that he and not the hated and feared Stalinists would lead the coun-try.

While waiting for Nagy to appear, I engaged in conversation with my fellow demonstrators. What an exhilarating experience it was to discuss openly and frankly the country’s problems and future with strangers, without fear of the secret police.
“I hope Nagy will show,” I said.
“There he is,” yelled a young woman, pointing toward the Parliament building where Nagy ap-peared on a platform, accompanied by a number of people. The crowd cheered.
“I wonder whether his entourage consists of his aides, or if they are secret police, to keep him un-der control,” I remarked.
As the applause died down, Nagy started to speak. “Comrades!”
We booed so loudly that it convinced Nagy – or those with him – that the tone of the impromptu speech would have to be changed.
“My friends!”

We were overjoyed. The crowd went wild. After about eight years of communist rule, finally we were addressed properly.

I do not remember anything memorable about the speech, but it seemed that by allowing Nagy to address the demonstrators, the Stalinist leaders accepted him as the future leader of the country.

My jubilation turned into concern when the news spread on the square that fighting had broken out in the eighth district, near my home. While still listening to Imre Nagy, we learned that demonstrators at the radio station requested that their demands be announced over the airwaves. At first the Stalinists sent army troops to disperse the demonstrators. Instead, the soldiers sided with the people. Unable to control either the police or the armed forces, the Stalinists ordered the secret police to use force. Only they were willing to shoot at the unarmed demonstrators.

To me, the armed intervention of the secret police was a signal that the Hungarian Stalinists and the Russians would not give up Hungary. Standing in the square that was named after Lajos Kossúth, leader of the 1848 revolution against the Hapsburgs (a revolution which was defeated by the Russian army), I was concerned that now, just as then, Hungary might again be at the mercy of great powers, without help. On one of the sculptures on the square were carved the words of the poet Sándor Petõfi, who described the nation’s fight in that nineteenth-century revolution:
From the mountain to the lower Danube,
In the storm with painful cries and no friends,
Covered with wounds and cuts in the midst of fight,
All by himself, the Hungarian stands.
* * *

Yes, in 1956, we Hungarians were all alone in our fight for freedom. Since then, not only Hungary, but its neighbors as well attained democratic political systems. In general, the national minorities also enjoy more rights than before, although contrary to democratic ideals, in some of these countries the Hungarian populated areas lost their autonomy that they one time or another enjoyed under communist rule.

We can only hope that in time the three million Hungarians living in the neighboring democracies will also enjoy the freedom and right to self-determination their brethren fought for in 1956.

Excerpted from his book, BUDAPEST EXIT: A Memoir of Fascism, Communism, and Freedom (Texas A&M University Press). The book has received numerous excellent reviews throughout the United States, England, and Hungary. It is available from the publisher, Barnes and Noble, and on www.amazon.com.

Csaba Téglás
Born in 1930, he took part in the Revolution ,then fled Hungary and made his way to Toronto, Canada, and ultimately to the United States. He is a semi-retired city planning consultant. For nearly forty years he has been living in White Plains, near New York City, where locals know him as a champion tennis player. He is married to Rowena, a Scottish lady, who speaks Hungarian. They have two sons, Nicholas and Gordon. He is a member of the Coordinating Committee for the Commemoration of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

The Start of the Revolution
I was 9 yrs. old and my sister Kathy was 8. We were doing our school homework on Oct. 23, 1956. My Mom came home from work, very excited, telling my grandfather, who was babysitting us, to turn on the radio. She told us about the exciting march and happenings on the Buda side of the Danube that afternoon. She worked downtown on Dorottya street., near the famous Gerbeaud Pastry Shop. She and other fellow colleagues went to the top of the high office building to see university students from the “Müegyetem,” marching with Hungarian flags, singing patriotic songs and yelling for others to join in. They were marching to the statue of General Bem (a Polish national hero) to show sympathy for the recent striking marchers in Poland and to lay a wreath there.

My father came home from his office and my Mom was trying to explain to him that something important had happened. He calmed her down and said let’s have dinner and we are going to the Madács Theatre, downtown. The play started on time at 8 pm. You could already notice some excitement in the crowd, but no one knew what was happening on the other side of the city. After an hour into the play, gunshots were heard outside from a distance. The play was stopped and one actor, Bárdi György came out on stage and recited a poem by the famous Hungarian poet, Ady Endre. This was a surprise and not part of the program. Everyone was told to go home. Outside, on the streets, people everywhere were excited and yelling “There is a revolution. Let’s go to Brody Sándor street to take over Radio Budapest and announce to the country and to the world that the Revolution has begun.” This was around 10 pm. They also wanted to announce over the radio the demands of the Hungarian people, which had already been announced earlier that afternoon at the Bem statue. The university students had outlined the 16 demands. Some of the highlights of the 16 demands were that the Soviet troops leave Hungary; a new government be formed; institute free elections; remove the red star, hammer and sickle from the Hungarian flag and bring back the Hungarian Kossuth emblem; remove the gigantic statue of Stalin form the city park (Városliget); and reinstate March 15th as a national holiday.

Walking down Rákoczy street, which is parallel to Brody Sándor street, my parents could hear gunshots and people were shouting ”Let’s go to the Stalin statue in the Városliget.” At this late hour there was no public transportation, so people had to walk. Trying to get home, my parents had to walk to the Keleti train station, from where transportation was still available. Once they arrived home and listened to the radio, the Communists called this a counter-revolution. In their eyes, a counter-revolution is one that opposes the Soviet Revolution of 1918, which was to impose and spread communism to the world.

Glorious Days of Freedom Crushed
During the few days of freedom, I remember going with my parents to visit my widowed aunt and her two sons. We had to cross the Köztársaság Square, where the AVO headquarters was located. It was from here that the AVO had shot into the demonstrating crowds of innocent people, including the Red Cross rescuers. After the freedom fighters took over the AVO/Communist Party Headquarters, they were so angry at the AVO police that they hanged some of them outside, with heads facing down, from the limbs of trees. Walking across the square, we could see the aftereffects of this tragic fighting. In my memory today, I can still see the hanging bodies from the trees, of the AVO police, and on the ground, the fallen bodies of the brave freedom fighters, covered with flowers and burning candles surrounding them. During our walk, I remember seeing broken shop windows, some of them displaying a box with the sign that read “Please Contribute to the Families of Our Dead Heroes.” It was striking and memorable that no one would think of removing even one paper bill from there, but just to donate.

We had no school during this time. My parents continued going to work each day, on foot, because public transportation had been disrupted. At their work, not much was accomplished, since everybody was exchanging the latest happenings from the previous day, and discussing what they heard on the Radio Free Europe, to which not everyone had access. My parents strictly advised my grandfather, who was our babysitter, not to take us outside, because intermittent shots were heard on the streets and fighting could erupt at any time.

As days went by, the hope and spirit of the country was drastically diminishing. I remember seeing that hopelessness and sadness in the faces of my parents, relatives and their friends. The most tragic moment came when the Prime Minister of Hungary, Imre Nagy, cried out to the western world, via the radio, pleading for S.O.S. help for the last time. No help came. We all knew that this was the end and that revenge would follow.

The glorious days of freedom ended by November 4th, when Hungary had to realize that help from the Western Nations, the U.S. and the United Nations were not forthcoming. Upon seeing this, the Soviets took the opportunity to invade Hungary once again. Hundreds of Soviet tanks showed up in Budapest, and airstrikes bombed the city. Both my sister and I distinctly remember the scary feeling we had seeing a huge Soviet tank parked underneath our first floor balcony. The turret of the tank was facing the district city hall across our street. When the shootings got heavier on the streets, I remember having to run down to the basement of our apartment building for safety. Even our living room window shattered. In the basement, we were prepared with cots, blankets and food, in case we would have to spend days or nights there.

The Soviet and the Hungarian Communist leaders started to arrest the high-ranked sympathizers of the revolution (i.e. Nagy Imre, Maléter Pál). They were preparing list of names of the sympathizers at all work locations. At the beginning of January of 1957, my father received a verbal warning at his work from a member of the communist party that his name was also on the list. This meant that the communists would question his actions during the days of the revolution, question his political views and the possibility of arrest could follow.

My father worked for the Hungarian National Bank, dealing with authorization of foreign currencies. During the first days of the revolution, he and his colleagues organized a committee as to what they should do to stop any activity in foreign accounts of the Hungarian National Bank in foreign countries. Their goal behind this was to prevent the possibility of the Soviets getting their hands on these accounts, with the help of the Hungarian communists. My father, with one of his colleagues, accomplished this task, based on information received at the British Embassy in Budapest.

The Turning Point for Us
The fact that my father’s name was on the list of sympathizers forced my parents to find a way to leave the country. By this time strict rules were established by the government to stop the flow of refugees out of the country. During November and December of 1956, thousands of Hungarians had fled across the border with relative ease. By January and February of 1957, that was not the case. If you were caught attempting to leave the country, the sentence was 10 years in jail, without trial. If anyone assisted someone attempting to leave the country, that person received the same sentence. My father’s sister, who lived in the apartment across the hall from ours, said that if she suspected that we would attempt to leave the country, she would report us to the authorities herself. She was so worried and concerned about our safety.

It just so happened that a distant relative from Szombathely stopped by at our apartment, bringing with him falsified I.D. documents for my mother’s brother. He indicated that my mother’s brother could not use these documents for attempting to leave the country, because his 6 year-old son had suddenly come down with pneumonia. So he asked why not take this opportunity to leave the country? This came as an unexpected blessing, my parents thought. They agreed. Things happened real fast from there on. Within 24 hours, our relative had our falsified documents ready. The documents indicated that we had been residents of Szombathely since 1953. By mid-January, travel outside of Budapest was limited to the city of Györ. One could travel further only if one was a resident of a town or city beyond Györ, or if one had special permission from the authorities. As the decision my parents made to leave the country came so suddenly, they requested a week off from work to go on their annual ski vacation. Since they had taken ski vacations every year, this request would not draw any suspicion. Without telling relatives, except for my grandmother, we packed a small suitcase and headed to the Keleti train station. My father bought a sleeping coach train ticket to Szombathely. My sister and I were excited about sleeping quarters on the train, as we had never experienced this before. We did not completely understand why my grandmother was crying as we were looking out the window of the train. We only remember my mother asking her “Please don’t cry, because it can draw attention.” But she could not help herself and just kept on crying, because she loved us so and could not stand the thought of not seeing us again. The train departed. My sister and I had fallen asleep. After a few hours, the train stopped in Györ, where soldiers boarded to check everyone’s I.D. papers. When the soldier came to our compartment, my father opened the door and showed the soldier that the family was sleeping and gave him our documents. The soldier was very cordial and left. After midnight, the train stopped in Szombathely, where our relative was waiting for us. We went to his house to stay till the next day. He already had plans for us for the next day as to how we would reach the border.

The Plan and our First Attempt
The next evening our relative walked us to the train station, where our guide would recognize us without any verbal contact. The guide, a friend of our relative, was a mailman. We were not supposed to talk to each other. In case there would be an inspection on the train, we should say that we were going to a funeral. We were wearing the black bands around our arms as was the custom. As soon as we boarded the train, we sat a short distance away from our guide just so that we could see each other. The plan was that we would get off where he gets off and follow him at a distance. The train stopped. When our guide got off, so did we. The station was unusually filled with many soldiers. Our guide did not know the reason for this; neither did we. He panicked and disappeared.

My father did not panic and had to make a quick decision as to what we ought to do without arousing suspicion. From nervousness and fear, he broke out in a sweat dripping from his face. This picture has remained in our memory for a lifetime. He noticed a road sign with the name of a village about 6 km away. We headed on foot in that direction in the night. After a few kilometers, we had to cross a small bridge. Suddenly, two soldiers jumped out from underneath the bridge, flashing lights in our face, yelling to stop and asking where we were going. My father named the village, stating that the children were tired and sleepy and we had a funeral to attend the next day. They let us go. Further along, we came upon a small wooded park, close to the village. My father decided that we should stay in the park, and not try to enter anyone’s house for fear that we may be reported. This village was close to the border, and thus not reporting non-resident folks was more seriously punished. We would stay here till daybreak, when the soldier guards by the bridge we crossed would be changed. In the morning, we walked back to the station crossing the same bridge without anyone stopping us and we boarded the train back to Szombathely. Our relatives were shocked to see us, because our guide already informed them during the night that we were captured. They were expecting that the police would be showing up to arrest them, instead of us. We had to rest. All of us had to calm our nerves. We were discussing the abandonment decision our guide had made, along with his false assumption that we were captured. Further discussions ensued about us giving up the whole idea of leaving the country and that we should return to Budapest, because the danger and risks were too high. Meanwhile, we found out that the border had been closed, the so-called Iron Curtain was set up, and tighter controls were in place. The nearby villages were filled with Soviet tanks and soldiers.

Our Second Attempt
Our relatives encouraged us that we should try again and they almost guaranteed a success for us. Two days later, in the early evening hours, our relative took us to the same train station as before. We boarded the train ourselves. A short time later, we got off at Egyházasrádoc. We were to meet a woman standing next to the red-colored mailbox located on the exterior wall of the station building. She would then lead us to a nearby small house, where we had to wait for a farmer boy to take us to the border village of Kiskölked.

It was dark by the time the boy arrived on his bicycle. The date was February 17, 1957, and the rain outside was pouring in buckets. For this type of weather, the Hungarian saying goes “One does not even let the dogs out.” The boy instructed us not to talk, walking ahead of us about 10 feet, as he was pushing his bicycle by his side. To our surprise he did not take the road, but led us across the tilled farmland toward the border village. From the heavy rain, the ground was thoroughly soaked by now, the mud knee deep. With our regular shoes, each step we took was extremely difficult. In fact, my Mom lost one of her shoes in the mud, but there was no time to stop. She was crying out “My homeland does not want me to leave, but is pulling me back.” The farmer boy had no problems with his steps, because he was wearing heavy rubber boots up to the knee. After trudging through the deep mud for about 2 hours, we arrived at the farmer boy’s parents’ farmhouse. Needless to say, we were soaking wet. They insisted that we remove all of our wet clothing and place them by the fire to dry. Meanwhile, my father had asked the farmer to sell a pair of boots to us for my Mom to use, as she could not continue on with just one shoe. Then we went to bed. Barely getting an hour of sleep, we were awakened by the farmer that the Hungarian soldier, who was to lead us to the border, had arrived. He insisted that we leave right away to take advantage of the particularly dark night, the thick clouds in the sky, implying that for a while there would be no moonlight. This would be to our advantage. We had to put our half-dried clothes back on. This was not a pleasant feeling. We started to walk, my father holding my hand, my Mom holding my sister’s hand, and the soldier with his rifle in front of us. My sister remembers to this day how my Mom’s hand was shaking. The soldier instructed us that if we saw flares light up the sky, we needed to get down on the ground. If we were caught, the soldier would say that he found us trying to escape. We walked about 6-7 kilometers. At one point we had to cross a ditch that was waist-deep with rainwater. I specifically remember the soldier having to raise his arm to keep his rifle out of the water. My father carried me across, and the soldier helped carry my sister across.

After midnight, from a distance we could hear dogs barking. The barking came from the direction of a lookout tower. Our soldier knew the exact schedule of the patrol guards between the two towers and the best time for us to cross. Between the Hungarian and Austrian border, the soil is tilled differently with about a 3 meter width, which is to indicate the border, called “határsáv.” Here, the soldier shook hands with my father and wished us good luck. He pointed toward small light in the distance and a church steeple, indicating the nearest Austrian village. He also warned us that the border is wavy in this area, and it is easy to make the mistake of ending up back in Hungary. My father gave him one of his shirt cufflinks to return to our relative, who had the other. This was our signal code that our escape was accomplished.

Though Refugees, but Free at Last
We crossed the border and continued walking a short distance. We had to take a rest, since us kids were especially tired by now. We took a rest in the bushes, so as not to be seen. My father made us drink some schnapps to prevent the chance of pneumonia, as we were still in wet clothes on a cold February night. We started walking again and came upon a small wooden hut, probably used by the border patrol guards. Inside, there was barely enough room to fit two persons sitting on the bench next to a wood fire stove. My sister and I sat down on the bench and were asleep within minutes. My parents, however, had to stand. My father lit the cigarette lighter and noticed that the inside walls of the hut were covered with German language newspaper from top to bottom. Therefore, we positively knew now that we were, in fact, in Austria. To dry our clothes, my father collected a few branches from nearby, tore down the newspapers from the wall, and tried to start a fire. Since the branches were wet, this created more smoke than warmth. In a few hours, daybreak came and my father looked out from the small 5 X 7 inch glass on the door. He noticed two border patrol soldiers in the far distance, but could not distinguish whether they were Austrian or Hungarian. My Dad said that we have to give a sign no matter what happens. So he stepped outside the hut and started waving his arms. When the soldiers changed direction to head toward us, and got closer we thanked God that they were Austrians. When they reached us, both my parents started to cry. Since they both spoke German, they explained to the soldiers that we were refugees, asking for help. Very politely they led us to the village of Moschendorf, where we met with officials and the Red Cross. As we were walking through the village, we must have been an awful sight to behold as the villagers were staring at us, at our dried, muddy clothes, peasant boots and smoky smell.

The officials registered us as refugees. At first they doubted us, because not many refugees made it over the border at this time in February 1957, due to the strict border controls. Because both my parents spoke German, the officials suspected that we might be spies. We had to wait a few hours for a military officer, who asked information about our escape. What he wanted to know most was what we saw at the border villages, how many Soviet tanks, Soviet soldiers, and how we made our escape. This was important to them because they were worried that the Soviets could easily invade Austria again, as they did during World War II. My father asked for information on how he could notify a friend, living in Vienna, of our escape. A memorable event occurred, when one of the Austrian border patrol soldiers gave him 20 schillings for a telegram, telling him “Go ahead and do it.” We regretted years later that we could not repay him because we did not ask him for his name. The next day we were transferred to Wollensdorf Lager (refugee camp), which was sponsored by the British.

Life in the Refugee Camps
After a month at the Wollensdorf Lager, we were transferred again, with the assistance of the Charitas help organization, to Klosterneuburg Lager, outside Vienna. The help organization (Rettet das Kind) aided us in enrolling my sister and me in the Sacre Coeur School for Girls, in Pressbaum, located in the Vienna Woods. This was about one and a half hour from Vienna.

My grandmother in Hungary tried to help us out financially. We later found out that she sold all of our furniture that we left behind, donated some items to family members and our washing machine was given to our relative in Szombathely. She exchanged the money into foreign currency (British pounds) on the black market. Then she had a seamstress sew the money into the shoulder of my father’s suit jacket. She gave the jacket to a mutual friend, who was on an official business trip to Austria. This friend delivered the jacket to us. Unbeknown to him, the message to us was to let her know if the shoulder of the jacket fit properly. This is how she got the money to us.

During our Lager life, we had mail contact with our grandparents. The exception was my Dad’s father, who could never forgive our leaving the homeland. He never wrote or signed his name on a letter to us. At that time we did not realize his reason until many years later; we were told of this by family members. Unfortunately, he passed away in 1958.

In the summer of 1958, my sister and I took a trip sponsored by the Rettet das Kind organization to Chelmsford, England, with a group of other refugee children. Each child was taken in by various British families for a period of two months. By this time, we spoke fluent German, but no English. Mind you, we were totally without our parents at 9 and 10 years of age, in the home of a British family, and we could not speak or understand a word of the British language. My sister cried many times and wanted to go back to our parents.

Back in Austria, my parents had applied at the U.S. Embassy to immigrate to the United States, but it was denied, since the refugee quota was closed and we had no sponsors. The political atmosphere and instability in Europe and the cold war gave us a scary feeling, with the thought that the Soviets could invade Austria as they had done before. Therefore we had to select from the countries that were still receiving a reduced number of refugees. These were England, Canada, Australia and countries in South America. My Mom’s brother was already living in Canada. My family escaped from Hungary before them, but they had made it to Canada (through Yugoslavia) before us. They insisted that we come to Canada. Canada was taking two more groups of refugees, so we decided to apply and very quickly we were accepted. Our thoughts, hopes and dreams were that someday, somehow, we would make it to the United States.

After a 12-day boat trip across the ocean, we embarked in Montreal, Canada. The Canadian government took care of our temporary accommodations and expenses by putting us up at the local jailhouse. This was an extremely disappointing shock to us, not to mention highly discouraging. My parents had to apply at the Immigration Office to select available employment possibilities. They suggested a job as a cook for my Mom and chauffeur for my Dad. My sister and I were placed into a boarding school in the city of Ottawa. Because of the separation of our family and having seen our crying faces, after 3 days my Dad came to get us and took us back to Montreal. He argued with the immigration authorities about separating our family, when we had been together all this time. Both my parents found jobs, and after 2 weeks we left the jailhouse to start a life of our own. My sister and I were enrolled in school, though not in our proper grades, but first grade, until we learned the English language. Eventually, my Dad became a draftsman and my Mom a bookkeeper. After 5 years, we received our Canadian citizenship.

The Dream Comes True
One day, my Dad noticed an advertisement in the newspaper of a U.S. company looking for technically experienced personnel. My Dad passed the application test with excellent results. The company representative shook my father’s hand and said to him, “Welcome to the United State.” My father was extremely happy to say the least. Within 5-6 months, we received out first preference quotas to immigrate to the United States. The company moved us to Beloit, Wisconsin. This was a booming time in the U.S. for technically experienced people. After two years, my father obtained a better job offer and promotion as design draftsman in Cleveland, Ohio. The new company moved our family to Cleveland in 1966. We were happy about coming to settle in Cleveland, because of its good location and its Hungarian ethnic population. This has been our home ever since. It was here that we had the memorable occasion of receiving our U.S. citizenship. By coincidence, that day happened to be the same day that we had crossed the Hungarian-Austrian border.

Every year the Cleveland Hungarians commemorate October 23, 1956. The Takács family participates to keep the memories alive and to never forget.


Martha and Kathy Takács
Martha graduated from Cleveland State University with a B.S. degree in chemistry. She began her career as a chemist at the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, and held various positions such as chemistry supervisor, licensing engineer/environmentalist, and QA auditor at the Company’s Perry Nuclear Plant. After 23 years of service, she took early retirement. Since then, she has continued working for chemical and pharmaceutical companies and has done other contracting work. In the 1970’s she took part in ethnic programs at the annual Cleveland Nationality Festivals as a folk dancer with a local Hungarian folk dancing group, and also performed as a solo pianist playing Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.

Kathy attended Cleveland State University and studied English and French literature. In 1969 she went to Paris, France, where she took a one-year course of French literature and civilization at the Alliance Francaise Ecole Internationale. She married and has two daughters. She works for the City of Cleveland, at Hopkins International Airport, where she utilizes not only her knowledge of the French language, but also Hungarian. She has assisted many Hungarians, especially the elderly, who visit from Hungary and do not speak English.

1956 was a very special year.

In the first few days of January, an early morning streetcar derailed and plunged from the Margit Bridge into the Danube.

A few days later, Budapest was shaken awake at daybreak by the earthquake at the suburb Soroksár.

In February, on leap-year-day, I married Dr. Denis Szokolay. Circumstances of the times did not make it possible for us to have an apartment of our own. We lived separately in rented rooms, either one of them too small for two people. As a budding architect I was already working on the plans for subdividing a nook of a studio we could call our own, hoping we could build it in a year or two.

We both worked. But by fall our circumstances hadn’t changed. We grabbed whatever time we could together. Sometimes it meant simply talking to each other from the office phones (we had none at home) or meeting and having dinner together at my parents’ apartment. This was not what you would consider typical married life.

On the 23rd of October the news spread like wildfire: there was going to be a demonstration in front of the Parliament where the 16 Point petition, drawn up by students, for human rights and against the Soviet occupation, would be presented. Denis and I agreed to go to the scene with our respective colleagues, and we’d see what would happen.

Along with all the others, (several hundreds of thousands, as it turned out) we went to the Parliament, listened to the reading of the Petition, partook in the cutting out the communist symbols from the middle of the red-white-green Hungarian flag and sang the National Anthem with torches improvised from rolled-up newspapers. From there we went with the crowds to the Bem Memorial – a symbol of events commemorated and sung about by innumerable bards and historians.

I got home, with the unforgettable memory etched in my head, of having participated in the most civilized Revolution of history. Denis came over since we had no phones. We discussed the events of the evening, then he went home.

The next day we showed up at our respective offices but, of course, nobody worked that day. We exchanged news, weighed the events of the evening before, and shared our hopes for the future, just learning that there were already some shootings citywide. That evening, we got together at my place again. We listened to the Voice of America and the BBC in the bathroom, the only room which did not have walls adjacent to neighboring apartments. In order to share information and hope with others who had no means of getting it elsewhere, Denis, reviving his stenographic skills, took notes from the radio reports, as I muffled the typewriter sounds with pillows and typed as many copies with carbon paper as would fit into the machine. I then typed another batch, and then some more until our paper supply ran out.

By the next morning nobody was going to work anymore. I stashed the freshly typed news under my coat, “hiding them into my bosom.” Every time I saw a child in the street, I pulled out a batch of the news for him to take home and distribute in his neighborhood. Strangers, who typically walked with heads down, now addressed me jubilantly on the Lánc híd: “Have you heard? The UN troops landed at the Dunántúl!”

Denis met with his friends at Pest. The Smallholders’ Party had already started to get organized. They wanted him to run in expected elections on several (city, county, nationwide) tickets. Amidst the shootings and bloodshed the planning of the future had already begun. A Jewish friend of ours started to work on the founding of a new Christian Democratic Party. By the time the Revolution claimed victory, the interim government reported receipt of 120 applications to start new political parties… The longtime one-party-system had boiled down to a festering head.

The Rebirth of the Smallholder’s Party
For the first time in my life, I felt I had a country. The irredentism during my childhood seemed affected, though the re-annexing of parts of historic Hungary, torn away by the post-WW I Trianon pact, brought some genuine hope. But soon that was followed by the German occupation and then, over the ruins, the Soviets took over. Now, in the last days of October, 1956, for the first time, was I a real Hungarian.

During one of the evenings of “victory” Denis brought the news that the Smallholders predicted three possible scenarios for the future:

1. The Soviets withdraw, we’ll hold free elections and establish a coalition government which, by geographic necessity, will be of pinkish hue.

2. The Soviet Union would not accept defeat and Hungary turns into a second Korea.

3. The West intervenes and a third world war starts over us.

At this point, the next step became crystal clear to me:

“There is only one conclusion from all this: we have to leave.”

The next day news of some withdrawal of Soviet troops started to circulate. Soon, however, the reported movement in the East turned out to be deployment of new troops.
Denis and I agreed: we must not stay in the country.

Yes, leave… But how? We had to find transportation.

That very evening, we visited our friend Tony who had a Jeep. It just so happened that his Austrian wife was on a visit in Vienna. We surmised that he would feel like trying to follow her and we might join him in the Jeep.

He certainly agreed, but only under the condition that both his little daughters could go with Austrian passports. One of the girls had a passport but Tony had to apply for the other daughter’s at the consulate the next morning.

At the crack of dawn we rode with him and the girls to the consulate at Rózsadomb.

Two Austrian vehicles were already lined up in front of the building, a pick-up truck and a VW mini-bus. They had delivered food and medications to Budapest and were now waiting for their return papers as well as some passengers. We expected to ride in the Jeep along with the other two vehicles but, considering the autumn chill and the fact that we were all heading to the same destination, I was allowed in the mini-bus along with the other women and children, while the men were directed to the pick-up truck. With the exception of one family and ourselves, all passengers had valid passports. The three-vehicle convoy was ready to leave, Tony’s two-year old little girl was sitting in my lap but back at the office, her six-year old sister was denied a passport by the consul! Tony accompanied us in the Jeep with his two little ones to the edge of the City, then, in tears, he turned back, not daring to take the risk.

His wife in Vienna cried hysterically hearing our account of the events. She returned to Hungary and it took the family several years to finally get to freedom together.

Encountering mixed fortune during our attempted escape, Denis and I only met up with each other in Vienna a few days later. Camouflaged as luggage in the mini-bus, I escaped safely over the border the same day we left. Denis was not so lucky. His feet were seen sticking out from under a tarp in the back of the truck. He was dragged out of the truck at the border, jailed overnight and released the next morning. No sooner had he been set loose than he took off for the fields running, never stopping until he reached safety in Austria.

On November 3rd, we thought we were among the last ones to cross the border. At the time we couldn’t possibly have dreamt that we were the beginning of the Hungarian mass migration of the twentieth century.

Postscript
Many years later, in the ‘90’s, the then commodore of our yacht club was trying to be friendly, and told me that he was born in Austria but had lived in Budapest in the ‘50’s.

His Father was the Austrian consul in Budapest… I never spoke to him again.


Olga Vallay Szokolay
Olga Vallay Szokolay is an architect and educator. She graduated from both the Polytechnical University of Budapest and the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and served as Professor emerita at the Norwalk Community College. Since her retirement in 2003, she has focused solely on her architectural practice. Szokolay escaped from Hungary in 1956 with her husband, Dr. Denis T. Szokolay, who died in 2000. She currently resides in Redding, Connecticut, and has two daughters and two grandchildren.

Szabadságunkat köszünjük nektek, 56-os hõsök”

“For Our Freedom We Thank You, Heroes of 1956”

These are the words engraved on the stone monument on the grounds of the Philadelphia & Vicinity Hungarian Sports Club. The Club’s membership dedicated it on the 40th anniversary of the Revolution.

The Club was founded by Hungarian refugees from 1956. It is commonly referred to as the “Magyar Tanya,” or “Hungarian Farm.” It is located on a 120 acre-large piece of land that resembles the hilly, wooded regions of Dunántúl in Hungary. We purchased it for $20,000, but its value has grown to several million dollars.

We built the Clubhouse out of a ramshackle, abandoned 125 year-old farm house. Next to the building that holds our ballroom and fully equipped kitchen we have a large swimming pool. Every July we hold a big Hungarian Day, which is an important event for East Coast Hungarians, and draws a thousand participants! We have spots for 30 camping trailers with hook-up for water, electricity and sewage. We built all this from sheer willpower, 95% of it with our own hands, and, without a dissenting voice in our midst.

A group of young Hungarians grew up here: we had a Hungarian Scout troup, a Hungarian School, and a Hungarian dance group. We preserved our heritage. The commemoration of national holidays, March 15, the Heroes’ Day, the 1956 anniversary, etc. are still important and inspiring events for us.

One of the founders of the Magyar Tanya and its president for over 40 years was my husband, József Szodfridt (1922-2003). Through his leadership he played a major role in this organization from its origins in the 1960’s until his death in 2003. He saw this project as his life’s work in America.

One cannot fully appreciate the inspiring stories about the 1956 Revolution, without first learning about the tragic consequences of communist rule on individual lives in Hungary. That is why I would like to share a letter with you that my husband wrote to a good friend and former fellow prisoner who asked him to document his terrible experiences of time spent in Russian and Hungarian prisons between 1945 and 1956. His fate, along with those of thousands of others, was tragically typical of those years. It served as precursor to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, when even the youth shouted “Enough!”

József’s letter to his friend:

My military rank: I was a 2nd lieutenant. I graduated from Ludovika Academy. On August 20, 1944, they promoted me to artillery lieutenant. I was assigned to a heavy gun artillery brigade, the Sopron #101, and sent to the front in the beginning of September, 1944, as chief officer. In a short time I became squadron commander. In May, 1945, I was taken prisoner near Wratikau County (Czechoslovakia.) I served time in the Olmutz prisoner of war camp and was one of the few Christians held at Auschwitz. Among the people, it was said that the Germans demolished this place before they retreated. This is a misleading lie! Nothing was demolished there or set on fire. The Russians used it as a prisoner of war transit camp; fifty-three thousand of us were crowded together there, where before us nine thousand had “lived in inhuman conditions.” Both of the ditches lining the 3km road which led from station to camp were filled with bodies, shot in the head, because the people were so sick they couldn’t keep up the pace. I was lucky, because two young men from my brigade dragged me the entire three kilometers, even though they, too, could barely walk from hunger and weakness. I don’t even have to tell you how miserable the conditions at the camp were: people were dropping like flies in autumn. I was able to get back on my feet after 12 days in the epidemic hospital, thanks to one of the soldiers from my squadron. At the risk of his life, he climbed up the lightning rod and saved my life with whatever charred bread and tea he could find. At this epidemic hospital the conditions were indescribable. I was fortunate because they threw me on the highest (third) bunk, so nothing could drip down on me from above. For 12 days I soiled my bed. On the 12th day I got up to go to the latrine, and when the doctor saw me, he released me as healthy. This is how I ended up in the same transport as the men from my squadron. On the car someone had just died waiting for the engine to arrive, and, as his replacement, I became the last Hungarian to be taken from Auschwitz to Russia. 1947 – Until the fall I was at the Akmolinsk #330 prison of war camp. On October 23rd I arrived in Debrecen. 1947 – In November, I enrolled at the Technical College as a mechanical engineering major. 1949 – From February 3rd I was again in prison. I got involved with the Gyõr police as well as the ÁVO there. For 53 days I was held for questioning at the Military Police Branch on Bartók Béla Street in Buda. (They were particularly cruel under the bloody András Berkesi and his deputies: They knocked out 8 of my teeth, broke several of my ribs, kicked and destroyed my right kidney, broke my nose, pummeled my genitals, beat my palms and soles of my feet to shreds. They tried to extract a confession from me at any cost!) After the investigation I spent time in the Margit Street military detention center, the Pest Regional Government detention center, and the Markó Street prison. After my conviction I was I sent to the “gyûjtõfogház,” a political detention center, where it was my job to “build democracy.” I was a plumber, an electrician, a Russian translator, a smith, a technical draftsman, a locksmith, an engineer, a furnace stoker, a machinist, an electrical and flame welder, a stone mason and a typewriter repairman to name just a few of my jobs. (Knowledge of these skills has served me well to this day.) 1952 – on June 3rd I got in major trouble by being a ringleader in providing cover for the successful escape attempt of Szilárd Karácsony, who reached Austria safely. They kicked apart my sphincter muscles, and beat out my eye (among others). Fortunately, they took me into the ÁVO headquarters for an interrogation, as I probably owe my life to this. Because of this escape attempt, they demoted the warden, Bánkuti, from major to captain. Out of total rage and retaliation, they beat one of our men (Ferenc Kurucz) to death in front of numerous witnesses from every work brigade. I can imagine that I could have met a similar fate had I not been taken away. 1953 – I ended up in the Csolnok coal mines. There I first worked on the coal wall, and later as an electrician. I gained some new skills, including electro-locksmith and mining equipment operation. 1953 – In December, because of strike organizing I was taken to the Márianosztra penal house, from where I was transported to Várpalota. 1956 – Once again I ended up at Csolnok as a skilled laborer. From there I was released on August 18th and was ordered to report again in February, 1957, to resume serving the rest of my sentence. During the Revolution I was in Gyõr under police surveillance, planning my long-awaited wedding. On November 13th, I received the news that I was again on the list. After a brief conversation with my wife whom I had just married 3 weeks before, we decided to leave the country. We crossed the Andau Bridge on a November night, on a rainy, muddy road to the unknown, and we succeeded in making it to Austria. Thinking back on it, fate is so unpredictable: we were most happy when we lost our homes, but won back our freedom!

Mária Szodfridt
Mária Szodfridt was also born in Gyõr, and attended the College of Physical Education in Budapest. After graduation she returned to Gyõr, where she taught physical education to high school students for 8 years.

After their arrival in the United States she worked as a quality control laboratory technician at Merck Pharmaceuticals. She taught in the Hungarian School, worked with the Hungarian Scouts, and supported her husband’s work at the Magyar Tanya in every possible way. She and József have two children.


József Szodfridt
József Szodfridt was born in Gyõr in 1922. His university studies in Budapest were interrupted by World War II. After serving 11 years in several communist prisons, in 1956 he escaped with his bride, Kiki, and three close friends and former prison-mates to Eisenstadt, Austria. In April, 1957, after they realized it was hopeless to wait to return to Hungary, the Szodfridts and the group of friends from Gyõr decided to immigrate to the United States. They started their American life together in Lansdale, Pennsylvania.

József held many jobs, working his way up in each position, first as an electrician, vacuum plater, and plant manager, and finally, as a consultant. In the early 1960’s along with others, he began decades of hard work actually building the facilities of the “Magyar Tanya,” the “Hungarian Farm.” He served as President of the Hungarian Sports Association of Philadelphia for 38 years, until his death in 2003

When I was growing up, it seemed to me that all of my parents’ friends had done time in jail in the old country. For political crimes, not theft or burglary. They didn’t all do time, of course, it just seemed that way to me, but a majority of them did, and all were discriminated against by the communist authorities in one way or another. I can distinctly remember dinner parties (I must have been ten years old or so) where they discussed Hungarian politics and literature with inserted comments here and there about their own forced-labor camp experiences in Hungary.
My dad, for example, had been a second-class citizen under the communist system because of his family background, and thus was banned from attending college. In fact, he did 15 months time for inciting a weekend work stoppage in his army unit. And my mom told me about how her father had spent a night at the police station, and was only released in the morning when he signed the bottom of a blank sheet of paper; that signature haunted him for years.

GROWING UP HUNGARIAN IN CLEVELAND
Having fled their homeland in 1956, my parents still maintained a close grip on their heritage, and did their best to give us, their children, a firm grounding in Hungarianness. We spoke only Hungarian at home, they sent us to Hungarian church, we attended Hungarian scouts, and on Monday evenings we went to Hungarian school, just like in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Actually, that film has many parallels with what it was like growing up Hungarian in Cleveland. And later, when as a teenager I joined the Hungarian dance group, I met other Eastern Europeans at dance festivals and realized that I had much in common with the Ukranians, Croats, Serbs, Polish, and other nationalities maintaining their heritage in the USA.

OUR ETHNIC COMMUNITY LEADERS
My Sunday-school teachers, scout leaders, and Hungarian school teachers shared some common traits. Whether from the DP generation (Displaced Persons: refugees from WWII) or refugees from 1956, they didn’t hold the Soviets in particularly high regard. I once asked my dad why he didn’t stay in Germany or Austria or France after he fled Hungary, and his matter-of-fact reply was something like, “son, those Russians overran my country twice in the 20th century; I’d rather have an ocean between us.” The people who formed my life, having lived under oppression, appreciated freedom and opportunity more than my American friends, it seemed to me. The literature they had us read and the personal recollections they told us were rife with tales of adversity: getting hauled off to Siberia, government collectivization of family businesses, incarceration for religious activities, these were the anecdotes I heard. My heroes became not so much American baseball players and movie stars, but rather Hungarians like Bishop Vilmos Apor, who helped save Jews during the war and then was killed protecting girls and women from the brutality of occupying Soviet soldiers, or Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty, who was jailed and tortured before 1956, but still maintained his dignity and peaceful resolve. I think the events of 1956 had a lot to do with the way I was raised.

MY AUNT
In fact, my father’s younger sister, Klára, was killed in the fighting on November 4th, 1956. She was 20 at the time, studying to be a nurse, and had been part of a volunteer medical team treating and transporting wounded freedom fighters to hospitals. I later found out she had gotten engaged a day earlier, on November 3rd. Then vicious fighting erupted on Sunday the 4th, and she was tending to the wounded on Üll_i street, right near the Corvin movie and the military barracks where Colonel Pál Maléter had been headquartered, when machine gun fire from a tank hit her. The fighting was so fierce that she could not be buried for another three days, and even then only in a makeshift grave off Rádai street. Then later in the springtime, when she was given a proper burial, the minister who gave her eulogy, as well as several others from the crowd were arrested going home from the funeral, according to a letter my grandmother wrote from Budapest to my dad. My parents never publicized this story, and only answered questions about it when asked, but I think that merely knowing that my aunt had died in 1956 had given me an extremely personal connection to the events and had made me study and appreciate the events that much more.

CONCLUSION
Growing up and seeing the grainy black and white photographs of the freedom fighters and Soviet tanks, hearing the experiences of my parents and their friends living in a totalitarian regime, knowing my parents had been there and that 1956 was the reason I was born in America, all these reasons made me consciously choose to keep my Hungarian identity, more so than had my parents come to America for economic reasons. Instead of assimilating into American society as many children of immigrants do, I, my wife, and many of our friends were able to completely fit into American society while nevertheless maintaining a very strong sense of Hungarian identity. We consider ourselves both 100% American and 100% Hungarian. Both cultures, including their historical pasts and everyday ways of thinking and acting, have influenced us and in fact are integral parts of our identity, and I believe that the events of 1956 caused this strong tie, a bond so strong I wish to pass it on to my own children. And when events of fifty years ago cause someone to impart a certain set of values to people two generations remote, that adds significance to the events of 1956.


Endre Szentkiralyi
Born and raised in and near Cleveland, Ohio, he grew up speaking Hungarian in the household. He earned a BA from Cleveland State University, then an MA from the University of Akron. He teaches English and German at the middle school and high school level. Also active in the Boy Scouts, he lives with his wife Eszti in the Cleveland area. All four of their children speak Hungarian.

A burst of gunfire shook the windows. It was midnight in Hungary, December, 1956. “Good God, curfew time lasts till seven in the morning. What am I going to do?”

I shook my husband, John. Startled from his dream, he reached for the phone. We were lucky. It still worked. The doctor’s advice was to try to wait. In case of emergency he would give us directions over the phone. The ambulance refused to come since it was a perfect target for the Soviets stationed right across from us, on the hillside – no cover whatsoever.

We held each other very close. The warmth of my husband comforted me as, with the passing of time, the cramps started coming.

The two children slept quietly in their cribs, not even occasional machine-gun bursts startled them. They were used to it by now. It was ten days after the Revolution was crushed; the fighting still was going on.

I could vividly remember now the morning when I was awakened by cannon fire after our four wonderful days of freedom.

“No, it can’t be. Hungary has a constitutional government, which declared the country neutral. We are out of the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviets must leave the country according to the U.N. decision,” my husband tried to comfort me. But he, too, knew it was cannon fire. He turned on the radio and we heard the message of the government: “The Soviet troops are coming back into the country. Our prime minister asked for help from the U.N. and we are fighting.” The Writers’ Association asked for the help of all people in the world. The message came in German, French, English, Russian and Hungarian. This went on for 90 minutes – and after that – everything was lost.

Now, ten days later, I was going to have my baby. I clung to my husband as the pains drew closer. Finally the first rays of the sun colored the sky pink, and the light gave me new hope as I tried to fight back the arrival of the baby.

At 7 a.m. we started running toward the hospital. Five long blocks of pain, cramps, blood and water, a few staring faces, distant machine-gun fire and more cramps melting into one incessant feeling of rupture.

When I arrived at the hospital, the only midwife there, who had worked alone for 48 hours, had no relief in sight. My doctor was not there yet. Several workmen were repairing the windows of the delivery room, which were shot out during the night. Two women were giving birth.

Then cramps and cramps again, unstopping, merciless cramps till the beautiful, happy cry of my son brought the long awaited relief from the suffering and fear. I saw my doctor lift him and put him on my stomach. He felt so soft, so sweet. And even the windows were repaired.

Remembering it all
Another ten days passed, and by that time we were determined to leave our homeland. Even though my husband was one of the promising young scientists who had every allowable privilege under the Soviet system, it seemed to us that if we wanted to bring up our children according to our beliefs, we had to leave.

All our belongings we hoped to take with us were packed into a small suitcase. Forty of us scrambled into a pickup truck in the freezing rain, and under a canvas held up by a broom.

As we left Budapest, we remembered the many beautiful concerts, operas, balls of former years, the 50-day siege during World War II, the hopes for freedom while trying to rebuild the country, then, the 1948 take-over by the communists with but 17 percent of the popular vote. The desperation, trials and tribulations every individual, every family had to go through. Our glorious Revolution with its four days of freedom – and the 20,000 fresh graves in the city.

The truck was already on the highway making good time, when all of a sudden we stopped with a jerk. An officer waved his arms in the middle of the road.

The driver handed him his documents. He was supposed to go to the border with some help to pick up a truck left there by refugees.

“With some help? Do you call 40 people ‘some help’?” he yelled at our driver. “See that you get back home!”

We turned around and I understood why he had no time to read papers, to check on people. There were so many would-be refugees that he simply sent them home.

On another route we ran at night, our truck came to a halt in front of a Soviet tank.
A Mongolian colonel approached; we were caught. He radioed for the Hungarian police, who arrived in a short time.

The police station was crowded with refugees.

“Everybody with children, here, into this room! The only one we can heat.”

We were shoved into a dark place, lit by a sole lightbulb in one corner of the room. While we settled down, the muffled storytelling went on and on:

“I swam across an icy river three times before I got caught, thinking every time that Austria was just on the other side…”

“We were sinking in the swamp, holding our children above our heads with our last strength…”

“My child is over there… he ran across to Austria when we were captured. We were already so near… so near…”

The usual sentence for illegal border crossing was two to three years of hard labor.

But in the morning they put us all on a bus and sent us to Budapest.

When the bus broke down, our police escort said, “You know your duties. I will be back in an hour and a half… of course, nobody can hold me responsible for whatever you do while I am away.”

We did not feel strong enough to walk to the border 20 miles away, with three small children, Louis being only ten days old. We started home. The train reached Gyõr by curfew and did not go farther. Everybody had to find a place in a hurry.

We saw a Red Cross building across the depot and ran. We found ourselves in the company of 600 people. There were beds, food and even medicine. We felt grateful and happy as we talked to the Red Cross lady, who, in an unguarded moment whispered in my ear:

“We are occupied by the police. We may give you whatever you need, but you cannot move out of this building. You are under arrest.”

The bus on which we were transported to Budapest the next day was supposed to go to another Red Cross building there, but they took us instead to police headquarters.

“Men should go inside the building, women and children can go home!” came the order. We dared not move. We heard of men being captured and taken to Siberia for no reason at all. All the women stayed and waited.

I pretended that I had to go to the bathroom. The stern guard still would not let me go inside, so I ran to an apartment building. I begged to make a phone call, and contacted the chairman of the Revolutionary Committee at the university who understood instantly what happened and what could be done.

“I am right now negotiating with the Justice Department about kidnappings which are taking place in the streets. Why, this is just such a case. From a Red Cross building… to police headquarters…”

Ten minutes later, his imposing figure pushed the machine gun-bearing guards aside and he stepped into police headquarters. Through the glass door we could hear voices: “Yes, it was the Red Cross building…” “They have taken us…” “Kidnapped is the word.”

Once more we felt the beauty of even limited freedom. We were allowed to walk home with our baggage, to come out from behind the bars… We were happy, yet depressed, as we felt that there was absolutely no way out of Hungary.

A passage to freedom
“Translate these papers into Russian for me, please!” my husband waved some documents at me while I was deep in thought about how in the world we could reach the border town of Sopron.

My sister had escaped to Vienna. She sent us word that we, too, could reach freedom, if we could get to friends in Sopron.

I was not much interested in my husband’s papers until I saw what they were. In less than an hour we had our counterfeit documents that would, hopefully, get us out of Hungary. My husband, as deputy chairman of the department at the university assigned himself to go to Sopron to resume teaching because their professor had escaped.

As the early darkness of the winter afternoon crept into our train compartment the next day, we noticed that the lights did not go on in our coach. We considered moving to another part of the train but decided to stay because the children were snoozing comfortably.

At the next station we felt “Providence” at work. The train stopped and Russian soldiers made everybody get off who did not have the No. 2 border-zone permit stamped into his passport. But when our door opened, it was a Hungarian soldier who appeared behind the flashlight. The Russians, it was said, were afraid of being murdered in the dark compartments.

“Where are you going?” he asked us.

“To Sopron.”

He did not know what he should think of us. If we were high officials, he’d better not argue with us, but if not… well, our papers looked official enough, he always had his excuse, and… a twinkle in his eye showed that he was thinking of the other possibility also. He really did not seem to mind if we wanted to escape…

“Thank you, professor, what a nice baby.” He slammed the door shut.

A near-fatal mishap
In Sopron came two days of silent waiting until our friends arranged for reliable guides. The children had to hold their cries, even their breaths, in order not to betray us. The house we stayed in was a house for retired people, and any noise from a child would have been suspicious.

Finally, an old guide led us out into the hills to reach the Austrian border on foot. When he stopped to wave his cane we also stopped! It meant danger. When he wiped the sweat off his bald head, it meant that we could go on. Behind him went our daughter, Helen, with a young couple. We were next with the two boys, the baby in the basket, and our two-year-old walking and looking for mushrooms, as we all pretended to be out only for a walk. After a while his small legs could not carry him any longer. He crawled into his Father’s knapsack and fell asleep.

The stars shone quietly over us after a two-day rain. There was no moon in the sky. A perfect night to escape.

We were on the last leg of our journey. I slipped and started sliding slowly down the hillside, at least this is what it felt like. I wanted to stop, but I could not. Then a small tug on my coat caught me. I stood up and smoothed my coat. There was a small hole. I looked back, and a barbed-wire fence stopped me from falling into a ravine-like terrace with stalks on the bottom of it, put there to hold up the vines.

If it had not caught me I would be dead. But there was no time to stop and reflect. In 45 minutes we would have to run two-and-a-half miles on the muddy lakeshore, after all that rain, to make it across the border.

The baby was whimpering, despite the sleeping pills we had given him. Janos slept in his Father’s knapsack; he too was drugged.

Only Helen, our 4-year-old, walked on her own little feet, looking straight ahead, then at us, with her huge, terrified, blue eyes.

She knew something was happening but could not comprehend it. She was trying to be good.

“Do you see those pear trees?” our guide pointed to some trees not too far way. “Three hundred feet beyond those is the Austrian border!”

How I wished he had not said it! Again, like the first time, when we were stopped by the Soviet tank, we had seen the lights of Austria. What if they would capture us again! I could no longer think. My mind, my legs, my whole body grew numb from fear, from desperation. But I heard a firm voice within:

“This time you are going to make it!”

I ran as fast as I could and pulled myself up from the ground for the fifth time, when all of a sudden I felt the softness of the “no-man’s-land” under my feet.

Then a small flag touched my hand.

As I looked, my husband’s radiant face and outstretched arms were greeting me. I fell into his embrace and started crying. We were in Austria.

This story first appeared in LADY’S CIRCLE magazine in September 1979.


Helen M. Szablya
Honorary Consul of Hungary for Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, Helen M. Szablya is an award-winning author, columnist, translator, and lecturer. Based in Seattle, she has two university degrees, speaks six languages, and many of her more than 700 publications have won awards. Szablya co-authored “Hungary Remembered,” an award-winning oral history drama/lecture series for the 30th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution. “The Fall of the Red Star,” her award-wining book about an illegal Boy Scout troop during the 1956 uprising, was published for the 40th anniversary. Szablya recently received the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary for her consular and cultural work. She and her husband escaped in 1956 with two toddlers and a newborn. They have seven children and 16 grandchildren.

Please also read the story of Helen A. Szablya, the daughter of Helen M. Szablya