Category: ukraine, russia, hungary

The Ukraine and Russia. The two existential decisions Ukrainians face. My memory of Hungary in 1956.

March 6, 2022.

Ukrainians are fleeing their country to escape the Russian bombing of their cities in this unprovoked war. Over a million Ukrainians have fled to date. Estimates range up to five million refugees by the time this war ends.

To leave your home, your community, your friends, and your job is an existential decision. By leaving your country, you enter another country, with an unfamiliar language, with a different culture. You have to reestablish yourself and adapt to the other country’s way of life. You may have to go back to school and relearn skills.

A decision to leave your country and emigrate is a life-altering decision with high risks for success: a lot of effort may have to be spent to get back to an equivalent position to what you left behind. It may take years. Some people may never make it: they may not have the skill to learn a foreign language or they do not need their skills in the adopted country.

My father was in his forties when he left Hungary during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Having succeeded professionally as a medical doctor and director of a regional hospital, he had no reason to leave. He was a proud Hungarian: proud of the people and accomplishments of a thousand years of history in the country.

My mother’s family lost everything. The communist government confiscated (nationalized) all of their property: a summer home on the Danube river and vineyards on the mountain behind. She had no reason to stay in Hungary.

Under the communist regime, the children of the proletariat, of the blue-collar workers, were admitted to a university. They considered a professional a “bourgeois” and were not part of the proletariat. A university graduate was, by definition, a “bourgeois”, and even though my father came from a farm, his education put him into the bourgeois category.

The communist government owned and directed all economic activity. The government hired and assigned people to specific locations where their skills were required. One of my cousins graduated from dental school and married a fellow dental student; when they finished university, they were assigned to two different cities where dentists were needed.

My parents did not think their children had a future in Hungary; I think that was the reason they left the country. So when during the Hungarian Revolution the border was unguarded–the guards did not know what to do during the 1956 upheaval – father and mother decided to leave the county. For the future of their children. And leave before the Russians returned and closed the border.

The day mother found out that the border was open, she collected my brother Peter, age 18, and myself, after school. I was 16 years of age. She packed some food into a backpack; gave us the name of someone living in Vienna and told us to walk to Vienna. Arriving there, we were to look up the person whose name she gave us. The situation was unreal for Peter and me, and not understanding what was going on, we got on the highway leading to Austria. Hoping that we would get to Vienna somehow. Mother did not know if she, father, and my younger brother John, eight years old, would see us again.

But Peter and I walked and walked and walked. The highway was like an exodus, with people filling up the road. Nobody talked. We hurried, not knowing how long the border would stay open.

The Austrians welcomed us with open arms and put us up in an army camp outside Vienna. After a day, they helped us to contact the person whose name mother gave us. He was a Jesuit priest, and he came in a few days and helped us to settle in Vienna. It turned out that the priest was a friend of one of my uncles from university days. The Jesuit helped Peter enter medical school, and he placed me in a dormitory of a high school.

When the large Russian army returned to Hungary in November, my parents decided it was time to escape from Hungary. Otherwise, they may never see their two older children. One of my father’s patients, the Mayor of the City of Sopron where we lived, helped them. He drove the family across the “iron curtain” in his official, government-owned car. The family reunited in Vienna and pondered the next step.

Right after you make an existential decision to emigrate, you have another life-altering decision to make: where to? You think the entire world is your choice. But to be pragmatic, you consider your trade, profession, and language skills and try to find someplace where you could use these skills.

Another constraint is your financial resources; you have nothing with you except what you wore during your escape and a backpack. With limited resources, you cannot travel too far. (Father had sold some assets and used the cash to buy collectors’ stamps, thinking the stamps took no space in his pocket and could sell them. Unfortunately, the stamps he had were worthless.)

A potential opportunity is a relative abroad who could help you get established. Or, friends in the diaspora of your country. And that is usually the first choice. Mother contacted her brother living in Manchester, UK, and asked for help to move there. We stayed in Manchester for a couple of months evaluating the possibilities in England, then my parents moved to Vancouver, Canada, in 1957, where my mother had a sister, a public health nurse. Canada appeared to have great potential to start a new life.

Father had to redo his studies and pass the Canadian medical exams, which he did in two years. It was difficult to do so at his age, but he persevered. And then he was a “resident” in St. Paul’s hospital for a couple of years, often with twenty-four-hour shifts. Not a peaceful life when you are in your mid-forties. Mother took a job as a dishwasher to help with money; she had never worked outside the house, being born into a privileged family in Hungary. But my parents had grit. And the children attended university; the youngest one was in high school.

Reading the news, I empathize with the Ukrainians; I have been through what they are going through now. Many Ukrainians send their family out, hoping to join them later or perhaps hoping to have them return should the Ukrainians win this war. Not a likely possibility; the Russians have much more military power and Putin’s vision appears to be the political order of decades ago.

The Ukraine and Russia. My Memories of Hungary and Russia

February 25

As Russia is pounding Ukraine, I thought of my early childhood in Hungary. Hungary was under German occupation and the Russians pounded Budapest in 1944, advancing on the German army. I was four years old. We covered all the windows at night to avoid lights that the coming bombers could see. And we rushed down into the basement of the four-story apartment building for protection should the bombing destroy the apartment building where we lived.

During the days, the “Green Shirts”, the Hungarian Nazis, came visiting our apartment looking for Jews. But the Germans were losing the war to the Russians, who came at night and bombarded Budapest.

I was old enough to be scared, but not old enough to understand what was going on. Complicating our situation was mother being Jewish. Although she took on the Christian religion, the Nazis went after all of Jewish origin. And father, a Catholic, hid mother’s family members in the corner of our living room behind the china closet when the Germans came looking for Jews; I was told to shut up and say nothing to the Nazis searching our apartment.

Then my father was sent on a military train to Ukraine by the Hungarian Army to serve as a medic. He was an MD. The rest of us – my mother, my brother Peter and me – stayed at a military camp in Szatmarnemety (now it is Romania). We had a soldier assigned to guard the family, who played with Peter and me; when the sirens shrieked alerting us to the upcoming Russian bombing raids, the soldier threw us into a hole in the ground and covered us with a piece of plywood. Then we waited until the siren’s undulating sound indicated it was safe to come out and the soldier would lift us out. But sometimes we had to wait a long time because the Russian pilots often returned and strafed the camp at a low altitude. It was extremely noisy, dark, lonely, and terrifying in the hole with the strafing.

The Russians occupied Hungary in late 1944, after the Germans were defeated. Shortly after, my father was transferred to Sopron as director of the regional hospital and the family accompanied him by train from Budapest to Sopron. The Russians divided Hungary into zones; Sopron was in the border zone, accessible only for Hungarians working and living in the zone. We crossed into the border zone, close to the Austrian border; two soldiers armed with guns stood on the steps of the last coach of the train to make sure that nobody jumped on, going into the border zone. When trying to escape from Hungary, people tried to reach the border zone first, hoping to escape to the west.

A huge number of people tried to go west but were stopped on the way at Russian checkpoints at all major highways or perished trying to cross the “Iron Curtain” between Hungary and Austria (a strip of land half a kilometer wide, mined, fenced, and with watchtowers and guards with dogs patrolling).

We never talked about politics. The secret police, the AVH, kept tabs on everyone and one never knew who were the informers or moles. People kept disappearing at night never to be heard from again. A friend of my father’s lived in an apartment across from us and disappeared one night. We never talked about him.

My father sometimes was called at night to tend to people shot up trying to swim across lake Ferto into Austria. The lake straddles the Hungarian/Austrian border and a wire fence in the water stopped people from swimming across to Austria.

And there were long line-ups for meat and eggs and food because of rationing. The Russians took Hungary’s agricultural and industrial output. They also nationalized (confiscated) all property that our family had.  

I learned to fix electrical devices and discovered that I could make the “People’s” radio (the only legal radio in Hungary at that time) to receive foreign channels by changing the rheostat. The “people’s” radio brought in one channel only, the official voice of the Hungarian Communist Party. It was illegal to listen to foreign radio channels. I was in my teens and thought it was clever of me to make these radios into receiving “Radio Free Europe”, the “Voice of America” and the BBC. But since it was illegal to do so, I worked on it alone without letting my parents know what I was doing. And then I listened to “Radio Free Europe” at night, in my bed, pulling the covers over so nobody would know it.

I feel sorry for Ukraine and its people. The consequences of the Russian army’s occupation were something I had experienced. I hope they survive.