For the Children: A Cold War Escape Story

by Geza Tatrallyay

Synopsis

For the Children is a narrative memoir that tells the true story of the author's family's escape from Hungary and immigration to Canada in 1956, told from the viewpoint of the seven year old child he was at the time.

After numerous attempts to flee from a revolution torn Stalinist Hungary ending in capture and disappointment, the author's parents' pursuit to give their children a better life finally bears success as they walk to freedom across a well guarded and mine strewn border. This is a gripping tale of bravery and the will to survive, the sometimes heart-breaking struggle for freedom, and the wonder and difficulties inherent in starting a life in a new country.

Release date: May 28, 2015

Publisher: Editions Dedicaces

Print pages: 218

Sample

Foreword

This is a story that I, and others in my family, have told many times, and which I always wanted to make available to a broader public. For it is about the human spirit, and the most fundamental instinct of all living beings: survival, and even more so, the fight for the survival of one’s offspring. My parents wanted desperately to leave their dismal life in Stalinist Hungary, not so much to gain freedom for themselves, but for us, their children, and the generations to come thereafter. They left their own parents, their friends and cousins, their belongings, the routines of a miserable life behind, to give us a hoped for better future.

I first wrote down a version of this story twenty-five years after it took place, and I am glad I did, because so much more of the rich detail would have gone lost. This was right around the time my mother, Lily, passed away from cancer of the lungs. We never did find out the exact cause of the cancer, but the most likely candidate is the heavy dosing of X-rays she was subjected to in Hungary, as her father—a lung specialist and the head of the tuberculosis sanatoria of the country—wanted to take extra care that his only daughter did not catch this terrible disease that was ravaging post-War Hungary and applied the latest medical diagnostic techniques. The other oft cited culprit is the button factory where she worked right after the family got to Canada: breathing the toxic fumes from the plastic as she pressed the four holes into the buttons was definitely not healthy. Nor was having to work beside a chain smoker at another of the early jobs she took on to help with the new immigrant family’s income. As such, she truly was a victim of her sacrifice for her children.

11

But are not all mothers like that? *****

I showed an early draft of For the Children to my father soon after my mother passed away. He did not like it. He said it is too idealized, not exactly how it happened. I think maybe he did not like being turned into a hero, or maybe the events were still—after a quarter of a century—too raw for him, or maybe he just did not want all those bad memories dredged up and revitalized with the written word. For me, now, it is irrelevant that he did not like it: this is the story as I remember it, a frightened, naïve seven year old at the time. No doubt though, as with the Viking sagas, the story may have been embellished or altered with each telling. That is why I wanted to fix it then, twenty-five years after the event, when, with each telling it was still as if a reel of film started to roll in my mind—more visual than rational—and when I started thinking about a career as a writer; by now, over thirty years later it would have probably mutated again many times.

Now that my father has rejoined my mother, I think it is finally time to tell their story to the world, however faulty the telling is.

*****

One of the reasons this story needs to be told now, is that the European Union which was brought to life after the Second World War by a few visionary leaders, is now under threat from within. The financial excesses of the last few years and the resulting political polarization that is happening in some countries, are threatening the quality of life the EU has brought to most of its citizens, including those that lived under the Soviet yolk for so many years and dreamed of living like their western counterparts.

12

It is time to remind ourselves of the struggles of the past, of how difficult it was for some to attain peace and freedom, and a safe and happy life for their children.

Let us not throw away what we have. Let us rather built on it, and continue to create a better world.

13

14

The Escape

Chapter 1

November. The eighth. Or was it the tenth already?
It was some time just after my mother’s birthday, that much I remember. From my mother’s comment, that I

don’t suppose we, the sleeping children, were meant to hear. “Péter, the best birthday present I could have next year would be to find myself far away from this Godforsaken country. Away from this hateful oppression.

All this eternal bickering.”
She paused for a moment, to choke back the tears,

and then bravely continued. “As far away as I can get from the laughter of those horrid men . . .”

My mother’s birthday wish tapered off into quiet sobbing, and in the dark, I could picture my father’s long, slender fingers gently caressing her hair, as she tried to fight back those painful memories.

*****

The event that my mother could not forget had happened just a few days earlier. In fact, right on her twenty-eighth birthday.

It happened in the late afternoon. I was out in the garden, under the towering chestnut tree, kicking a soccer ball against the wall of our house on Lejtő utca on Sashegy in Buda—the house that my grandfather had built, and where, after it was nationalized by the Communists, we were allowed to live in a small apartment. My older brother, Peter, was at a friend’s, and Clara, my younger sister, was at my grandparent’s place in Pest. I was bored and just passing the time as best I could until my mother came home from the neighborhood Közért—the state-owned cooperative grocery store—where she had gone to try and buy a few meager provisions for our family. Not that there would be much on the shelves, but a mother of three—two growing boys and an infant daughter—had to try to forage as best she could even in the toughest of times.

All of a sudden, my concentration on the mesmerizing rhythm of the ball bouncing back at me was interrupted by screaming. The screams of a woman. It took two more bounces for me to realize that it was my own mother who was crying out so desperately.

“Get away! Leave me alone!” I heard her yell.

I ran in terror to the white picket fence. Wide-eyed and unbelieving, I saw my mother stumbling toward the gate. A soldier, wearing the olive green peaked Russian army hat with the red star in the middle, was wildly grabbing at her from the haven of an open armored car driven by one of his equally drunk buddies. They were howling with laughter and making lewd remarks—the only words of Hungarian they knew, but even I recognized them—and suggestive signs at her. It was obvious what they wanted; even for a seven year old; it was a terrifying spectacle.

I watched in stupor, as I saw a soldier jump out of the vehicle and grab my mother from behind, reaching inside her coat. With one of the sacks in her hands, she walloped him across the back—I could hear the eggs crack and saw the few potatoes she had managed to purchase tumble out onto the ground. As the soldier started to tear her coat off, I emerged from my torpor and rushed forward to open the gate. It was then that I heard Bózsa néni, the wife of the Communist caretaker—who had been installed in the basement apartment of the house to spy on us, or so we thought—yell, “Leave the girl alone! Get lost you brutes!” as she maneuvered her large form past me, broomstick swinging above her head. I saw her whack the soldier repeatedly on the head with her weapon, until he had had enough, and seeing other neighbors emerge, decided he was better off climbing back in the armored vehicle to rejoin the safety of his friends. The jeep sped away as Bózsa néni first helped my distraught mother to her feet, consoling her all the while, and then gathered up the few still intact articles from the ground. Once inside the gate and seeing me standing there with a blank look in my eyes, my mother burst into tears and hugged me as Bózsa néni slammed and locked it shut behind her.

“Come, my dears,” Bózsa néni was certainly more intimate than normally, “come and sit in my kitchen until Péter comes home. We will both have a good ‘barack’.” And then she added, “Maybe you too, my little one.”

It was only once we were in the safety of her kitchen that I noticed my mother’s trembling lower lip was bleeding; one of the thugs had slapped her across the face still from the open car as the other soldier was already molesting her from behind.

Bózsa néni served us both a small amount of a very strong liquid that smelled of apricots—I could not get any of it down. But unusually for her, my mother drank a couple as Bózsa néni administered to her wounds. We stayed there until we heard my father come home with Peter and Clara in tow, and then holding hands, and with Bózsa néni leading the way we finally dared go upstairs to our family and our own apartment.

*****

This incident with the Russian soldiers, though, was only the latest that confirmed my parents’ intention to leave Hungary. In fact, their search for a better life, a new homeland, had germinated in the difficult post-Second World War era. And, it was fertilized over the intervening years by the glowing reports of life in Canada they received from my father’s brother and sister, who had left Hungary immediately after the War, and who, by 1956, had established themselves in the New World.

*****

Gábor bácsi—my uncle Gabriel—was the first in the family to make his way to Canada.

At the end of the War, Gábor bácsi, a soldier in the Hungarian Army, found himself close to, but just on the wrong side of the line that had been drawn between the victorious Soviet and American forces. On one side, the newly ‘freed-up’ lands were ruled by Soviet ruthlessness, on the other, by American respect for law and human life.

Gábor bácsi’s father-in-law, old Bornemissza, who had served as Minister of Industry in an inter-war government, and who therefore still seemed to have reliable sources of information, had somehow managed to get word to him that if he valued his life, he should try to get across that demarcation line. For the Soviets had by this time started their purge of the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, and if he returned to Budapest, he could find himself in front of a firing squad, or more probably, on one of those numerous cattle trains that ferried Hungarians off to the frozen Gulags of Siberia.

While the rest of the soldiers in his division surrendered to the conquering Soviet army, Gábor bácsi hid in a barn, and at night cut across field and forest to the nearest railway station. Here, he managed to avoid the many Red Army patrols by squeezing himself into one of the battered and empty green wooden boxes that in better times held sand for the winter. He hid here until the next evening when he heard the loudspeaker announce that a train wasdue to depart for Vienna, where the American and Soviet forces had met. He stole out from his hiding place, and with his belt and some stray rope, tied himself firmly to the bottom of one of the carriages.

At the first stop within still Soviet occupied Austrian territory, the bespectacled, mustachioed old stationmaster was shocked to hear a parched voice whispering for help in fluent German from underneath the Hungarian train— heavily manned by Soviet guards—that had just arrived from points east. He crouched down on all fours, as if to inspect the train’s undercarriage, and—lo and behold—there was a man in the dusty, tattered uniform of a Hungarian soldier tied to the bottom of the wagon! This poor soldier was quietly pleading with the stationmaster not to give him away and to lend him a hand to untie himself.

Half dead, my uncle emerged a few moments later, when the stationmaster gave him the signal that the Soviet guards’ attention was focused elsewhere. The old man helped him climb out from underneath the train and whisked him straight into a closet in his small office.

After the Hungarian train and the Soviet guards departed, the stationmaster—over his meager lunch of an onion and a Kaiser roll that he shared with the starving refugee—heard my uncle’s story, and gradually nurtured him back to life with the help of a bottle of schnapps. This kind Austrian even gave Gábor bácsi some money and civilian clothes, so that the next day he was able to continue his travels to Vienna in a more civilized fashion in a third- class carriage on a crowded Austrian train.

Relatives in Vienna helped Gábor bácsi for a while, until he finally made his way to the New World. He eked out a living for himself in Canada, working in the forests of northern Ontario, digging holes in the ground to install hydro poles, before going to work for General Electric in Peterborough, Ontario.

Meanwhile, the countries behind the Iron Curtain were plunged into utter spiritual, cultural and economic darkness under Stalin, and Hungary particularly so under Rákosi Mátyás, who in his zeal to please the Generalissimo, tried to outdo him. Gábor bácsi was able to receive only sporadic bits of news from the family he had left behind. He finally gave up all hope of reunion with his wife and children, including a son born after he escaped. Eventually, he remarried—a Canadian girl, Aunt Irene—and started a second family.

Poor man, he was marked to the end of his life by the hardships he had endured. To be forced to leave behind everything one holds dear—wife, children, parents, hearth and home, friends and belongings—to have to start life over again in a foreign environment, is not easy for anyone. Gábor bácsi, however, was probably more affected by this than most people would have been, for he had the sensitive nature of an artist. He was an excellent painter, and when he played the cello, he evoked all the melancholy of a bygone era.

*****

The Magyar nation managed to stay neutral and out of the Second World War until 1941. However, as its battered history illustrates, Hungary has always been too important a strategic crossroad to remain uninvolved for long in any global conflagration. Indeed, with the powerful Nazi Wehrmacht poised on its border with annexed Czechoslovakia, and the hated Soviets ready to march into the Carpathian Basin from the east, Hungary’s neutral position became untenable. The intense German pressure on the Regent, Admiral Horthy, and Premier Bardossy, finally bore fruit, when, incensed by the unprovoked bombing of three Hungarian cities by airplanes bearing Soviet markings, the Hungarian government declared war on the Soviet Union. Thus it was that Hungary entered the War on the Axis side, albeit without general enthusiasm.

By 1944, the Nazi leadership considered Hungary too unreliable an ally, and accordingly, the German Army moved in to occupy the country. It was not until the very end of the War that the Soviet Army ‘liberated’ Hungary and its capital in an extremely vicious and destructive battle.

After the War, the Soviet occupation forces wreaked a terrible vengeance on the people of Hungary. Rape and looting were rampant, and tolerated, if not encouraged by the High Command. The Kremlin ordered the mass deportation of Hungarians to Soviet labor camps, and the dismantling of Hungarian industrial plants. Thus was the life-blood of the nation sapped, its spirit destroyed.

Although in the elections of 1945, the Hungarian people demonstrated its distrust of Russian Communism by voting the Smallholders’ Party a solid fifty-seven percent majority, and the Communist Party only seventeen percent, Soviet Marshall Voroshilov, who was then Chairman of the Allied Control Commission for Hungary (and who would be President of the U.S.S.R. in 1956 when the Revolution was crushed) was able to insist that the defeated Communist Party of Hungary be included in a National Popular Front coalition government of all parties. Under pressure from the ominously present Red Army, this weak, glued-together government allowed the Communists to grab the portfolio for the Ministry of the Interior, which controlled the AVO, the already infiltrated secret police. With the systematic guidance of the Soviets, it did not take long for these intelligence forces to undermine the other parties and to demand the resignation of the non-Communist Premier.

In the ensuing elections of 1947, the Communist Party did not fare much better than it had in 1945. Even though they tried to stuff the ballot boxes, the Communists received only twenty-two percent of the vote; however, they, with the backing of the Red Army, continued to hold the power in the government. All organized opposition was quickly eradicated. The Socialists were forced to merge with the Communist Party,

while all other political parties were dissolved. The Catholic Church, that powerful and vociferous bastion of anti-Communist resistance, was decimated by persecutions, culminating in the mock trial, torture and imprisonment of the Primate of Hungary, the revered Cardinal Mindszenty. The May, 1949 elections— held under the dubious supervision of Soviet troops—finally gave the unopposed Communist Party the kind of majority they were used to elsewhere in the Communist world: over ninety- five percent of the ‘popular’ vote.

Once the pro-Soviet government of Rákosi Mátyás— who soon came to be known as ‘Little Stalin’ by the people of Hungary—was fully in control, it became quite clear that the purges of the former upper and middle classes and the intelligentsia would only intensify. Many were deported, exiled or even incarcerated and shot.

My father’s father was stripped of his position as Extraordinary Professor of Medicine at the University of Budapest. Forbidden to practice as a doctor—which, for him, was the cruelest blow of all—he was forced to contribute to the social reconstruction of Hungary as an orderly, performing menial tasks, often at the command of one of his former pupils. He was a broken man, and died shortly thereafter.

My other grandfather also lost his privileged position as Director of all the tuberculosis institutes throughout the country. The irony came later: within months after the War ended, the tuberculosis hospitals were in total disarray, and the danger of a large-scale TB epidemic loomed over the entire nation. So the Communist authorities came to my grandfather begging that he assume his former position again. He agreed, not out of sympathy for the system, but because he did not want to see his fellow Hungarians suffer and die due to the incompetence of the neophyte, uncaring leadership.

Indeed, in the end, it was my grandfather’s reinstatement that saved our family from the purges; during the tough years ahead, it was the fact that he was in a somewhat respected and useful position that kept the hated AVO from our door.

Perhaps even more poignantly, it was the financial support my grandfather gave my parents that allowed them to feed and clothe the family. And to permit the odd luxury here and there—oranges at Christmas, a chocolate bunny at Easter, a much-needed jacket for my brother, Peter, on his birthday. My father’s monthly income, in the Finance Division of the nationalized pharmaceutical company, barely sufficed for a pair of shoes for himself.