The Uprisers

By Jeannine Vegh

In The Uprisers, after eleven years of brutal communist leadership, a young girl and her brother join a grass roots campaign to end oppression in Hungary. The siblings are followed by thousands of other students, professors, and local workers, and what begins as a peaceful march ends in a brutal massacre. One will perish and the other will make it safely to America. In the U.S., the battle is not over, and our protagonist is put in the middle of yet one more fight to save the honor of the “Old Country.” Ten years later the hero returns home on a job assignment, immediately impacted by the communist regime and a detective of Russian heritage. The story ends as the Iron Curtain is lifted and the second generation feels the impact of its past. One of them becomes determined to share the family legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeannine Vegh
• Release date: Jan 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458046963

Jeannine Vegh

Jeannine Vegh, M.A.,I.M.F.T., has her graduate degree in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis on Somatic Psychology, from John F. Kennedy University in Pleasant Hill, California. She received her undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts and Psychology from Antioch University in Santa Barbara. In addition she holds an undergraduate degree in Merchandising and Marketing from The Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles, California. Her work experience includes ten years as a social worker with Head Start and Children’s Protective Services in California. Ms. Vegh continues to write fiction and has four selections available for purchase here on Smashwords.com. Ms. Vegh was an active member of the California Writers Club for six years. She now resides in Ohio, where she grew up. Credits for the drawing of the little boy on Foster Child goes to Betty Auchard from California and it was first published in the Writers Talk newsletter for the California Writers Club - South Bay Branch.

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THE UPRISERS

A Hungarian Historical Fiction

By Jeannine Végh

Published by Jeannine Vegh at Smashwords

Copyright © 2011 by Jeannine Vegh

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Memorial

This book is dedicated first to the memory of my stepfather (who adopted me), Antal (Anthony) Végh. It is also in memory of the Hungarian immigrants of 1956 who came to Columbus, Ohio along with my stepfather, and whom I grew up around. This includes Marika néni (Csáki), Karcsi bácsi (Nagy) and his wife Emi (still with us), Jani bácsi (Fürj), Péter bácsi and Ica néni (Mózes), Klára néni (Réthi), Mihály and Anna (Hudák), Tibi bácsi (Lukács), and many others whose faces you could see on the basement walls of the Hungarian Reformed United Church of Christ in Columbus, Ohio.

I also dedicate this book to all the Uprisers of 1956, nicknamed ‘Freedom Fighters’ by the U.S. publishers, who died, stayed, or fled for their lives. As one person wrote online, (and I sum it up here) a freedom fighter was anyone who was involved with the revolution directly or indirectly. In my life, this also includes the late Nana (Ruth) and Dobbie (Frank) Warner, the couple who lived in Wheeling, West Virginia who did not know anything about Hungary until three young, 18 year old boys including my father, from Camp Kilmer, showed up on their doorstep. They sponsored these young men by providing them with a home. Nana taught the boys English from a Sears and Roebuck catalog. Dobbie helped the boys to learn a trade. My stepfather became a carpenter, Jimmy Csaki, now a retired mason in Florida, and Robie Markus, now a retired baker in Ohio.

Dedication

There are other Hungarians who affected my life and I am still lucky enough to have them around. This book is also dedicated to Marika néni (Lukács), who was the godmother (keresztanya) to my late brother Ferenc, and Laci bácsi (Varga), who lived with my stepfather when they first came to Columbus, and became an adopted godfather to my brother Sándor. I also wish to thank Laci bácsi, for all his help in making sure my information for this book is accurate, and the words in Hungarian translated properly. I thank Andrea Galvacs for the same as well, not to mention that she edited my first novel.

Egy - One

The interpretation one makes of an incident or situation is based on one’s beliefs, perceptions, as shaped by one’s upbringing and society in general. Ethics are determined by the family or individual to create boundaries and to give us insight into right and wrong. In a normal privileged society, ethics can have similarities in groups based on race, religion, or ethnicity. During a time of war, these values change or are ratified and made appropriate in one’s mind struggling to deal with the truth in a vacuum of lies. When a person’s life is at stake, the world becomes an existential moment between him and the conflict. The decisions he makes will affect his life forever.

As a young girl I was raised in Columbus, Ohio a place better known as the Buckeye State. It is hard to know what exactly those little brown nuggets are for, but the buckeye trees are everywhere. This state is proud of its football team, which is named after the tree. In the fall, during game season, you see the colors scarlet and gray on everyone from the grocery store clerk to your dentist, the gas station attendant and people walking down the street. Women created a piece of candy: peanut butter dipped in chocolate, which is an exact replica of the seed you might find on your lawn.

Columbus is a family community, with roots dating back several generations. People are raised on local produce and it is a place where one can drive to the country and have an honor system at the bottom of the driveway. There are tomatoes or bags of string beans on a table with an empty coffee can nearby and a sign that says ‘ten cents a piece’ or a ‘dollar a pack.’ It’s a decent place to live which is why so many folks stay and never wish to leave.

This is the reason so many Europeans settled here, because it reminded them of home. My loved ones, who, outside our homes were known as refugees they immigrated from Hungary in 1956 and made Ohio their second home. My friends, with whom I went to school had regular American names and their life revolved around the homespun activities. On weekends or evenings the Hungarians would gather for small parties, weddings, funerals, or church services on Woodrow Avenue. They flocked in from the surrounding suburban areas, some as far as thirty miles away, just to get a chance to speak their own language and partake in discussion about a life they once knew. Their names might be Marika, Árpád, Csilla, Pista, or Pannika. The parents spoke with a thick accent, and sometimes we, the youngsters, might have had to translate for the older people who had a hard time with the language.

We, the children studied reading, writing, and arithmetic, hoping to impress our parents with good grades. At night we watched television programs, maybe studied the violin or took dance classes, and many of us were involved in the scouts. Here we were the same as any other child in America. Though while my school friends went home to eat macaroni and cheese, baked beans or Johnny Marzetti. My Hungarian friends and I thought about cabbage rolls, thick soups and paprikáscsirke. Our homes savored the aromas of garlic, peppers and onions. We daydreamed about the kiflis, which looked like crescent moons, our grandmothers might be baking. Mama would make palacsinta for a special treat one evening and later I would learn that these thin pancakes were known as Crêpe Suzette in France. We would turn down offers to attend sleepovers and birthdays if the Hungarians were gathering for popular dances, the annual picnic, or the international festival at the Lausche building. Wherever our parents went, all the children were sure to follow. Just as they preferred speaking their language with like minds, we enjoyed hanging out with the kids who understood our lifestyle as no other could.

My mother’s female friends had the word néni attached to the end of it which means aunt and was a respectful way of addressing an elder. Likewise, their husband’s names would be followed by the word bácsi and, of course, this means uncle. Grandfather was nagypapa and his wife nagyanya. At school, our American friends got used to hearing us say these strange words but it did not always make us popular. They were not so concerned with learning about a new culture any more than the teachers were patient with my mother, when she first came to this country. Americans wanted people to speak English and to act patriotic; foreigners were strange and suspicious. Even though they had adorned the cover of Time magazine during their revolution, only a decade or so before, they were different, spoke oddly and had come from a communist country.

The United States was at war in Vietnam for many years and the acronyms used were POWs and MIAs, terms that all of us had an association with when we arrived in this country. Some Hungarians did come here and then went off to serve in Vietnam but my elders had already survived a war. In fact, some of our group were old enough to have been through World War II and all had been affected by the events of ‘fifty-six.

This story, however, is not about my childhood or my friends, but about my mother’s homeland and her escape to America.

Mama and her friends did not tell us their stories while we were growing up and we were too lazy to care. We enjoyed the food, the gypsy music and learning to say curse words in another language. Some of us were more bilingual than others and all of us could understand what we were told; often we could even write or spell some words. As far as we knew though, the Hungarians had tried to end communism in their country. Since this was a popular cultural phrase on television, due to the Vietnam war, it sounded fine to us. Sometimes the aunts and uncles spoke at the table in Hungarian while we played in the background. Often I would sneak to the side wall by their room and spy, a favorite pastime of mine. Being bilingual, I understood the words, but not the facts. From their tears I did have a sense that their plight had not been easy. The shots of whiskey, to ease the pain, and the fists pounding the table might have been similar to those at the meetings held on those nights long ago in Debrecen, Budapest, Pécs, Miskolc and Szeged when the students gathered to strategize and gain a new sense of meaning.

Mama and her friends did not tell me the story. They’d say We are in America now, don’t worry about it. So I learned about it myself years later when, as a writer, I decided to compose a story to reflect on my heritage. Then, I gathered together my mother, her aunt and uncle, whom she had lived with in West Virginia, a tape recorder and began to put together the events that occurred in 1956. I travelled to Hungary several times as a child, and many more as an adult. This is how I was able to investigate and find out, discover even more from my grandparents, uncles and aunts who continue to live there.

My maternal grandparents’ struggles began with World War II and a country forced into battle as soldiers for Germany. Nagyapa was too old to fight, but not too aged to have a conscience. While the Magyars were divided as to their feelings about Jews, mainly due to fear of reprisal, Nagyapa and Nagyanya were brave and steadfast liberals who believed in human decency. Later, Nagypapa would spend some time behind bars as a result, during the communist regime led fiercely by Jewish leaders turned Stalinist sympathizers. Though the red commanders practiced no religion, the irony reigned amongst the Hungarians once more.

For eleven years the country suffered under the hands of people such as the one known as Stalin’s best pupil or Mátyás Rákosi. Jewish by birth, he used salami politics to slice off the sympathizers of the great war or the traitors to the new regime. This could mean executions, imprisonment, torture, or put in exile. Unlike as in America where one might be ostracized for one’s beliefs or imprisoned for going against the president, in Hungary, annihilation was more popular, weeding out the dissention so that it could grow no more.

The red, white and green flag was rarely seen, and if it was the communist symbol of the hammer and sickle instead of the Hungarian shield would dominate the middle. Red flags would fly in the streets, and statues of Soviet philosophers were erected and placed in prominent squares to remind all what really mattered. Radios depicted Russian policies and their men with pale white skin and dazzling white blonde hair walked down the boulevards. While the Soviets were certainly strangers in this troubled land, their air of confidence and over-compensated egos showed no respect for the men and women, who carried no weapons, and conveyed a shadow of deceit as they walked by.

Sparked by events in various countries and then throughout the land, in 1956, at the end of the eleven years of brutal communism, my mother, her brother, and other noteworthy students would bravely shift the consciousness of their country. In a place no bigger than the state of Indiana, their voice would be heard around the world. Their actions would forever influence the course of events that would one day, many years later, take down the Iron Curtain.

PART ONE

The Revolution

Kettő - Two

Zoli and Éva set off for the meeting at the university. It was a typical fall evening with a thick carpet of leaves on the ground that rustled under your feet with the sun beginning to settle, warming their backs. Zoli was eating a sausage sandwich and his long lean legs took steps much larger than his younger sister’s, so she constantly had to struggle to keep up with him.

Let’s go Éva! Come on, we’ll be late, he said with his mouth full.

Slow down, you know I can never keep up with you, brother.

Ha, ha, you are such a little girl! Luckily you have your big, strong brother to protect you.

Would you, brother? Éva stopped to repeat herself Would you?

Zoli came to a halt turning to his sister and looked down to meet her gaze, the brown tresses straggling around her face. You should never question my loyalty to our family or to my country, Éva. I am your older brother first and a Hungarian second. Then he smiled at her and grabbed her arm. Let’s run, I have a message to deliver to Sanyi and he needs to hear it before we begin.

The two began to run, Éva having to do so much faster than her brother, but soon they came to the steps of the meeting hall where Zoli attended college and found that the door was locked.

No, Comrades, over here, a male voice whispered from the side of the building. Are you here for DISZ? DISZ was the Union of Working Youth, a Communist Students Party which all students were forced to join but had little interest in as it did not support their needs. They had already grown up with the Pioneer movement since 1944, a red takeover of the Hungarian Scouting Association, that rewarded those who did well and punished and scolded those who fell behind.

Yes, Comrade. Zoli replied quietly, then looked around, who are you?

Béla, I am in the Engineering classes here at Debrecen.

Good evening, Béla. This is my sister, Éva, and I am Zoli Lukács.

Zoli, I’ve heard so much about you. I’ve been wanting to meet you. I’m Sándor’s cousin. My family is from Hajdúszoboszló, but I am staying with my aunt and uncle while we are in school.

Zoli! A voice was heard from a room with a light up ahead."

Sanyi?

Come on, man, get in here and tell me what they said. Hurry, before the rest get here.

Listen, I am going to go and gather the others as they come. I’ll see you two inside. Then Béla turned and walked back to where he had come from.

Éva and Zoli walked into the lit room that would ordinarily have been a geography room. She immersed herself in the displays of the maps and globes along the walls while Zoli went up to consult with his friend.

Sanyi, listen, I’ve talked with Karcsi at Tech. He says Szeged and Budapest are both shifting from the DISZ leadership back to MEFESZ. We must do the same. They are also coming up with demands to request at a later meeting. MEFESZ was the Federation of Hungarian University and College Students, the student group name prior to Communism.

Good, good. Let’s hope that our students will follow us in supporting the same mission. Our other two colleges are also meeting tonight and we will exchange information with them tomorrow at a meeting at 3:00 p.m.

Many people began filing into the classroom taking seats on the different levels of the stadium-like seating. It normally would hold thirty, but now ended up with almost a hundred, as students sat in the aisles, stood at the top of the riser, behind others, or sat in front of the teacher’s desk, on the floor.

Comrades, Sanyi began. Excuse me, he said clearing his throat, Hungarians! Tonight we would like to direct your attention to the changes our country is taking at two prominent locations. The University of Szeged and Technical University in Buda, have both elected to change DISZ to our original MEFESZ.

The room was silent and for a minute or two as Zoli and Sanyi stood erect and firm, neither dared look at each other which might show a lack of confidence. Both men held their breath hoping there would not be a fight or even worse that they would be reported. Zoli had learned that the other schools had some debate over the issue but mainly the change went smoothly and the student majority agreed. Still, one could not judge the actions of other regions with those locally.

Hey, who do you think you are? One man interrupted the silence, we are DISZ, or we are nothing! He said and then sat down.

We are Hungarians, Zoli noted, putting his index finger in the air.

I agree, a woman spoke from down on the floor, but did not stand up.

My uncle has been sitting in prison for nine years now; I want him home! A man stood up and shouted.

I’d like to see change, another man’s voice was heard, with a Yugoslavian accent. My father and I work hard at the communal farm after school, I work hard all day in classes, I don’t have time for women or even vodka!

The students laughed and he sat down with a huge smile on his face. Zoli and Sanyi felt relieved that the meeting was going pretty well. A few more loyal communists tried to force their opinions, but they were countered by several others who continued to rise and share stories about political issues, the economy, and how their families had been treated. Then Éva rose with her hand in the air.

I’d like to say a word or two, she muttered.

Go ahead, Éva, Zoli pointed to her with his hand and then shoved his glasses back on his nose because they were always falling down.

In school we were taught about Imre Nagy, who helped us with land reform so that some of our property could be saved. He seemed to be a gentle man, not quite so brutal.

Yes, Imre Nagy, another person shouted, and then many more began to chant Imre Nagy, Imre Nagy, Imre Nagy. Éva smiled feeling proud of herself, especially seeing the vote of confidence in her brother’s face.

Fellow Hungarians, we need to put together a list of actions to present to our two sister colleges tomorrow afternoon. Several delegates from this meeting and the two others will decide on the final presentation to take to Néplap, Sányi continued, do we have any representatives from the party’s paper? Néplap was a newspaper which meant the People’s News.

I am Csaba. My father writes for Néplap, but I’m not sure how easy this will be for his editor to agree with.

Thank you, Csaba. Why don’t you come with Zoli and me tomorrow afternoon? Talk to your father and see what he can do.

I will do my best.

Let’s take a vote, fellow countrymen. Are we all in favor of MEFESZ? Almost all hands went up around the room. Those opposed? About ten people raised their hands. It is decided by the majority of students that we return to our original student leadership. Zoli, will you pass out the manifesto of MEFESZ, which I brought with me in the box over there?

Zoli got up, took the flyers and began passing them around the room; a few students got up to assist him. At this point, several men walked out of the room, grabbing a reluctant woman’s arm before they retreated.

The rest of the crowd stayed and patiently took turns talking as the newly formed MEFESZ began to document concerns. They came up with twenty-nine items they would bring to the delegation the following afternoon.

Father! Zoli jumped when he and Éva walked through the back door, trying to be as quiet as mice. I am sorry we are so late.

It’s all right. How did your meeting go? Ferenc asked, then kissed his daughter, who excused herself to go to bed.

Father, it was unanimously voted and we are now the Federation of Hungarian University and College Students again!

No kidding?

Yes, it all went so well. Sanyi and I were really surprised. Tomorrow we meet at 3:00 p.m. with the other two colleges and decide on our demands for Néplap.

Your demands? Don’t you think requests might sound less aggressive? Ferenc gave his son a nod, leading him into the main room to sit down on the sofa to talk.

I see your point Father. He sat down and took off his glasses, pulling out a hanky from his pocket to wipe them with. He had built up a lot of sweat during the evening and the residue had fogged up his glasses, blurring his vision.

Nothing ever goes easy, Son. Don’t ever forget that the Soviets run this country, not Gerő or his team of puppets. You know we have the ÁVO lurking around every corner, spying on our every move. They may even be dressed as regular students. The ÁVO was the Office of State Security or people who were paid Communist informers in uniform. Other Hungarians might do the same if they were loyal communist sympathizers, or if brought before a tribunal. Some might do so in fear after having met some fate at the hands of the ÁVO.

The DISZ sympathizers could have been the secret police? Man, why wasn’t I thinking?

Our adrenaline pumps wildly when we are on a mission. Many of us Hungarians have been sitting in our parlors like this, quietly for eleven years, being careful whom we speak to, and then only to our closest friends and family. When we finally hear someone say out loud what has been in our hearts for so long – that we are Hungarians, not comrades! The agreement of friends makes your heart beat as if you were in love. When you are in love, you think with your heart, not with your head. After eleven years of Soviet control, change will not happen at one meeting.

"Yes, Father, I see your point. I did feel as if I were in love tonight. I felt like a king standing there next to Sanyi, the whole room giving us attention and agreeing with what we had to say. There were about a hundred people there, Father. I wanted to go