From Hungary with Love: The Immigrant

By Tibor Weinzierl

In this book, The Immigrant: From Hungary with Love, you will read the true story of a Hungarian who is a well-known artist, singer, and virtuoso violinist. This is my life as an immigrant who came to the free world through many surprises in his ninety-three years of living. My life was put in danger many times--from escaping a Russian hard labor camp as a young teenager after a two and a half years of torture and pain to finally arriving back home to my family in Hungary as a seventeen-year-old boy, with God helping me find my way home. Starting a new life was not an easy task to embrace as an escaped prisoner; I was forced to leave Hungary and my family behind. I went through many adventures and hard times to make it to America and start a better life. I believe that my hard work and perseverance paid off, and I never quit on my quest for freedom. I truly hope you enjoy my story and come away from reading it with renewed energy and hope.

Life is a great teacher for everybody! You learn how to survive when the "wheel goes down," and you must work hard to push up that wheel. It happened to me many times in my life. This book is the life of an immigrant who fought for his future. Please keep the "life wheel" moving forward, up always, and never give up!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9798891302211

Book preview

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From Hungary with Love

The Immigrant

Tibor Weinzierl

ISBN 979-8-89130-220-4 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-89130-221-1 (digital)

Copyright © 2023 by Tibor Weinzierl

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Dedication

It was 1929. February 2 was a very cold and windy night, fifteen below zero. A small riding coach with two strong horses pulled through in deep snow, speeding to the nearest and closest hospital to save a pregnant woman having her second baby. The time is very important, as its very close to her due date and time to deliver the baby. She was yelling to the driver, who is her husband, to go faster because she knows the time is near to give birth. Her husband was in the front, yelling at the horses, Bandy and Lenke, to go faster; but because of the cold, wind, and snow, it's much more difficult, and it makes it very hard to reach the hospital.

In Budapest and all around the world, 1929 was the hardest year because the stock market collapsed, and the economy was at its lowest point ever. Inflation started already and forced people to work when and wherever they could find work to support their family and survive. The woman having the baby was my mother, and the driver of the horses was my father. They were trying to save me. I was born an hour later in the nearest hospital, a healthy little boy they named Tibor. The nurses brought me to my mother, but there was a big mistake on the first day of my life. The tag on my little foot accidentally fell off, and another woman also gave birth to a little boy in the next bed near my mother's bed. My tag went to the wrong person. This woman started to nurse me, and my mother started to nurse the other little boy. Somehow, my mother noticed the boy in her arms had black eyes, and she remembered her baby had the most beautiful light-blue eyes. She called the nurse and complained and tell her what she knew. The next minute they found out the tag was mistakenly put on and changed the babies back to their rightful mothers. This hospital was well known in Budapest for the best services they provided to everyone who walked in. Religion didn't matter. This hospital was the Jewish hospital in Budapest. The woman who accidently had mistaken me for her son and was nursing me was a Jewish woman, so I got some Jewish breast milk from her, and after we were switched to our correct mothers, my mother got me back, but I feel this brought me luck for the rest of my life.

The person (me) who was nursed from the Jewish woman will be lucky in his life! My parents took me home after five days from the hospital, and getting my mother's Christian milk was no problem; it helped me get strong and grow with good luck in my body. I met with my brother who was two and a half years old, and he gave me another name because he saw me very small so he called me Potyi, which means little. This name stayed with me throughout my life in the family. Finally, my parents took me home during this critical time in Hungary and all over the world. My father did not find work even though he had two diplomas in electric engineering and special electric motors. He was forced to pick up a shovel and clean the roads with the frozen snow. They paid him daily in cash to spend on groceries that same day because the money would be worth nothing the next day during this inflation.

The hard days slowly got better, and some jobs were opening up. My father went back to work as an engineer. I was one year old and started to learn the ABCs and, slowly, the numbers in which I was very good at. My brother Oscar played with me and started to teach me more and more, talking and reading some children's books with the large letters and numbers. He was a very good brother and smart throughout his life. Oscar had two doctorates; he was an attorney and a district judge in the court system. My life started to become more interesting when I was two and a half years old. I met in Godollo with Baden Powell, the father of the Boy Scouts from England. I sat on his leg and received the first prize for the best-looking Boy Scout,

Two years later, I was a Boy Scout with an ID card. The years started to fly by, and I entered my first year in elementary school. I loved going to school and meeting other boys and girls. It was easy for me to learn because of the earlier studies with my brother Oscar and my mother. I especially liked sports and the religious hours, and I always got As in mathematics. I was selected for the school handball team for two years as a center. At the same time, when I was five years old, I started to learn to play the violin. The beginning was very hard because my auntie Gitta was a music teacher and the owner of the school. She was very strict and pushed me to learn fast, which helped me in my future to earn my living in Canada and the US. My high school years started in the bad times of 1939–1940 because the Second World War just started, so it was very critical to keep the good marks in the first year. My final grades were Bs and Cs.

The Jesuits' gymnasium was very hard, so hard that I fainted. It made me decide to concentrate on sports and my music. One of my Jesuit teachers was picking on me after a handball game because when I scored a goal, I threw the ball too fast and was very strong, and the ball hit him in the head. It was during this time that I began to get picked on. Two days passed, and the head of the teachers asked me a question in class in front of the other kids and pushed me to the corner. He waited for my answer; I didn't know the right answer, so he hit me in my head. Wrong point in my life. I told my father who was, at this time, an officer of the Hungarian military. The next day, he went into the school looking for my teacher who was in his office, and my father pulled out his sword and hit the desk so hard everything fell on the floor and told him, If you touch my boy one more time, you will meet with my fist.

A week after that, my parents took me out of the Jesuit school, and I finished my last years in a civil school. During that time, there were four big changes. I entered the military school in the city of Pech in Hungary. I was fourteen years old going through this time when half of Hungary was trying to enter the best military school in the country. It was very hard for me. I had to leave home, leaving behind my family—my mother, father, and my brother Oscar. Also leaving behind the memories of my things: my trophies and awards, which I won in high school in tennis, swimming, and athletic fields. It was tough having to say goodbye to all my friends because the war was coming slowly, closer and closer. The Russian front and the German army started to back up more and more, and during the worst time, the winter. They stopped in the deep mud, like Napoleon in the war before he lost the whole army frozen in the deep, deep Russian winter.

Wearing my military uniform was a hit with the girls for sure! This first year of the school ended very quickly. The start of school was September 1994, which by the time December came around the order came from the ministerium to move the school. First to Austria because the war was coming closer and closer, and they were taking us to the Sudetenland territory, which was further from the fighting front. I remember the sad moment when my moving transportation reached the Austrian border. There was my father in his military uniform, waving to me silently in the distance. He knew it was goodbye for me. I had tears in my eyes, not knowing what the future holds for us. The long line of the wagons moved slowly for a week. Finally, we arrived at a stop deep in the forest. Both sides had tall mountains. We got the order to move ourselves and get ready because bad news was coming through the wires from the Hungarian military commander. We will be hit by an air strike from the closing of Americans and English. This was the front line for me. I was just starting to eat my lunch when the sirens started alerting us to leave. A plane flew over us. It was an English Lightning plane; it started to shoot out the locomotive. This meant we could not move forward, but we would be an open target on the wide road, facing the probability that the plane will come back and attack.

That evening came too fast for us. We immediately moved back to the wagons. We thought they would come back in the daylight to finish us completely. Nobody was sleeping this time, just eating our dinner in the cold because the canteen in the kitchen was shut off. There was no heat, no water to cook, and we cannot make a fire. The order was no fire, no lights, and staying in the dark so the enemy could not see us. After sunrise, the same plane came back flying so low we could see the pilot starting to throw out explosives near the road to kill us. He came back four times. We hid in the forest, but when he came back the fourth time, three of us jumped to an open wagon with the furling empty air gun. With our luck, the wagon wasn't destroyed, and we started firing. The plane was flying so low, we hit the plane on one of the motors, and it started to burn. We heard the explosion near one of our locomotives, burning to pieces. We survived other attacks for three more days. When we got a new locomotive to pull our broken-down convoy, there were about forty, fifty wagons for a safe place not far from a city of Erfurt. This is called the Sudetenland territories, which is in Germany with some runaway Czechs and Russian people who were saving the life from their Russian army. They were known to rob, rape, and kill people on their way to Berlin.

In the city of Erfurt, we stayed very close to the front and had to move west to the city of Budingen, but before we moved, there was a big American air invasion bombing of all the rail lines and the small military airport next to us with some Polish airmen with small planes. Most of them, the famous German Messerschmidt planes were left over from the Warsaw Polish army. This was the first time of my life to feel that I felt I was going to die far away from my family and from my parents.

I started to pray, Please, God, save me. Help me find my way to home to my mother so that I may throw myself to her arms to love me again. I jumped in a roadside hole, laying low and saw running airmen about ten, fifteen yards in front of me, one without his head, which fell down from his body, collapsing in the dirty road. The blood was still spraying from his head and body, and I was still praying for myself and for him, for us who were fighting for something in our life, but now he cannot reach his dreams. The bombing was about two to twenty-five minutes long. I saw planes trying to escape from the little airports, but before they could lift up, they surrendered because of the explosions and the carpet bombing. It was far from my hiding place, so I had to wait until the end of the bombing. It was then that I saw the burning planes. I was shaking when I arrived back to the temporary buildings, and it was time to start moving with the new wagons to reach Budingen and the temporary buildings.

This fell at around March 15, and I was thinking about the March 15 Memorial Day in Hungary, which is one of the revolutionary days of Sandor Petofi, the poet who fought against corruption and communism. Here in Budingen, we got the news. Hungary was over the Russian army, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and they're coming our way. We started to get ready to run again, but we're not sure which direction. We would listen to the news every day via messenger and the radio to let us know where the Americans were and also to get far away from the Russians. I got homesick after I saw that poor guy running a short distance like five six steps without his head, which was cut down by a large piece of metal from the nearby exploded bomb. I will never forget this moment in my life, and right now, it is replaying in my brain like it happened in this moment.

Our leader, Captain Stufi Laszlo Mollnar, ordered us to pick up the necessary belongings, which we would need because we were walking west to find the American line first, getting far away from the Russian line. It was April already, and we were in the front getting closer to the American line. We started to arrange a white flag large enough for anyone to see from afar if we were to see some soldiers coming toward us. The nights were very cold, even the water was frozen, and the wind was making us shake. It really was a miserable night. Listening to the nonstop noise from the bombing and the artillery fire coming closer to us, we walked the next day, always covered by some trees because the planes that were searching for some target was still ahead of us. Not far, but we knew the end would come soon. We reached a little town named Orlick. We were staying in the distance from buildings. We were hiding in farmers' barns, finding food in the fields, not so much from the cold winter, but our supply was not going to be enough