For the Children

By Geza Tatrallyay

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Geza Tatrallyay
• Release date: Apr 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781088166925

Geza Tatrallyay

Born in Budapest, Geza Tatrallyay escaped with his family from Communist Hungary in 1956 during the Revolution, immigrating to Canada. After attending the University of Toronto Schools and serving as School Captain in his last year, he graduated with a B.A. in Human Ecology from Harvard College in 1972, and, as a Rhodes Scholar from Ontario, obtained a B.A. / M.A. in Human Sciences from Oxford University in 1974. He completed his studies with a M.Sc. from London School of Economics and Politics in 1975. Geza worked as a host in the Ontario Pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan, and represented Canada in epée fencing at the Montreal Olympics in 1976. His professional experience has included stints in government, international finance and environmental entrepreneurship. Geza is a citizen of Canada and Hungary, and as a green card holder, currently divides his time between Barnard, Vermont and San Francisco. He is married to Marcia and their daughter, Alexandra, lives in San Francisco with husband David, and two sons, Sebastian, and Orlando, while their son, Nicholas, lives in Nairobi with his Hungarian wife, Fanni, and his granddaughters, Sophia and Lara. Geza is also the author of five novels, three memoirs, four poetry collections and a children's picture storybook. His poems, stories, essays and articles have been published in journals in Canada and the USA.

Book preview

For the Children

(A Cold War Escape Story)

by

Geza Tatrallyay

Any errors of fact or misstatements are unintentional and purely mine.

I apologize in advance for these.

"… It would indeed be difficult for us to be worthy of such sacrifices. But we can try to be so, in uniting Europe at last, in forgetting our quarrels, in correcting our own errors, in increasing our creativeness, and our solidarity. We have faith that there is on the march in the world, parallel with the forces of oppression and death which are darkening our history, a force of conviction and life, an immense movement of emancipation which is culture and which is born of freedom to create and of freedom to work.

Those Hungarian workers and intellectuals, beside whom we stand today with such impotent sorrow, understood this and have made us the better understand it. That is why, if their distress is ours, their hope is ours also. In spite of their misery, their chains, their exile, they have left us a glorious heritage which we must deserve: freedom, which they did not win, but which in one single day they gave back to us."

Albert Camus, Letter to the World

The Blood of the Hungarians

October 23, 1957

(The First Anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

The Escape

Epilogue

Next Cold War Escape Story

About the Author

Acknowledgments

The events that made this story would not have taken place were it not for the courage of my parents. Their hopes and dreams, their failures and disappointments, but above all, their single-minded pursuit of freedom, a better life for themselves and their children, is what this book is about. Apart from being thankful to them for bringing me into the world and raising me, I am grateful to them for this. Without their will to escape and leave behind the dismal Communism that ruined Hungary, my life would have been very different. I have often wandered about this alter ego that might have been had it not been for my parents’ refusal to give up their struggle to leave, and I have always come away glad that this other is not the life that I have been living. 

Their vision, since the terrible suffering and destruction during World War II and the darkest days of Stalinism, was always to transplant themselves and their family to a free country. 

And Canada was their choice.

Thank you, Mami and Papi, thank you for everything.

#

My gratitude also goes to the people of Canada and Austria who welcomed us, gave us shelter, helped us start a new life. Relatives, friends, acquaintances, strangers. Again, without them, this story would not have happened. I owe a lot especially to Canada, my adopted nation, the country that I love. I must also include in my thanks the many Hungarian friends, relatives and strangers who helped us on our way to freedom. Thank you.

#

Lastly, I thank my wife, Marcia, and my children Alexandra and Nicholas who put up with the gestation of this book, and who, in fact, returned with me to Hungary after the régime change in an adventure that, I believe, was interesting and life-shaping for all of us. Thank you, my dears.

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. 

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 fifty years later, as I plunge into a third edition of this book, 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.

Even more recently, the savage aggression of Russian forces in Putin’s military special operation – no, war – against the sovereign neighboring nation of the Ukraine has brought home to all of us how fragile our freedom and democracy is. And the resulting plight of more than six million Ukrainians – mostly mothers and children – who have fled their homeland, and the other eight million or so internally displaced is a reminder for me everyday of what I lived through, and the difficult decisions and traumatic experiences my parents confronted at each step.

So, 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 build on it and continue to create a better world.

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 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 watched as the few potatoes she had managed to purchase tumbled 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, with a chuckle, 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 the pre-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 undesirable 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, 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 was due 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.