Chapter 1
Times before My Own Memories
I was born in Hungary in 1941, only two months after, that my country joined the war against the Soviet Union. My native language is Hungarian, but I decided to present this set of ideas not in my own language, because in English it can be available for much more people as if I wrote it in Hungarian.
Something about my ancestors. My surname means someone from Komarom, a town at the border of two countries that belonged to one land up to the end of World War I. By the end of the war my home country shrank to one fourth of its original size and big parts have been given to neighbouring lands or changed to become independent states cutting off millions of my compatriots from their mother country. It only happened two and a half decades after that the first millennium of existence has been celebrated for our land and state. Well, international politics can do even worse. We are lucky that American politicians did not cooperated in what one of the European quasi-winners of the war wanted, i.e. to cut the whole country into pieces and to give the parts to the neighbouring newly formed ones. This time, when I write these sentences, it might be irrelevant, as after another world war (or rather the second stage of the thirty-year-long world war, as in my opinion the so called peace treaties were only ceasefire agreements that made it possible for the loser the prepare for a return match) and half a century of cold war Europe is in a positive change, and in a few years or at most decades probably all my former compatriots will be able to live in a union of states, where native tongues can be used without the fear of being discriminated.
More than seven decades before the above border switches my great-grandfather was ordered to leave his home of Komarom with all his family. His guilt has been taking part in the War of Independence against the neighbour, the ruler actually. And his bad luck had been that the letter of surrender to make everyone, present in the town of the time of surrender, free of consequences, did not cover him, as he lived over the town. He moved with his children and wife to Buzsak in the south and there, together with many hundreds of the same fate from their old place, settled down. My father was born at the new place at the beginning of the 20th century. Some years after his birth the family moved north and, at the southern shore of Lake Balaton found its permanent place. Then Fonyod was a little village, now it is a town of 20 thousand or more. Eight brothers and sisters, my uncles and aunts, all found their ways of living in that village as peasants, except my father. He did not like peasantry. At 20 he tried to become a forester in the hills of Bakony, north of the Lake Balaton. His obstinate character did not allow it and he moved on. It was then, when, after World War I, with only 30 percent of the original country left, but, as an independent state again after 400 years of dualism, all the administrative state institutions have to be newly created. He joined the Ministry of Finance as a customs officer. As a peasant boy he had been learning in an undivided school, where all the grades, from first to sixth, that time highest in an elementary school, had been sitting together under one teacher. He had to finish secondary school to become final as a customs officer and he did it in a private way. Before the final graduation he was given a choice, to study either ancient Greek language or Greek mythology. He chose the latter and so some decades later I was given the opportunity of having a valuable book, the history and mythology of the ancient Greeks, including how Herr Schliemann had found and excavated the treasures of Troy.
As a customs officer, first my father had got a place in the capital. He wanted to be promoted, so he had to study law, but to do your studies in your leisure time, when your work is not limited to a normal pattern is almost impossible. He did not finish his studies, although completed many of the exams with good results. Anyhow, his knowledge grew and as a child I could seldom ask anything from him not to be answered in a proper way.
Uniformed men at that time did the same as now. They moved around in pairs or groups. Father had a colleague, almost friend, and they frequented a house in the hilly right side of the Danube, where a family lived with two sons and two daughters. It would not be uninteresting to see how this family came to existence.
A manual worker with almost no education, but a good brain, the man met a woman that had come to the capital almost from the same village as he did, but whom he saw first only in the capital. As a peasant girl, she was going to the city every week to sell the produce from her parents’ garden and dairy farm. She was a beauty and wanted to fulfil her dreams of getting a prince on a white horse. The unattractive manual worker of the same age was no match for her. But, as legend goes, once she was preoccupied and made a mistake and, saying "Yes” to his proposal instead of the usual "No” she accepted him as her fiancé.
Their children have come in a line as a boy, two girls and another boy. The elder of the girls became my mother.
Father had been in love with the other, but she was beautiful and, as such, thought much more of herself as deserved. She was a born empress with no heart, but a great sense of domination. She had also waited to catch a prince, but that time horses were already seldom white and princes as rare as white ravens. As the girls have got nearer to thirty than twenty their mother fell into panic and urged them to choose the remaining two customs officers. The younger had also been in love with my father, considering somebody with no heart in love. As the other man with no will of his own would fit her better, she has chosen him. Mother chose my father. She has been the only winner, as she had loved him, too.
Something important in the future to be mentioned. Much before that the two customs officers appeared at the house, my mother had had a platonic romance with a young man. Mother has not been very pretty, but her bronze hair and green eyes provided her with some sex appeal. The man had been crazy about her. Fortunately, he wronged everything by helping himself to an unauthorized loan and being imprisoned.
For some years my parents have lived in the capital. Their first child, a girl, has died soon, as she became ill and in that years hospitals were not very good places. She got pneumonia and it was incurable in 1932. The next year my second sister was born, four years later my brother and another four years later me.
During the first few years of their marriage my parents were enjoying the relative safety and peace of the ‘30s. In our country it was the first time that, with a few hundred dollars’ sum, someone could create a small business and prospered. Of course, troubles that bothered Europe at that time would not stay out of the country, but still, there was no foreign rule, our language was free to use at last – at least in the small size mother country –, there was good education and the living standard of the ordinary man was improving.
As the ‘30s passed, the situation grew harder and my father as a government employee has been sent first to the eastern part of the country, later, when some of the pre-World-War
territories were given back to our homeland by the notorious Vienna Pacts, he was sent to Transylvania at the extreme east. It means, I was born within the small homeland, but at 3 months I was taken up to the corner of the Carpathian mountains. It was only 3 years that my father and mother have spent in the re-annexed country, but I felt always later, when they spoke about that time, that it had had a great influence on their way of thinking. I myself remember nothing of that time. What I know about it, I know of the tales of my parents and my sister.
The end of that period came quickly and brutally. The Soviet army was not to be stopped by our military forces and also the good eastern neighbour took back the land, that had been given him by mistake in 1920, once more. I was three then. All belongings of my parents, cloths, paintings, porcelain, furniture, that they owned, have been left behind, as the ministry could not send a truck to take them into safety, only an open car was available. Only miracle saved our family from falling apart. Father took all the three children with him to leave us with relatives in the capital. He was to return at once for my mother and things left behind. War was in full scale, during our trip to the centre of the country we had to get sometimes out of the train and hide on the meadows. Once the train was hit by Soviet bombers and we had to wait for a day to continue our journey. It was even worse in the east where mother was sitting and waiting. In a short time it became clear that she would not succeed in getting any means of transport for the baggage, even for herself, was she to remain there until my father would arrive back. As it seemed, it was the last opportunity to leave the place that had been their home for three years, when the last car of customs officers was to depart, and she decided to go with them. It was really the last moment for fleeing. Even this last vehicle had to stop shortly after and, as they were waiting for fuel there came gossips that waiting had no sense and a train was on its way to take them soon. Mother was sitting in the waiting room, when a train from the opposite direction arrived. Father was on way by this one to my mother. At least, he thought so. He got out to buy tobacco for cigarettes and met a familiar railway man who said him mother was in the station. This was the miracle I was writing about. Everything collected in 13 years of their married life has been lost, but they were together and their children in relative safety. Soon we all got together again.
The war did not spare the remainder of our country, either. We were in continuous fleeing, first to relatives of my father, then to his birthplace to the south, and at last to the capital again. With the war over, my father got another assignment from the Ministry of Finance in a fine place, Gyongyos, a town in the north-eastern part of the country among wine-growing hills. It has become his last employment. The reason why it happened, was programmed into his own nature: straightness, honesty and lack of care.
In that town commerce had always been one of the main sources to get money. Thus here there were a lot of people having Jewish ancestors. Beginning with the German occupation of the country taking place to prevent a pro-British coup in 1944 the prosecution of Jews started. They had been taken to different concentration camps in Poland, Germany and Austria. Only a fragment of this wretched crowd returned and even they had to face a situation that their belongings were missing. The group that helped their deportation has not been swept away by the war and a very well organized attempt made it impossible for the owners to find their property.
As a customs officer my father got some information and assisted these poor people to get their things back. And consequently he did not become popular among his own colleagues and bosses. It was one year after the war and so-called unreliable people were fired quickly. There were two lists: the A-list was dangerous, to get on it meant prison or death. Father’s name has been put on the other, the B-list. He was very lucky, he has even got a pension. But, it is not an easily solved problem to be fired by a government agency at 46. And the climate has not been fit for private enterprises. We moved to the village where his relatives lived, except my sister who went to school in the capital. He had the chance to make a fresh start as a peasant, although he had escaped that activity two and a half decades before. As he had never ceased to be a member of the community in the village, he has got a piece of land called building site of about three thousand square meters. Building has never occurred, but he did his best to make a living of the vegetables and corn produced on the site. Corn was fed to domestic animals and my parents managed to make ends meet.