Divergent paths

István Gadácsi (Brantford) and his sister Sós Istvánné (Budapest)

In October of 1956, István was isolated in a remote village, in the company of an eclectic assortment of characters, although not because he had planned it that way. They were the young and the old, people who had problems getting a better job because their backgrounds did not suit the powers of the day. They were former entrepreneurs, aristocrats, or people that that simply didn’t toe the line or fit the mould. They were relegated to far-off villages or forests – conveniently out of sight – to quietly measure the country’s future roads and railway lines.

Had he been more conniving or better able to manoeuvre within the system, things might have been different. But István was somebody who swam the tides as they came in.

They worked in pairs. István, in his early twenties, went out to the fields each day with a distinguished looking older man, perhaps in his sixties, who had been a lawyer or judge before the days of communist domination. They had no access to a telephone in the village of Kisterenye, not far from the north-eastern city of Miskolc, and thus they had only sparse reports about the revolution that was brewing in the capital, and making itself felt throughout the country.

During the first days of the uprising, they continued to work at that remote location. It was only on the 26th, three days into the October revolt, that the leader of István’s work group informed them that the time had come to stop. There was an insurection underway, he said. From then on everybody was on his or her own.

The leader, István would find out, was an informant for the AVH, the much-feared secret police. He was afraid of returning to the capital. The group remained stranded, as the public transportation system was paralyzed, and they would have to wait, each person nervous for different reasons about the journey back to Budapest. Their only line of communication with the outside world was the radio.

It was not until November 3rd, the day before the revolution collapsed, that István finally took a freight train to Budapest. “When I arrived,” he remembers, “the capital was quiet, the streets were dark. The fighting wasn’t all that bad yet, from what I could see.”

The shelling of Budapest began soon after István arrived, and he and others sought shelter in a cellar. “We spent three or four days in that cellar, coming up occasionally and going for bread,” he remembers.

Disarray in Vasvár
At the same time across the country, István’s sister Anna was in the village of Vasvár, not far from the Austrian border. She had just begun teaching physical education at a college in the village. Becoming independent had been a big step for her, earning 1,000 forint a month, an income that lessened her burden on their Budapest family, who even before the revolution were in a constant struggle to survive.

“When the revolution or counter-revolution began,” she says, remembering her first sight of trouble in Vasvár, “we didn’t know what it was. We were just horrified at the tanks. Although there was no shooting, there were tanks all over the place.”

Nor did Anna know anything about the fate of her family. Very much like her brother, she was living in a total news blackout. She knew something was wrong, however, when the local communist party chief began acting rather strangely.

“He was totally flustered,” Anna remembers, “to the extent that he was constantly walking around the village with a gun on his belt and a rifle on his shoulder.”

Anna continued her work as long as there were classes to teach. She had no idea of the whereabouts of her family in Budapest. In the early days of November, she too began the journey back to the capital.

“We knew that they were fighting in Budapest,” Anna remembers. “I brought a big suitcase full of potatoes because we heard that people were hungry, that they were starving in Budapest.”

Escaping to Sopron
Anna and István’s family was particularly poor, even in the context of the relative general poverty of communism. Anna remembers her mother making a single scrambled egg for breakfast, and putting a little piece of bread in it. They would share. It was hard for István because many of his friends had big apartments, while their family of five lived in one room, all crammed together.

“It was difficult, and many times I had to go to bed hungry,” remembers István. “There just wasn’t enough food. My mother used to barter clothing for food. It was really very bad.”

In high school, István and his friends would go to concerts in Károly garden, where they just stood outside the fence listening to the classical music. Of a creative nature, young István was polite, reserved and enjoyed taking long walks in the city. His sister Anna was a more practical type, a straight arrow that followed her own path. She enrolled in the college of physical education, consciously envisioning and working towards each step of her future. Meanwhile, István struggled to even get into university, failing his first attempt to enter the forestry engineering program in Sopron.

When he finally succeeded in 1954, although forestry engineering was not his preferred choice, it was an opportunity to escape the troubled family environment in which he lived in Budapest. His true interest was architecture, and not only did he fall in love with the city of Sopron itself, but he also enjoyed his newfound freedom.

The reprieve did not last long. After a year in Sopron, due to financial difficulties and his deteriorating health, he was forced to skip a year and find work to avoid overburdening his family. “I could only afford one meal a day in Sopron,” remembers István.

“My parents were unable to help me. I loaded train wagons and other various jobs, but the work I was able to find there was not enough.”

The first escape
His mother knew that István was miserable and was having trouble finding his place. She even supported the idea of his defecting, thinking that things might end up being easier for him elsewhere.

István’s father worked for the Hungarian National Bank, and the family had experienced forced eviction during the Second World War. They lost everything when they were forced to flee Transylvania with all of the other employees. On their return they had a hard time finding housing, and initially they were sheltered with relatives.

“We had no home at all,” remembers István. “It was very hard to find accommodation, be it an apartment or any housing in general. It was almost impossible.”

After the November 4 Soviet invasion to crush the revolution, waves of youth began defecting across the Austrian border. István did not venture an attempt at leaving until late that month, when a childhood friend of his whispered to him, “I am going to Austria; we have to go. Do you want to come?” István, feeling pressured for a quick decision, asked, “Right now?” to which his friend replied, “Yes, right now. Do you want
to go or not?”

By then his sister Anna, or ‘Potyo’ as they called her, had already returned to Vasvár. The family in Budapest had heard a radio message that she too had fled to Austria, and they were convinced that she had fled.

In a split-second decision, István decided to go. He stuffed a few things in a canvas bag, and left a note to his parents. “I went to Austria with Miki,” it read.

“It was a funny thing,” remembers István. “I don’t remember how I could think of leaving my family without saying goodbye. I was very close to my mother.”

Faced with an unstable country and home life, István decided to take a train with his friend Miki to Mosonmagyaróvár. It didn’t take long for the attempt to fail. On arrival, after being halted by a military vehicle, the passengers were lead out of the train and carted off to a building being used as an impromptu jail. Locked up for three days, one by one each was interrogated by the Soviet forces.

Miki claimed that they were visiting his girlfriend in Mosonmagyaróvár. The officials even took them to his girlfriend’s house, and Miki ran to her whispering, “We are very much in love”. They stayed with her for a day before both were sent back to Budapest.

“I had to promise that I wouldn’t try to leave again,” remembers István, “and theystamped my identity book. “I was very scared, and felt that from then on I was a marked man. When I got back home I knew that I would have to leave, and started working on how to escape again.”

It was obvious to István that the revolution had been defeated and the regime was reasserting its control. He had the impression that there was no future for him under those circumstances.

Planning the next escape István discovered another friend who was planning to leave the country, one who had connections with railway workers, a gold-mine under the circumstances, he thought. He also learned that the news of his sister’s departure was hearsay.

“I know that they thought I left because people would constantly leave messages on the radio,” remembers Anna, “and we all listened to the Radio Free Europe. They heard that ‘Potyo sends a message that she is in Austria’, but it must have been another Potyo.”

Anna had had several offers to leave, as Vasvár was on the route of many of the refugees. In early December she was offered a ride across the border for just 20 forints, but she declined, never really wanting to leave in the first place.

“I wasn’t a big Hungarian, but where would I go?” Anna says, “and to whom? For a girl it was different.”

István and his friend Gyurka walked the grey streets of Budapest which was in ruins, reminding him of what the city looked like just after the Second World War. Houses had large holes ripped right out of the center, and streets were littered with mortar.

“This is a disaster,” István remembers telling his friend. “I just won’t stay here, Gyurka. Don’t you want to leave with us?” István had heard that the whole forestry engineering faculty of Sopron University had crossed the border, but it was becoming very late. Nevertheless, he began to emotionally prepare himself for the dangerous days ahead. They began their trek on December 6th, heading by train to Sombathely, not far
from the Austrian border.

“It was nerve-racking, because we had heard many stories,” remembers István. “Some people had been captured five times. Some had lost friends who were shot to death. It was dangerous, and we were prepared that we might die.” The small group hid away in a cattle train, and the doors closed behind them. They were instructed to jump off the train after about an hour, when it would make a stop, and then, once off the train, they were to keep on running in the same direction, towards Austria. As time passed, however, the train showed no signs of stopping.

István was in a daze, but he knew that he had to get across. He felt that his life in Hungary was too stifling. He felt cornered, and the danger had lost its importance. His family knew that it would be better for all of them.

“I was sort of a financial burden, because they had to give me 100 forints every month for university, and they just couldn’t do it,” he remembers.

On that day he ended up safely crossing the Austrian border. Settling in Canada István spent about two months in Austria before making the journey to Canada, arriving in mid-February. He was somewhat aimless at the beginning, and to this day regrets not having been more proactive to make his first years easier. He was never able to rejoin the forestry faculty of the University of Sopron, for instance, who had moved as a group to British Columbia.

“I wrote to them, and have many letters saying that I was welcome,” says István, “but I would have had to pay three hundred dollars in tuition fees, and eighty dollars for my own transportation. I was making something like eighty-three cents an hour. I just could not collect the money for the train.”

Life did get easier in the sense that he felt liberated from the financial problems of his childhood. And he met Julie, the first real girlfriend of his life. In the early years it was a struggle, and István tried out numerous kinds of work. He worked as a night cleaner, while Julie worked as a lab technician. With his forestry engineering background, István also worked for a time as a logger at the Canadian International Paper Company, in the wilderness near the northern city of Val D’Or. He also worked one kilometre underground, in a gold mine.

Over time, István’s penchant for the arts crept back into his life. In 1959 he tried his luck as an artist, mostly bartering his work. When he lost his job, Julie and he opened a gallery focusing on the works of contemporary Canadian artists.

“We were green,” he remembers. “ Julie didn’t like her job either, because she worked with radioactive tracers and didn’t want to end up as a lab-technician in her sixties. “That is when we decided to be on our own.”

The gallery had a rough start, with Julie initially continuing to work at the lab while István ran the business. He spent his time driving around picking up the works of contemporary Canadian artists for display at their gallery.

Return to normality
Anna continued her work in Vasvár for two years until she returned to the capital to teach. “For me, the whole thing didn’t mean that much,” Anna says. “When I returned to Budapest there were ruins everywhere. It all meant nothing to me. It was just the memory of a bunch of tanks in the streets, and later life continued on its own course.”

After he left, the fact that her brother had defected may have been a stain on Anna’s record. She says it was likely the reason why she wasn’t asked to be a member of the Communist Party, but that wasn’t something she was interested in anyways, she says.

It was not an ideal life and she remembers how they struggled. But they had known poverty, war and revolution. It was part of the baggage that they carried. Eventually she attained her goals of teaching, having an apartment and a family, contented with her lot.

Anna never regretted not having left Hungary during the revolution. She wasn’t interested in supporting one regime or another, but was simply interested making her way through life as best she could, working within the system.

“I wasn’t neutral either, since I was a member of the union,” she says. “I was responsible for women, and I was the leading teacher of the Communist Youth for a while.

“We had to do innumerable seminars, something that was natural at the time. It was required.”

Anna still has the books that they read and studied. While she was not surprised when the system collapsed, she is convinced that during the previous system a person could succeed. “I understand that when my brother left, for a long time he lived very badly,” she says. “But I’m sure that being the kind of person that he was, he could not have succeeded here as well as he did there.

“He is reserved and not a fighter. He would not have gone very far here, but I think that he did rather well in Canada.”

* Text by Andrew Princz
* Photos courtesy Katalin Sándor
* Bridging the Divide published by ontheglobe.com
* Copyright 2006, All Rights Reserved

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