The direction to follow

Géza Hermann (Montreal) and his half-brother Elemér Hanó (Szigetmonostor)

In October of 1956, Elemér was manning an air defense station in the quiet village of Szigetmonostor, outside of Budapest. There was a heightened sense of tension in the air, one that the soldiers could hardly explain. But they knew that something was happening when the orders from their superiors became confused and contradictory. And suddenly, their officers just disappeared, leaving in their wake orders to shoot down any Soviet planes entering the airspace around the Hungarian capital.

It was all rather perplexing. While the soldiers were armed with anti-aircraft cannons, twenty-one-year-old Elemér knew all too well that if a Soviet MIG-15 fighter jet were spotted in the skies above the Pilis mountainrange, their reaction would be all but toothless.

“Honestly, by the time we saw a MIG-15 and pointed our guns, the jet would have been long out of range,” remembers Elemér. They found themselves totally alone. The service master distributed some rough blankets to sleep in and told the soldiers they would have to make do. There was little food or provisions, and the forty young soldiers, faced with the prospect that they would be out there for weeks, soon grew desperate.

“We aimed one of our guns at the side of the houses in the village,” remembers Elemér. “These guns were supposed to shoot down airplanes. “So we pointed one of the cannons at the exterior of a peasant house, and sent three soldiers to fetch us bread so that we could eat.” They threatened the villagers to simply blow away the house.

“Thank God they gave the food, so there was no problem,” he remembers, regretful of the incident.

Géza and the mayhem
On that very same day Elemér’s half-brother Géza was on the balcony of his family’s apartment on Stáhli Street, waiting for his parents to return from an evening at the movies. He watched through the railing as students gathered below. Across from where he lived were the offices of the Hungarian daily newspaper Népszava, and the little boy saw a downpour of flyers presumably disbursed by the revolutionaries from above.

By the time his parents returned, what had looked like a demonstration was becoming louder and more violent. Simultaneously the much-feared AVH and the Hungarian military arrived. By that evening, the army had started to distribute arms to the demonstrators. The family took cover in the basement of their apartment as the power was cut and events began to get nasty. They remained there for days and days in the thick of the action. A Russian tank was stationed on the corner, ostensibly protecting a state laboratory in the very building they occupied.

“They decided the building was free picking so they blew a hole right into it,” Géza remembers. “There were different kinds of fire extinguishers with different kinds of foam, and people rushed in to put out the fire. It was so close that none of us would be here if the rest had blown up.”

Géza’s father walked around the city taking photographs, sometimes even bringing his young son with him on these journeys. They lived on a dead-end road, and one day Géza emerged from the basement and saw three dead bodies that had been left in a small alcove off of the entranceway.

“There was a Hungarian soldier, a Russian soldier and a civilian,” he says. “Someone had just dragged them in there.”

Their basement was put in tatters as the tanks fired at the building above. Géza remembers the distinct smell of the thick smoke in the air. Since there was no electricity, they lit a candle. He spent his days drawing. He suspects that it was in that grungy basement that he was awakened to a lifelong passion for art, as he would later become an artist.

Although less than a kilometre-and-a-half separated the village from Elemér’s base, initially there was little communication between the townsfolk and the soldiers, until their days of isolation extended into weeks. Their search for food was not restricted to bullying villagers with cannons. Another way was to fish in the nearby river using a rudimentary technique. Laden with hand grenades, they stood on the banks and tossed them in one by one, waiting until their catch floated to the top. Content in their self-sufficiency, they fried the fish and ate right on the riverbank.

To break the routine of the previous weeks and months, Elemér took part in a theater troupe created by five or six buddies when relieved of his regular military duties. They wandered from village to village performing, trying to while away their dreaded military service.

Elemér remembers going to the local council offices from time to time, where a young woman named Erzsébet would help them transcribe their plays. He and two of his buddies befriended her family, and before long they started recieving eggs and good peasant food. In addition to the family’s pigs, cows, and nice little garden, there were also four pretty young girls. Once left without the military’s leadership, it was young Erszébet’s family who began nurturing Elemér and his two friends. He began courting her, and the two other soldiers, her sisters – one of whom would later become his brother-in-law. They were all taken in by the family, and life became more bearable.

“There was food there so we didn’t die of hunger,” says Elemér, “and we went there more and more often. I think her parents were happy to marry off their girls, and they didn’t object. It’s been almost fifty years now that we’ve been hanging around together!”

The cobblestone streets
As children, Géza and his friends played soccer at the dead-end near his home- the alleyway was theirs. They ran about on the cobblestone streets dreaming of the stars of Ferencváros, their favourite soccer team. Géza badly wanted to be a soccer player, and it was as if he had been given that street to help him make his dreams come true. It was dirty and laden with tar, but there was something comforting, safe and magical about that road.

Géza’s father took his young son to watch the “Golden Team” play in black and white on the silver screen. That team captured the imagination of all Hungarians. His father was a master watch- and clock-maker, and before the period of nationalization he owned a small store. When it was later consolidated by the state, he was forced to work for a medical instruments manufacturer.

As the revolution became bloody, Géza’s parents, particularly his mother, grew very concerned about Elemér’s whereabouts. She worried that he might have died in the fighting.

“My father dragged me out to the cemetery to view the unidentified bodies; to look for my brother,” remembers Géza. “It was the kind of experience that has remained with me for the rest of my life. It was a transformative moment, seeing those bodies. “They had them in boxes, and some of them had been crushed. It was really a mess.”

The pragmatism of the day
It was November, and Elemér could not have felt safer; he was in Szigetmonostor, and in love. While his parents were convinced that he would join their escape from Hungary, he would not be cajoled to go anywhere. His wife-to-be and her family provided all the nourishment and love that he could ever desire, and he would end up spending the next half century in Szigetmonostor.

“I don’t think he ever regretted it,” says Géza. “I don’t think that leaving even came into the equation for him. It all happened very quickly.”

Although it was probably not the determining factor, that Elemér was a soldier also may have contributed to his staying put. As a deserter he would have been shot the moment he tried to cross the border. The pending separation was most difficult on their mother, who never really wanted to leave in the first place.

“She had four sisters, her mother, and her other son in Hungary,” says Géza.

“Apparently my father based his decision on my insistence. He thought that I would become the Prime Minister of Canada, since I wanted to go so badly.”

Hearing news of his family’s imminent departure, Elemér left the security of Szigetmonostor and traveled to Budapest on foot, as it was too dangerous to travel on the roads. By that time he had told them about his plan to marry Erzsébet. Practical matters had to be dealt with quickly. The family owned a large piano, on which both of the children had learned to play. Elemér was given the choice of taking the piano or the kitchen furnishings. About to be married, he passed on the piano and chose the kitchen items. The piano and everything else they owned was sold to raise money for the rest of the family’s escape.

“I might have wanted to go,” Elemér remembers, “but my wife was a very grounded person, and we just stayed.”

The way out
The decision to leave did not confer an easy departure. Already early January, the window for their escape was growing dangerously tight, and the borders were very difficult to penetrate. Géza’s father made the plans with the precision of the clock-maker that he was. He sold everything they owned and hired a guide.

“How he got ahold of an American jeep and driver with papers, I don’t know,” says Géza. “My father must have paid him a lot of money to do this trip.”

The journey was treacherous. The family met the driver at dawn, passing through roadblocks with his mother sitting in front while Géza and his father remained hidden under a tarpaulin in the rear.

The guide dropped them off on the outskirts of a tiny border village and directed the group to another guide, who would take them across the border. They waited a day and a night to cross in total darkness, on the night of a new moon. They marched through a muddy field, his father losing a shoe on the way. The guide brought them through a barbed-wire fence and pointed them towards a light that he said was in Austria. They were to follow the light through the fields. The landscape had twists and turns, and if they made a wrong turn they ran the risk of arriving back on Hungarian soil.

After traveling through the darkness for some time, the light they were following suddenly went out. It was total darkness. They searched for the direction to follow.

“My father, being a watchmaker, would use a compass to measure the magnetization of small watches,” Géza recalls. “So when the light went out that was one of the things he had in his bag.”

They stopped, recalling the direction of the light. Géza’s father lit a candle and took out his tiny little compass.

“That is how we made it,” says Géza. “Without that compass I don’t think we would have made it across.”

Muddy and barefoot, they arrived at a small town in Austria. The first house they came across was inhabited by a German-speaking family of Hungarian origin. They told them to walk a few hundred meters to where the refugees were being gathered. Little Géza would spend his eighth birthday in Austria, and his brother Elemér would just a few weeks later be married without the presence of his immediate family.

On arrival, Géza’s father got new shoes and clothes from the Red Cross, and the young boy was given his first bar of Toblerone chocolate – an exotic treat. However, it was his exausted mother who ended up in the hospital.

“I don’t think that she wanted to go,” says Géza, “so the physical journey took its toll on her.

“I think my father thought that leaving would give us better opportunities. He had dreams to open a little boutique, and I would man the front while he made repairs in the back.”

They were given the choice of staying in Austria, and Géza’s father actually considered it. In the end, however, their destination was to be Canada, where they already had family who had left Hungary in 1948. After a time in Austria, they traveled through Europe to Liverpool, England, where they began their voyage to Halifax on the oceanliner Saxonia, arriving in late February. From Halifax, they made their way to Montreal. Young Géza couldn’t help but be amazed at the setting awaiting his arrival at the CN train station.

“From a city that was grey and dark, with no electricity or food, where you stand around for three hours to get a loaf of bread,” he remembers, “here I ran out of the train as if it were another world.”

He remembers looking wide-eyed at the buildings, the neon lights, the electrifying world that he had suddenly been parachuted into. Géza’s father was able to resume his life in Canada, working for many years at his trade. In Montréal as a ‘refugee kid’, Géza had to struggle. He didn’t know any English, and somehow felt as if he had to prove himself more than most.

Life on the other side of the pond
Géza and Elemér lived worlds apart over the next half-century, and saw each other only on rare occasions.

“We always had a good relationship,” says Géza, “except for the fact that I don’t really know my brother. In fifty years, we spent maybe four months together.”

In 1968, after graduating from high school, Géza returned to Hungary for a visit. It was the year after Expo 1967, a World’s Fair held in Montreal that had a profound effect on the young man, who was now making his way in life as an artist. “Expo 1967 brought the greatest art you could see in the world,” remembers Géza. “I saw Van Gogh, Picasso. It inspired me to revisit Europe.”

With little money, a young Géza toured around Europe with a knapsack and a small easel. He traveled to Hungary and surprised his family. On arrival, he went to see his grandmother on Kálai Éva Street, moved along the way by the vividness of his childhood recollections. His memories of distances, long at the time, were in fact very short. Nobody was expecting him; it was a complete and total surprise.

“I ended up walking to the apartment, and saw her sitting outside with a close friend of my parents,” remembers Géza of that day. Reestablishing contact with Elemér did not take long, and they fell into each others’ arms. Elemér, who had become a welder, knew that he would certainly have been more prosperous had he gone to Canada, as his mother had hoped.

“I might have been a millionaire had I left then,” says Elemér. “I knew that welders were always paid very well there.”

Elemér even visited Canada, and was impressed by the multitude of cars and vastness of the landscape. He talked over the idea of emigrating with his daughter, who said that they couldn’t live there. His America is in Hungary, she told him, and Elemér ultimately agreed. Since the tumultuous days of the revolution, there was nothing he was more sure about than the path he had stumbled upon in the small village of Szigetmonostor a half century earlier.

“I don’t tell anybody, but I have a golden life,” says Elemér. “My wife is such a wonderful woman. We do everything for one another, as much as we can.

“It is a comfortable kind of life here that is worth every penny. I wouldn’t even go to Budapest.”

Although Elemér settled in to his life and family quite easily, on the other side of the ocean his mother remained in a constant struggle. She had trouble with the language and adapting to life in Canada, and always seemed to want to return.

“She was being pulled in two directions:” says Elemér, “being with her husband and son, or being here with me, her other son.”

As the rest of his own family was so far away, and he had joined his wife’s family in Szigetmonostor, the situation didn’t really affect Elemér as much as it could have.

“They lived their lives, and I live mine,” says Elemér. “When the poor woman died, my father wrote me a note asking whether he should send some of her ashes. I told him not to send them, that they should stay in one place as a whole. Let God forgive me, but to be honest even her death didn’t shake me that much, since she was so very far away. If she was here in a neighbouring village, then it would have been different.”

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