It’s Hungarian Lit Month, hosted by Stu from Winston’s Dad and although I’ve read a few books from Hungary, I didn’t have anything on the TBR.  So I explored the lists at Goodreads, and found Escape from Communist Hungary (2013) by Zsuzsanna Bozzay and (after a lot of mucking about with the download), I was able to acquire a copy using the Kindle Unlimited subscription that I intend to ditch the day before the trial expires.  It really is a dead loss, because the range is so limited, and the majority of them are self-published.

Anyway…

Escape from Communist Hungary is a self-published memoir by a refugee who managed to escape with her mother Mimi during the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution.  The Cold War politics of this revolution is known to many Australians because it took place shortly before the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.  Although the Melbourne Olympics were marketed as ‘the friendly Olympics’, it became infamous for the ‘Blood in the Water’ water-polo semi-final between the Soviets and Hungary.  To the approval of the crowd, Hungary defeated the USSR 4-0 in what was a brutal match, and there literally was blood in the water when one of the Soviets punched one of the Hungarians in the final minutes of the game.

With some similarities to the recent uprising against an oppressive government in Iran, the Hungarian Revolution had been crushed by Soviet tanks and troops and thousands were killed. Among the quarter of a million Hungarians who fled the country were Zsuzsanna Bozzay and her mother.

The memoir begins with a brief recapitulation of Hungary’s postwar history when it became part of the Soviet buffer zone, as agreed at the Yalta Conference by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin.  Bozzay refers to this as Hungary once again [being] punished for being on the wrong side of the war, without acknowledging that being ‘on the wrong side’, in WW2, meant being complicit in one of those most evil regimes in history.

Wikipedia’s page about Hungary during WW2 explains that Hungary entered the war as an Axis Power in 1941, and fought on the eastern front for two years.  In 1943 when it became obvious that the Germans were losing the war, Hungary attempted to forge a secret peace deal with the Allies, but when Germany learned about this in 1944, they occupied Hungary, and installed a puppet government.  Later in the book, Bozzay makes a scanty reference to this abortive peace deal with the Allies in the context of her friendship with an aristocratic family who had connections with one of the negotiators.

Although the title suggests a book about the evils of communism in Hungary and why one would want to escape it, some historical context would have made this a better book.  For example, to put food shortages in context, and to clarify what is meant by ‘life returning to normal’ it would have been helpful if the memoir noted that while postwar reconstruction was funded in Western Europe by the Marshall Plan, Hungary (however unwillingly) was part of the eastern bloc and therefore not eligible. According to Wikipedia:

The Soviet Union had been as badly affected as any other part of the world by the war. The Soviets imposed large reparations payments on the Axis allies that were in its sphere of influence. Austria, Finland, Hungary, Romania, and especially East Germany were forced to pay vast sums and ship large amounts of supplies to the Soviet Union. Those reparation payments meant the Soviet Union itself received about the same as 16 European countries received in total from Marshall Plan aid.

Born in 1941, Bozzay would of course have been only a child at the time, preoccupied by school and ballet lessons and so on, but as an adult writing this memoir in 2013 after completing a Creative Writing course at the Open University, she might be expected to provide some explanatory details for a 21st century English-speaking audience who probably know little about Hungary’s war and its postwar period.  It’s not readers who should have to do the research!

The war left Hungary devastated, destroying over 60% of the economy and causing significant loss of life. In addition to the over 600,000 Hungarian Jews killed, as many as 280,000 other Hungarians were raped, murdered and executed or deported for slave labour.  After German occupation, Hungary participated in the Holocaust, deporting nearly 440,000 Jews, mainly to Auschwitz; nearly all of them were murdered. The Horthy government’s complicity in the Holocaust remains a point of controversy and contention. (See Wikipedia’s Hungary/history page.)

Bozzay’s mother Mimi had Jewish relations who perished in the Holocaust except for her brother Feri who survived in time to be liberated from a concentration camp by the Soviets, though Bozzay doesn’t name which one it was, and seems to have little to say about her mother’s trauma.

Anyway, moving on…

The memoir details the oppression of the Soviets, determined to replace a postwar coalition government with communists in power.

It took two years to achieve their aim by starting a reign of terror; deporting, imprisoning and executing leaders of the opposition as well as ordinary people. My father’s brother was imprisoned for political activities with the Smallholders Party and held in the headquarters of the secret police, the AVO on Andrássy út 60, which is now the Terror House, a museum and memorial for the victims of communism who were tortured and died there. My mother had a cousin who was a high ranking communist official there and she persuaded him to release her brother-in-law. Later this cousin committed suicide when he realised that communism was not what he thought it was.

People had to be careful of what they said in public places in case they were accused of being anti-communist and thrown into prison. We were frightened if there was a knock at the door, especially late at night in case it was the secret police. If we happened to be listening to the BBC we not only switched off the radio, but we also changed to a different station, because listening to western radio was punishable and could result in a prison sentence. But we knew that the only reliable source of news came from the BBC World Service. People could be imprisoned for no apparent reason, maybe because someone with a grudge against them accused them of being ‘enemies of the people’ and that was enough for the secret police to call and take them away. (p. 7)

Her parents’ first attempt to escape was in 1949.

The only way to get out of Hungary was to walk through the border illegally which was very dangerous, especially crossing into Austria in the west where the border was well guarded. But apparently it was easier to cross from Czechoslovakia into Austria. The border between Hungary and Czechoslovakia was not especially well guarded in the east, close to the Ukrainian border, as most people did not think of crossing there from one communist country into another. (p.8)

Their plans included a failed attempt to send treasured possessions to England with friends, and this sequence reveals one of the dilemmas faced by refugees.  Apart from the problem of leaving financial assets behind, most people have property that has sentimental value too, and Bozzay’s tells us that her parents were in dispute about this.  Her mother thought that possessions can be replaced but her father felt differently about pieces of furniture that were family heirlooms.

I had to grit my teeth when reading the casual way in which Bozzay recounts moving into a furnished flat that once belonged to a friend called Serényi Aranka, a Jewish lady, who left for London before the war.  No mention of the reasons why she might have left: no mention of the Horthy government’s pre-war oppressive laws that excluded Jews from almost all aspects of everyday life.  Some of these are briefly mentioned later in passing in the backstory about her mother, but there should have been an explanation in this part of the book where it is relevant. 

Bozzay seems to lionise her mother as the hero of this family history, and she accepts what she has been told at face value.  She states that Mimi would have liked to emigrate to Israel but was frustrated by the requirement to be able to speak Hebrew.  This is not obviously not correct because it would have denied Holocaust survivors from migrating, even if they could read it as a sacred language.  There was then and still is a Right of Return for all Jews in the diaspora, regardless of language proficiency in Hebrew.

Whatever, that plan was abandoned for reasons Bozzay hints at, i.e. her parents’ differences about wanting to leave Hungary:

It takes a very special kind of person to leave all their possessions behind and move to a new country but she was not frightened by the prospect. It took all her powers of persuasion to convince my father of her plan. He was a staunch Hungarian, with very deep roots in Hungarian culture, had no talent for languages and found it hard to imagine living anywhere else, but eventually she had her way as she always did. (p. 13).

The chapter about the first escape attempt when Bozzay was eight details the plan for her parents to leave separately, the journey through Czechoslovakia, their capture near the border with Austria, and — reading between the lines — the somewhat naïve trust in a people smuggler. Her mother was imprisoned only for a couple of months because she had a convincing story about wanting to leave her husband after a row, but in the interim Bozzay was placed in an orphanage until her father could collect her, and there she caught polio.

From here, the narrative becomes more of a family history, obviously drawn from her mother’s memories, and some of it is repetitive.  The chronology breaks to provide the back story of Bozzay’s grandparents, and her paternal grandmother’s opposition to her son marrying a Jew. It covers her mother’s brief sojourn in Paris in more nostalgic depth than it needed to be, and then Mimi’s dutiful return to Budapest to look after her ailing parents.  It goes on to cover her parents’ marriage and some happy childhood memories of her father, but it also includes her childhood memories of the battle for Budapest and the vicious behaviour of their Russian liberators. Any euphoria about the end of the war was short-lived.

The narrative then switches back to Bozzay’s experience as a victim of polio, and her mother’s remarkable efforts to help with her rehabilitation, supplemented by a physiotherapist who had trained in the USA under Sister Kenny.

Bozzay was fifteen when the Hungarian Revolution broke out, and her vivid memories of it are the best part of this memoir. But optimism evaporated as the tanks rolled in and once again it was Bozzay’s mother who had the foresight to take advantage of the chaos to flee. Again leaving her father behind, they managed to cross the border into Austria and to seek asylum at the British Embassy.

In England they were taken in by Mimi’s brother Raoul and his wife, and despite communication difficulties because Bozzay had refused to learn English at school, she soon became friends with her cousins.  The usual adjustment problems were exacerbated by the Hungarians’ complete ignorance about British life and the privations suffered during the war.  But her mother’s multilingualism meant that she soon found good work and (having fudged her birth year on official documents) was able to keep working until she was 75.

Meanwhile Bozzay herself went to a convent where she received a very good education and went on to make a success of her life.  She gained a degree in Chemistry at London University where she met her husband Michael Snarey and went on to have a career in teaching while raising their family, followed by a second career in chiropody.

All through this book, which privileges Bozzay’s mother’s point-of-view, I kept wondering what had happened to Bozzay’s father because I knew from other sources that the Soviets severely punished the relations of those who left illegally.  Though late in the book we learn that after six years he was eventually given permission to be reunited with his wife and daughter, and that despite not knowing English he was able to get a job, there is nothing about his experiences during the separation or his feelings about his new life in Britain.

I’ve been hard on this book because I was disappointed by the inadequate editing, the failure to consider its audience, and its over-reliance on a selective family history at the expense of the expectations I had from its title.

Author: Zsuzsanna Bozzay
Title: Escape from Communist Hungary
Publisher: Self-published
ASIN: B07NCBRZQS
Purchased for the Kindle from Amazon.

You can find out more about Zsuzsanna Bozzay from her profile at the Open University here.