February 9, 1997

I found myself a commercial high school where the teaching emphasis was on office and business skills. I was finally free of the restraints of the Jewish schools where I had been so unhappy for seven years. I had learned to read Hebrew but never managed to understand what I was reading. I liked my new school very much. On the first day of the school year, a short, blond girl named Georgia sat down next to me and she became my best friend for years to come. She now lives in Sydney, Australia and to this day, we still telephone each other once a month.

I was still not a great student. In the four years I spent in this commercial school, I never learned how to type. I stared out of the windows a lot but I liked the girls. We had our own gang, our favorite teachers and since this was an all-girl school, we soon looked around and discovered boys.

I started high school in September of 1945. At some point during that fall they took us every single day for an entire week to the City Theater, a huge movie house with an enormous balcony filled with perhaps as many as two thousand students. Over the course of the week we were shown footage taken by the United States Army for the purpose of exposing American soldiers to the harrowing evil Hitler and his gang of criminals were perpetrating upon the World.

I was fourteen years old at the time and up until that point I had blocked the reality of these horrors from my consciousness. The first images shown were of the beginnings of World War II when Mussolini, already great friends with the Fuhrer, attacked Abyssinia and colonized the country. The natives with their leader, the Negus (Haile Selasi), tried to outrun the Italian war machine.

All of this happened more than fifty years ago and although I lived through these momentous times and was a history major, I cannot retell the history of the Second World War in the scope of my story. I can only respond to what I saw during those six days in the City Theater or rather, what I remember seeing.

I saw footage of Rommel in Africa and of General Patton defeating him. I recollect Germany gobbling up Czechoslovakia, Poland and eventually the rest of Europe and a large part of the Soviet Union. I watched German troops marching down the Champs Elysee. We were shown images of leaders of the Allies at various conferences; Chamberlain with his umbrella, Ribbentrop and Stalin.

I recall seeing the siege of Leningrad which made me think of my father who perished somewhere in Russia. We watched the London Blitz and the attack on Pearl Harbor and Roosevelt speaking over the radio waves. I watched with pride the uprising in the Polish Ghetto and marveled as the Allied Forces combined their strength and turned the War around. Finally D-day arrived upon the screen followed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, the surrender of Japan by their Emperor and the final defeat of Germany.

I am sure there was a great deal more but the images which were the most powerful and shocking were those of the concentration camps. Naturally I had heard about the camps before this time. I lost many relatives to their abhorrent violence and one of my Uncles and his wife had survived the death camps. But hearing about it and then seeing the horrible images right in front of me on the movie screen were two very different things.

We watched as the Germans loaded the Jews onto cattle trains which then traveled for days during which time neither food nor water were given to the prisoners. They were not given the opportunity to relieve themselves or to sit down or even to remove the bodies of those who had already died in the wagons. The prisoners found to be too weak to work were gassed in specially built chambers and then their bodies cremated in huge ovens.

The images on film showed how the Germans forced some of the Jews and other prisoners to work for them handling the bodies of the dead and yanking gold teeth from lifeless mouths. They cut the hair off of dead bodies and used the human locks to stuff mattresses. Of course, they stripped the cadavers of all their clothes. The Germans were very efficient and when the crematoriums could not keep up with the volume of the corpses, they forced the Jews to dig huge holes in to they threw the naked bodies as if they were handling logs of wood. They poured lye on top to fend off the smell and the plague.

I watched this nightmare with my fellow students and I knew my relatives (my grandparents, my uncles and cousins) and friends were among those so inhumanely destroyed. Being born Jewish had been their only crime.

The younger and stronger Jews were kept in concentration camps and used to work in the munitions factories which helped to fuel the German war machine. The workers in these factories tried, as much as they dared, to sabotage the production of weapons. These prisoners were treated brutally, fed on thin soup, a small piece of black bread and water. They were crammed several bodies to each bed in the barracks. The women’s and men’s heads were shaved and they were forced to stand for hours shivering in their thin clothes as the Kapos (brutal supervisors) counted their hostages over and over again. If any of the prisoners fell from exhaustion, their fate was sealed.

After six months of grueling work the Germans thought their prisoners were ready to be replaced since the supply of human bodies, mostly Jews, was inexhaustible. As I watched these horrors unfold before my eyes, I knew I would have never survived the camps. Two classmates in my new high school Mary and Sofia, came back orphaned and devastated and they never talked about the horrors they experienced.

There was only a light sprinkling of Jewish students in the movie theater and the rest of the adolescent viewers, brought up on Nazi propaganda and flagrant anti-Semitism, did not find these images particularly horrific and used the viewing as a golden opportunity to let loose whistles and loud anti-Semitic remarks.

Now I consider the way I dealt with the Holocaust as strange. I avoided discovering more. I have seen the television mini-series, ‘Holocaust’ and I have seen ‘Schindler’s List’ and a few other movies. I remember going alone to the movie theater and crying my heart out while watching ‘The Pawnbroker’ and ‘Julia’.

Fifty years passed and still I feel that recovery from such an ordeal is not possible. Considering the horrible memories and experiences I had to overcome, I worked out my life the best way I know how. My brother, George, made some inquiries and was informed that our father, Miklos, and his brother, Laszlo, died on the same day in the same vicinity of the Ukraine. It was comforting to believe that by some miracle the brothers had found each other on the final day of their lives. Laszlo was thirty-seven and Miklos almost forty years old.

Sometime at the beginning of 1946, my mother sat down on my bed and told me that she was going to marry her cousin, Frank. I cried inconsolably as this announcement ended all hope of my father ever coming back. Frank had lost his wife and two young children (Laszlo and Aniko) in Auschwitz. He had spent years in Forced Labor and in a concentration camp. He had been badly beaten, his ribs broken. When he came home, he discovered his apartment and grocery store had been completely stripped, the vandals leaving only his prayer book, tallis (prayer shawl) and two candelabras.

Frank was very much in love with my mother and he was always loving and good to George and me. When he brought flowers to Mother, he also presented me with a little bouquet. He was a very handsome but uneducated man and losing his family, including his parents and siblings, crippled him emotionally. I remember Frank having electroshock treatments after their marriage.

I think my mother regretted this union. She could not accept the fact that he was such an unsophisticated man. They stayed together, unhappily, for almost fifty years. Eventually my mother mistreated Frank long enough that he fell out of love with her and became contemptuous.

Frank tried to be a good father to us but I was never willing to accept him in place of my father, and my mother undermined his authority. George was only eight years old at the time of their marriage so he adjusted more easily but I never had the feeling that he thought of Frank as his father. George has always tried to find out as much as he could about our real father about whom he remembers nothing at all. Seven years is a lot of age difference. I never had a conversation with my brother that started out

“Remember when you were eight years old and we did this or that....” I left home when he was twelve.

The battle between my mother and myself raged on. I had poor posture as a child so my mother signed me up with an ogress who was supposed to help me improve my posture. I remember her studio was icy cold. This Monster woman - with a drum in her hand - worked me to within an inch of my life. The next day every muscle in my body was screaming and I was running a high fever. I tried to stand firm, telling my mother that I was not going to go back there but my mother dished out a slap so I did go back to the ogress and her concentration camp methods for a long time.

I still hate to exercise and my posture is still poor. Although my mother’s motives may have been well meaning, her execution was cruel. Years later I heard that the ogress had died and I was quite pleased.

I wanted so much to learn how to swim, to dance, to ice skate, to play the piano, to play tennis but my mother thought these activities were frivolous and she refused to spend any money for lessons. I went to the ice skating rink a few times but it was hopeless. Someone ran into me with the force of a truck and I fell on my back. I had the wind knocked out of me and could not breathe for several minutes. The pain was excruciating and my back was sore for a week. I gave up and headed for home, vowing never to say a word about this to anyone. When I arrived home my mother said,

“We went down to see you skate but you weren’t there.” I had been licking my wounds in the warming room.

I taught myself how to swim but almost drowned several times in the process.

Today swimming is the only sport that I enjoy. Somehow I found my way into a fencing club. I really enjoyed the exercises and the ambiance and besides, I was ready to slay the dragon. As luck would have it, George came down with pneumonia and with a logic which defies reasoning, my mother decided that I better cease the fencing lessons. Since I worked up a sweat during my fencing class, my mother was afraid that I too might catch pneumonia. And that was the end of that.

Piano lessons were vetoed after my second hour because I had no talent. While this was probably true, a little musical education could not have hurt me. Once my mother hired a refugee to give me English lessons. This man had interesting ideas about teaching as he quickly found his way to my crotch. I was scared and did not know what to do because in those days there was not information available to us explaining how to protect ourselves. I refused to go on with the English lessons but did not say why so my mother considered me an ungrateful wretch once again. Disapproval constantly oozed in my direction.

On my sixteenth birthday I could not wait to get home from school and I excitedly scanned the living room for my present but there was no sign of it. Late in the afternoon my mother said

“I have to get something for Agi, this is her birthday...” She took me to a bookstore where I selected an anthology of poems entitled “I Love You.” By this time I was very hurt and felt that giving me a birthday present was an obligation to my mother and not an opportunity to demonstrate her affection. I have often felt this way as a child and an adolescent, I had had troubles with my birthdays all my life and it was always a depressing, blue day. It has only been the last few years that I have handled it better. The poor men in my life have had a hard time living up to my expectations at birthday time.

Cecilia refused to give me an allowance so for every little thing, beg, cajole, explain and grovel in order to get any money out of her. We had to buy our own textbooks--used, of course--and notebooks, pens, supplies for the various handicraft projects, gym clothes, etc. For all these things, I needed money. In school, they were constantly and aggressively collecting for the Red Cross, for the war orphans, etc. etc. Once again, I needed money.

As I grew older, I asked for money for the movies. There were inexpensive student tickets available to plays, concerts and the opera. According to the custom of the times, when I started dating, I went Dutch with the boys. Even getting money to take the streetcar was prefaced by negotiations and in my day, I ended up walking the streets quite a lot. I was frustrated because we were not poor and my mother’s incredible stinginess just made life more difficult for me .My mother was no different with her husband, you might say she held onto her purse string very tightly.

Once I stole a bill from her purse, it was perhaps the equivalent of ten dollars. She found out quickly enough and I was humiliated and embarrassed.

My mother predicted a career in crime for me but by some mysterious reversal of logic, I started receiving a small allowance from then on.

Whenever my stepfather’s gray overcoat was hanging in the entrance hall, I stole the change out of his pockets. I am sure he knew about me but he was such a good and kind man, he never said a word. Once Frank said,

“God was good to me. He took my two children and he gave me two others.” This is what I call saintly. He let God off the hook.

Human psychology works in mysterious ways and I did not know anything about it but I was not going to give my mother the very thing she wanted from me; good grades. This does not mean that I gave up on educating myself. I still read ferociously and constantly worried about what would happen if the library ran out of books. This is the one thing I do not worry about any longer.

I used to type out my favorite poems and eventually had a bookbinder bind all the pages together into a volume. My book had poems from Baudelaire, Heinrich Heine, Villon, Rabindranath Tagore and verses from the famous Hungarian poets. I specialized in collecting love poems befitting my age. I wish I still had that book but unfortunately it was lost in the shuffle of life.

I know that I am being tough on my mother but this book is about MY experiences and she just did not seem to know how to be a mother. I never had the feeling that she was glad she had me. Apparently her idea of good mothering was to try to whip me into shape. She could not stand to see me reading. The moment she found me hunched over a book, she found something for me to do. She would send me on an errand, put a needle in my hand or commandeer me to shine brass doorknobs, peel potatoes, etc. etc. There was no place to hide except in my daydreams. More than once, my daydreaming got me into trouble and almost got me killed by my walking in front of a car or horse drawn lorry.

To pay the devil her due, I am glad I learned to sew since alterations are so expensive these days. And I am happy I can cook delicious, fattening Hungarian dishes. I can even iron!

I was already eleven years old but afraid to light a match. In those days we did not have automatic pilot lights so every time I needed the stove lit, I had to bring someone into the kitchen to light the burners for me. One day my mother had had enough of this. She made up her mind that she would make me light the stove for myself. She slapped me until I did it, but it took a long time. I cried and howled so loudly that people in apartments all around our four story courtyard stuck their heads out of their windows. Well, I did it. I lit the fucking burner but what would Doctor Spock have to say about this? Is this the way to teach a child?

On the other hand, my mother was magnificent when I broke my leg on the frozen platform of the Ujfeherto railroad station. I traveled all day to return to Budapest but was in agony with two fractured bones. My mother was really there for me. After a few days in the hospital, she installed me in the bed next to her own - my father was gone by this time - and neither of us had a full night’s sleep for weeks because I was in a lot of pain. She was loving and she tried to keep me happy. She even engaged a tutor to keep me up with my studies. Those blasted studies!

George did much better with Mother. He had asthma and ‘not’ eating in his arsenal, after all, and he brought in excellent grades. But I remember when his birthday present, a brand new Doxa watch, was stolen and it took him a week to fess up to my mother. When it came to money, we all had to toe the line. She even put a lock on the telephone so it would not be used too much. Because of the death grip I was locked in with my mother, I grew up to be very combative and I really had to work on myself to become a softer person.

I felt my mother wanted to extort too much attention and affection because her losses were many and she wanted to fill her needs through her children. But children are not designed to not give, but to receive nurturing. My mother was trying to fill her needs through George and myself and I resented it. Not that I had much to give since I had sustained the same losses that she had and they left me needy and demanding also. Only late in life have I finally realized that love is not a commodity easily obtained on demand.

During my second year of high school in 1946 my class decided to put on a play and I landed the lead role. I played a boy and I had a lot of funny lines. We invited the students of the neighboring boys’ schools and we ended up with a much larger crowd than our gymnasium could accommodate. It was a rainy day in December (Mikulas) and we had a lot of trouble sorting out the coats and the umbrellas. The coat racks collapsed and the flimsy paper numbers signifying ownership disintegrated. Confusion reigned. The play was a great success. I received thundering applause and orchids in a box from my boyfriend, Johnny.

The next day I was sick so I stayed home from school. I wrote a long ballad of the events of our memorable night and my poem was read in every classroom. I was a celebrity for fifteen minutes. One of my old classmates, Olga, in Hungary still has that poem among her memorabilia. From that point on my class held a yearly dance on Mikulas Day.

One afternoon I went to the movies with four of my friends to see Ginger and Fred dancing and cavorting. To enhance the fun of the outing we decided that each of us would bring something funny to snack on but not tell each other what we were bring. Half an hour into the film we asked Mary to share with us her funny food. She had pickles and distributed them among us. We ate them with a great deal of hilarity. Perhaps pickles are funny but not that funny! Next came Sofi and she handed out her small packages and would you believe it? She brought pickles, too! The usher came by and told us to keep quiet or else. After we calmed down it was my turn to share my stash. When I passed out my pickles we had to form a quick beeline to the bathroom. Even Ginger and Fred laughed. Olga and Eva refused to share their pickles because we were in danger of being mobbed or thrown out of the movie theater. We all fondly remember the “Afternoon of the Pickles”, and my son, Paul, wanted to be sure that the episode was preserved in my memoirs.

During this time ideas of socialism and communism penetrated Hungary. Fascism had a very strong hold on the country but many members of the Arrow Cross party had fled to the West and the rest of them laid low. New political parties were created and attempts were made to govern according to democratic ideas. Since the Soviet Union was the occupying force, by 1949 the Communist Party had a stronghold. The communists were instrumental in taking the land from the large landowners and aristocrats and subdividing it among the peasants.

All the factories, large and small, were taken over by the government and socialized. In a matter of a few short years Nazi Hungary became a communist country behind the Iron Curtain.

Having a business taking place in our apartment had plenty of disadvantages, the biggest being not having any privacy. It was difficult to have my friends over, particularly when we started to have boys attached to our crowd. More than once we would crank up the record player, put on Gershwin and start to dance only to have a buyer arrive and, puff! my mother asked us to leave. When the weather was good we went down to the banks of the river or to Margaret Island or up to the King’s Castle but when it was wintertime, there was no place to go. Nevertheless, I understood that my mother had to make a living.

My poor stepfather was a very inept assistant to Mother. She thought he would take over my father’s role in the business but he had neither the calling nor the education necessary to live up to her expectations. He was a simple loving man and later settled in to a factory job, a position in which he was better suited.

Our apartment was so crowded that items often got displaced or lost. Once I could not find my school uniform for two weeks and I had to lie to my homeroom teacher, telling her that it was in the laundry. I was caught lying when my mother dropped by the school one day to check on my progress.

My friends and I started to hang out with a youth group affiliated with the Socialdemocratic Party. I was excited about their ideas. They had a great many activities, seminars, dances and on Sundays, we went hiking and picnicking. And that was where they boys were.

My first boyfriend was Johnny and on our first fate we went to the movie theater to see The Invisible man. Johnny was a cut above my class and I do not think his mother was entirely happy with our match but she made the best of it. She even invited me to tea in their very elegant apartment. I received great clothes from my aunts in the U.S. and Canada and Johnny appreciated my swell outfits.

Johnny was a talented pianist and a dandy. He was studying the piano in the Conservatory and he planned to become a conductor. A few years ago, I found his name and a list of his compositions in the Encyclopedia of Judaism. I guess he made it. Today he is a music therapist in a nut house in Germany. Such is life.

He was a good looking boy, articulate, with a good sense of humor. I was in love! We went around together for a few months, mostly as part of our crowd. Johnny was an excellent teacher of French kisses and we made full use of all the nooks and crannies under the seven destroyed bridges spanning the Danube. The beautiful and lush Margaret Island in the middle of the Danube was made for lovers. Not that we went all the way--no nice Jewish girl did in those days. Never the less, my mother treated me as if I was a slut. She locked me out if I was a little late coming home and she made good use of her wry, sharp and cynical tongue.

Johnny also introduced me to the opera. We took our seats in the last balcony right under the ceiling. Bizarre events were taking place on the stage which was miles beneath us. Once I was rudely awakened from my little nap when the stage seemed to be engulfed by flames. It took awhile until I recognized Wagner’s Walkure. Eventually I became an opera lover but to this day I have not been back to hear the Walkure. Johnny recommended the books of Sartre, Cocteau and Camus and we discussed their writings with enthusiasm. This was heady stuff!

After a few months, Johnny and I drifted apart and from then on I was never without a boyfriend for long. I certainly overestimated their importance but that was the style of the times. One had to have a boyfriend to count. Once I attended the Medical Ball--in my first long gown of light blue moiré, no less-- and at the last minute, I found myself without an escort. Rather than stay home, I insisted on going and spent a miserable evening hiding like a wallflower behind the columns.

I was very needy having lost my beloved father and so many relatives and friends. I was never close to my mother and adolescence made our relationship even more difficult. I needed my boyfriends to give me love and I was crazy about them. Decades later I read a book entitled “Why do I think I am nothing without a man” --and I knew what the author meant. On the outside I was very independent, but I was miserable when I didn’t have a boyfriend in my life. I also had wonderful girlfriends. Georgia, Mary, Olga, Sofia, Eva and others. We had a lot of fun and we were lucky enough to have a few good teachers who were our mentors.

In those days after the War we seldom had school outings and even when we did our teachers only took us to visit churches. Admittedly Hungary has lovely historical churches, chapels and even a beautiful basilica but enough is enough, and those outings were hot and boring. To make things a little more interesting, we used to steal the keys to the churches we were forced to visit and we had quite a collection. Olga, in Budapest, still has one of those keys as a memento. When my son, Peter, worked in Yugoslavia for a few weeks he presented me, upon his return, with one of the old fashioned keys as a gift. Had he followed in the foot steps of his delinquent mother and lifted it or had he come upon it by legitimate means? I do not know.

We were into a little mischief now and then. We had a small room in the school for the student government and this is the place where we gathered to have a smoke during recess, lunch or when we were skipping class. Naturally we locked the door from the inside. One day our poor, much suffering homeroom teacher was told to fetch us from our hiding place but instead of surrendering, reckless Olga threw the key out of the second story window to the street. Now we were really locked in. The key fell on a policeman who promptly brought it in to the school and handed it to our teacher. He even apologized, God knows why.

We used to go to the movies in the afternoons with Georgia and luxuriated in the pre-war films finally available to us, trying to catch up on musicals, love stories and comedies. Sometimes we laughed so much I would wet my pants. Georgia could laugh magnificently and was a great companion.

We spent the summers in camps sponsored by the Socialdemocratic Party. At least one of these camps was coeducational. I met my future husband, Tony there, although we did not connect that time. Food for the camp was donated by the International Red Cross. Barrels full of peanut butter arrived with the supplies. We had never seen peanut butter before and we had no idea what it was used for. Finally our trusted camp leaders made a decision and we had peanut butter soup all summer.

We enjoyed wonderful campfires with lots of singing, hikes, swims across the Danube and reading “The Testament” by the poet, Francois Villon. This was a great camp with no adult supervision.

Unfortunately my boyfriend at that time was not camping with us but he did come to visit. I really liked this one. His name was Isti (Steven) and he was blond with blue eyes and smelled delicious. I always liked classy guys. We used to dance on the walks of Margaret Island accompanied by the music straining in from the cafe. The red dye from my favorite dress rubbed off on to his white linen suit. Well, there was a lot of rubbing going on. At home they never understood why his suit was turning pinker on a daily basis and it remained our little secret. It was certainly a summer to remember.

In the fall Isti’s family smuggled him out of the country and he settled in London. He had no future in communist Hungary. The loss of Isti was unbearably painful and it took my breath away. I think even my mother felt sorry for me. She took me to a cabaret but I did not enjoy it very much. How I would like to know what happened to Isti! Every time I visit London, I inspect the phone books. I want to find Isti and I haven’t given up yet. One of these days I might try the WEB to locate him.

During the last year of high school I decided to pull my act together and I earned good grades. I remember telling my science teacher that the only science question I could answer during matriculation was how they made steel with the Bessemer Process. He was accommodating and asked me that very question. I did well in literature and excellently in history. I was thinking of becoming a history teacher. My mother did not think I was college material and she thought I should learn a trade preferably sewing.

We had a modest high school graduation where we decided not to dress up because some of our classmates could not afford fancy clothes. My mother had a beautiful royal blue two piece outfit custom made for me and I refused to wear it. I never said I was a lovely daughter, did I? Cecilia always dressed me well and I was a demanding customer. Today I still love clothes although I know finery does not make the woman or man.

I had not expected my mother to attend my graduation but to my surprise, she showed up with a bunch of flowers. After the ceremony my pals and I decided to celebrate with a stroll by the shore of the Danube. When I arrived home two hours later, my mother said,

“I was going to give you my watch as a graduation present but since you are late, I changed my mind.”

That hurt because I finished high school with good grades, the best I ever had. Oh well, that was Cecilia for you. This class never had a class reunion until the communist system collapsed. Half of the class were daughters of Nazis, some very religious, but the ringleaders were politically to the left and very involved with various youth groups. These two groups were never going to break bread together if they had anything to say about it. Almost fifty years later in post-communist Hungary, fourteen of my old classmates got together and enjoyed a stimulating afternoon.

By this time the universities and colleges were only accepting students from worker and peasant families along with the sons and daughters of the Communist Party members. My chances were not very good since I was coming from the middle class. I went to see an old teacher and mentor of mine who was then working in the Ministry of Education; her name was Emma. The very next day I was accepted in the Teacher’s College.

Fascism and communism were equally detrimental in forming a good character. I knew I had to become street smart, manipulative and learn to pull strings if I wanted to survive so that is exactly what I did.

I moved into the dormitory but several days later I was bumped out by the Secretary of the Communist Party who said they needed my bed for out of town students and since my folks lived in the city, I was expected to live with them. My mother was invited to witness my execution. It was a painful and difficult afternoon but I refused to move back home. I remember walking down the hill away from the dormitory, the weight of my suitcase and the rope holding my bedding together both cutting deeply into my palms.

The next day I got a job at the headquarters of a chain a bookstores. I transferred to the night school of the University and rented a furnished room with my friend Mary. I was eighteen years old, self-supporting and keeping up with my studies now that I was out from under my mother’s thumb.

Soon I was running a tiny book shop in a new city named after Stalin. A hellhole in the mud if there ever was one. By default I became the correspondent for the youth program of Radio Budapest: It was not easy to find anyone who could put two words together in that place. The radio people were most anxious for every bit of news I could contribute about how our heroic youth was building steel works in the mud. I turned out to be a fairly decent writer, at least I could give them what they wanted. It was a little lonely but it was a living and I did enjoy the writing.

After a few months I maneuvered myself back in the capitol, having been transferred to the day division of the University, working my way up so to speak. I lived in the dormitory and I made fairly good money with my free lance writing. At that time I wrote mostly human interest stories about children and young people.

I thought I had the system figured out. I had no illusions. I was still a second class citizen because I hailed from the middle class and I wasn’t a Party member. I had to tread very, very carefully. I remember once one of my classmates was warned by the secretary of the Party to stop dating me. He was being groomed for some high position and I was politically unsuitable for him. M. obediently followed his orders but he wasn’t too happy about it. But ultimately the secretary was right and several decades later M. became the head of the Hungarian Television; a pretty influential position.

I was studying history although I no longer wanted to teach. I hoped to become a writer. Both World and Hungarian history were extensively rewritten to reflect the communist point of view. The history of the United States was taught by a Russian professor who could not speak Hungarian. The CIA, capitalism and the American labor unions were mentioned frequently but we understood little else. The names of beheaded or imprisoned Russian and Hungarian traitors were scratched out from our books or the pages where their names appeared were ripped out of the school encyclopedias. The entire four years was a waste of time and psychologically very stressful. I visited my family regularly but the relationship was not a close one.

I ran into Tony Linhardt at a dance held by the University. I knew him slightly from camp and met him at various youth group functions. He was a very handsome young man, like a movie star. He wore the uniform of an Air Force cadet and was finishing his studies as an aeronautical engineer which was considered a high status profession.

Although I was with a date (Future Head of Television), I decided to leave the dance with the handsome soldier with the Rudolph Valentino eyes. As fate would have it, I was accosted by him on the street a few days later. We started to date, taking in movies, morning swims and enjoying dinners in the Officer’s Club, and there was always Margaret Island.

Early on in our relationship, Tony asked me to shop and prepare a meal of wienerschnitzel and spinach for his mother who was recuperating from surgery. I didn’t know how to cook so I asked my mother’s maid to come to my rescue. At the time I felt that there was something funny about Tony’s request. A red flag went up but I chose not to pay attention to it. He was perfect. Well, almost.

I moved out of the dorm, found a room with friends and one thing led to another. One morning my mother came to visit me and I was still in my pajamas. Tony had left only minutes before so I was almost caught en flagrante.

It was hard for me to conduct a love affair. It was 1950 and the mores were more conservative and I was too young, too unsophisticated and too conventional. I was also afraid of getting pregnant. One day Tony and I were walking on the bridge coming from Margaret Island and he said,

“We are going to have a small apartment full of books...” I suppose he popped the question.

Upon hearing the news of our engagement , Tony’s mother, Boske, took to her bed. She had had the idea that after Tony’s graduation, he would live at home with her and act as her escort. He would take her to the opera, play bridge with her and Tony promised her mother that they were travel together. Their relationship was very strong and everlasting. Now I believe that Boske was the most important person in Tony’s life. More red flags!

Tony was twenty-two years old when we started dating but his mother and sister still addressed him as “little brother” instead of by his name. I think I should have had a thought or two about that...if I had been a smart girl, that is. Later on it took quite a bit of doing on my part to break Tony’s family’s habit of referring to him as “little brother”.

Since Tony and I started were going steady,. I invited my boyfriend to meet my parents one a weekend afternoon at three o’clock in their apartment. Tony had still not arrived by five o’clock and I was terribly embarrassed and in so much visible discomfort that my mother and stepfather, Frank, went down to the Hotel Gellert for coffee so they would not have to witness my suffering any longer.

When Tony arrived more than two hours late, he said

“I was playing chess with my brother-in-law.” MORE RED FLAGS went unnoticed. We went down to the hotel where I introduced my boyfriend to my parents and then we joined them for coffee.

But we were in love and our hormones were raging. Life was too hard to go at it alone and Tony was handsome and loving. He was the right age, the right profession and he was the first man who asked me to marry him and he was not Jewish. Technically he was half-Jewish but culturally he most certainly was not. The War and the Holocaust had proven to me that to be Jewish was to be in a dangerously weak position and I wanted to be safe. I was already nineteen years old, practically an old maid and not even a virgin so we were engaged.

One day before his graduation, Tony (and many others) was dismissed from cadet school because he was considered to be politically unreliable. I felt for him but I was also scared. A friend of mine whose fiancee was in the same position said to me, “You can’t leave him now.” I agreed with her.

Upon graduation they gave Tony a very good job as an aeronautical engineer at the Ministry of Aviation - but as a civilian.

We got married on February 2, 1952. It was a rainy, slushy day and we couldn’t get a taxi, we had to take the streetcar to the City Hall. Tony insisted that he go into his office before our wedding and this hurt my feelings since this was supposed to be our special day.

The simple marriage ceremony was followed by a luncheon for our families at the Hotel Astoria. I wore a blue skirt with a white blouse and red cardigan, not very festive, come to think of it.

Our families were uncomfortable with each other and Tony’s sister was not even invited. It was not the joyous, happy occasion a wedding should be.

On the morning of my wedding day, my mother called and told me that I did not have to do this; get married. I insisted that I loved Tony and we want to get married. On the same day, we had our closest friends over for dinner in our kitchen, meat loaf, if I remember it well. My dowry was a very nice convertible sofa, pink damask bed linen and a down comforter.

We had no apartment of our own, only a room sharing a friend’s place. Half of Budapest was destroyed by bombings and mortar fire and there was an acute shortage of living space after the War. There was little hope that we would ever get an apartment and secretly I blamed Tony. Did he not propose to me with the words

“We are going to have a small apartment...”

Well, where was it?