Escape from the Iron Curtain Map [Previous ¦ Next]
October 1956 saw the invasion of Budapest, Hungary by Yuri Andropov's Soviet tanks. My parents were pregnant with me, and decided that if they ever were going to emigrate, it better be done before I was born - crossing the border in secret with a babe in arms would be well nigh impossible. So Dad got a permit from his employer underhanded (Dad was a geologist working in coal mines then, and his boss, um, left in his drawer the signed notice that allowed him to leave town for work). They went to the New Year's eve party of a friend, who alone knew they would not return home that night. They boarded instead the train bound for the Austrian border, and when police control came by they stayed in the toilets - those were simply holes in the wagon floor, so you can imagine an eight-month pregnant mother enjoying the draft on a cold December night! They disembarked, paid off a farmer boy who led them to the mine fields along the border, which was just being closed after the unrest. They thread their way past the miradors across the border river Laita frozen at this time of the year. Austria was nominally neutral, but it happened to dispatch empty postal lorries along its eastern border, to pick up refugees on foot and ship them to a disaffected train station in Vienna. It had been converted into an immigrant processing center, to which converged head-hunters from Canada, South Africa and Australia among others. Hungarian refugees were mostly white-collar workers with some means and unattached to the land, and thus a rich crop for nations in post-war growth.
2004 add.: When I was at Esri, I managed the Petroleum User Group session at the International User Conference. It hosted SAG (Special Achievement in GIS) awards, and that year the Austria Post was a recipient. So I approached the local distributor's manager, who received the coveted award. After introductions, I told him my recollection of postal lorries patrolling the border at the cusp of 1956 & 1957. He fetched a senior manager about my age, and his eyes went big as saucers: He had heard about it but dismissed it as an urban myth, so it must be true he said. We quickly slid off to safer topics such as where I was born and baptised: few have the chance to be associated with not one but two prestigious locales in Vienna, they quipped.
My Dad's best friend from university (they were born the same day and thus were registered together) found my parents on a bale of hay, and immediately had Mum whisked off to the Semelweiss clinic (named after he who reduced infant mortality by simply instructing nurses to wash their hands before assisting in childbirth). I was born three weeks late no doubt due to the stressful voyage, and a kindly old member of parliament took care of us. He arranged that I be baptised in the Stefansdom (St. Stephen's cathedral), from which I got my middle name. My Dad actually got a job with Exxon in Calgary, but the Canadian government would only ship us from its eastern seaboard. This was the dead of the winter, all liners were full and my parents didn't care to risk the passage with a month-old babe on a cargo ship (either there were no flights then, or they couldn't afford them). So Dad accepted a post in Paris because Mum got a Ford scholarship to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. '57 was about as bad as '87 and my Dad bounced among jobs until he landed his career job with the French national oil company which would become Elf a quarter century later. We also moved to southern France and started a new life under idyllic circumstances. Pau was small and not unfriendly as many Spaniards had just emigrated to escape the Franco regime. There were however only two Hungarian families around, and Pau was very provincial in that nothing foreign was available.
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