Hungary for Personal Freedom

My recollections of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the subsequent nocturnal border crossing into Austria provide indelible illustrations of the connections between the personal and the political. While the immediate consequences of the Revolution were, for the most part tragic, I was among its beneficiaries. Fifty years later I remain convinced that leaving Hungary was a wise decision and one that, at one stroke, had changed my life. Rarely does a walk of a few hours in the countryside have such far reaching consequences. It was a gamble, as I could have been arrested before reaching the border, or at the border. Life in the West, in unfamiliar surroundings without family and friends could have turned out to be grim. I left with nothing but the clothes on my back, including a crumbling, American made leather jacket I have preserved to this day. The jacket hangs in a closet and I may wear it on November 19 to impress my friends who will join me in a small celebration of my border-crossing anniversary.Leaving Hungary did not guarantee unalloyed contentment and the elimination of all problems of life. But by doing so the political realm ceased to dominate and deform the personal one. I gained access to higher education, a professional life, and a modicum of intellectual creativity. More important — and perhaps the hardest to convey to those who had no opportunity to make such comparisons — I exchanged life in a repressed and regimented society for one in a free world, which I do not put into quotation marks. The border crossing was the culmination of longings, which, I used to believe, would never be consummated. Conditions for getting out were not auspicious between 1948-1956 — the Iron Curtain (of which the Berlin Wall was the best known and most conspicuous part) was not a figure of speech.Political and personal elements were inextricably intertwined in the motivation to leave Hungary. There was, to begin with, a growing distaste for the intrusive and mendacious political system even a high school student was bound to experience first hand (for instance, we were required to sign petitions demanding the strictest punishment for defendants in the Hungarian Purge Trials). There was no way to ignore or avoid the singularly repetitive, numbing, and self-righteous political propaganda that engulfed all of us, in and outside school.I also recall, among the reasons for my questioning the system, the spectacle of party functionaries and government officials riding around in large, luxurious, chauffeur-driven American (!) cars while most people were poor and the official propaganda claimed that an egalitarian society was being built. Even in my mid-teens I could discern the yawning gulf between official pronouncements and practices, between proclaimed ideals and social realities. That is to say, I rejected the regime in the first place because of its addiction to fraudulent propaganda.I also believe that the vast majority of Hungarians (and people in other communist countries) came to reject the system above all because of their experience of the insistent, routine misrepresentations of reality they could check against their daily experiences. To be sure, objective realities — the declining standard of living, the loss of free expression, the abuses of power, restrictions of religious practices, etc. — also mattered a great deal. But these grievances were more strongly felt since the authorities endlessly claimed the opposite: that we lived in growing harmony and abundance, in the most enlightened and just social system, and under the benevolent guidance of wise and beloved leaders.The second set of experiences relevant to my departure are more personal. One night in June 1951 a police truck arrived to our collect our family, which had officially been classified as “politically unreliable.” We were taken under police guard to a freight train terminal where similarly designated people were assembled for shipment to villages in Eastern Hungary defined as “forced dwelling places” that we were not permitted to leave. At the railways station of the village we were met by a small crowd assembled by the party organizers who shouted denunciations at the newly arrived enemies of the socialist state.Our political classification resulted from my maternal grandfather’s pre-war social status: he used to be a well-to-do, self-made businessman. His properties had been confiscated by the communist authorities years before the exile. He lived with my parents and myself, hence we were considered one family, all members of which were hopelessly tainted by his capitalist background.About 50,000 people similarly classified were exiled from Budapest in 1951 and dumped into villages under crowded and primitive living conditions. This measure was officially explained as a stage in the class struggle and one that also alleviated the housing shortage in the capital.The exile closely followed my matriculation from high school and it meant that I could not attend university to which I was admitted. Two years in the village was followed by conscription into the army but having been a politically unreliable element I was placed into a so-called “construction battalion.” Instead of getting military training, we performed manual labor at various construction sites. In my case, military barracks, the Hungarian Nuclear Research Institute, and a state farm. Following discharge from the military I sought employment as a laborer in construction since such a job entitled one to temporary permission to live in Budapest.Between October 23 and the massive Soviet offensive that began on November 4, I gave little thought to getting out. I was on the streets most of the time, observing events and participating in demonstrations, distracted from plotting my escape. A chance meeting with a truck driver in mid-November led to joining a group of strangers driven by the same driver to a small town by the Austrian border. There were about 15 of us, including children and a baby. At night the truck deposited us near the border and we were shown by the locals which way was Austria. We began our walk through open fields. After about an hour we saw in the moonlight two figures standing by a ditch who turned out to be Hungarian border guards. We approached. Silence ensued. At last one of the guards remarked, “Why are you going in such a big group?” This sounded like a friendly inquiry that was followed by the guards pointing us in the right direction.After arriving in Vienna I was among 300 Hungarian students the British universities undertook to help continue or commence their studies. I arrived in England on November 30 and in January began my studies at the London School of Economics. (I knew some English and quickly picked up more.)I chose to study sociology because it seemed interesting. I never heard of such a field before. After graduating in the summer of 1959 I came to America for graduate studies which led to a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1963. A non-tenured teaching job at Harvard and over three decades at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst followed. In 2000 I retired from teaching, but not from writing. I have produced 12 books over the years. My personal life in America had little to do with political matters. But the past found expression in my books, most of which, in one way or another, have some connection with the experience of having lived in a communist society.I spent the first 24 years of my life in Hungary, close to three in England, and 47 years here. I remain fluent in Hungarian and pass for one when I visit, which I do every year since the collapse of the communist system. I still have relatives and friends in Hungary and I like the heavy Hungarian dishes. I don’t have a love-hate relationship with Hungary or Hungarians. I used to think of myself as a so-called “rootless cosmopolitan” — a term of disapproval, Zhdanov, the Soviet cultural commissar under Stalin, coined. This is no longer quite true. With the passage of time I sank roots here in Western Massachusetts. I have found New England very much to my liking being an outdoorsman and nature lover. I don’t even mind the occasional bears visiting our yard. After the excitements of growing up in Hungary, surviving both Nazism and Communism, and witnessing the Revolution, I led a settled and secure academic life. I have an American wife, a daughter, a dog and a cat, and two kayaks. I have published books critical of anti-Americanism but that does not mean that I am uncritical of everything in this society, far from it.I learned that political conditions inevitably, and often painfully, shape personal lives. In the course of my reluctant participation in the building of Soviet-style socialism in Hungary I met many peasants and workers, supposed beneficiaries of the system who were its most embittered victims and adversaries. It became clear to me that repressive political systems, even if they proclaim impressive idealistic aspirations, will cease to be idealized once the human costs of their practices are experienced or understood. Warren Beaty would not have produced “Reds” if he had known how far apart the ideals and realities of Soviet communism were from one another. Nor would he have produced the movie if he had known people who lived under such a system, or if he had given thought to the question of why the ideals he admired lent themselves so readily to distortion and misapplication.My life in the West deepened the conviction that personal freedom has a reality and meaning that can be truly appreciated only by those who have had to live under circumstances defined by its absence.Mr. Hollander’s most recent books are “From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States” and “The End of Commitment: Revolutionaries, Intellectuals and Political Morality,” both published in 2006.

Hungary for Personal Freedom

Hungary for Personal Freedom

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