Reflecting on an escape from Hungary
AFTER his first guitar lesson in the fall of 1956, Tom Leimdorfer made his way across Budapest, the capital of Hungary, to attend a peaceful demonstration.
The Soviet-backed communist government had left many Hungarians restive, and Leimdorfer, just 14 at the time, later recalled that the demonstration on October 23 fuelled his adolescent optimism about his future – and the country’s.
But before his next guitar lesson, Soviet tanks had rolled into Hungary, and residents of the capital woke on November 4 to invading forces.
The Soviet incursion 60 years ago created Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II. Some 180,000 Hungarians, Leimdorfer and his widowed mother among them, escaped through holes in the Iron Curtain.
Leimdorfer, who eventually settled in Britain, recalled his exodus in a recent interview with the New York Times, at a time when Britain and Europe are again struggling with mass migration.
The uprising: October 23, 1956
Even as a teenager he was aware of the pressures of life under communism.
“We were very, very politically aware, and in fact I think I was politically aware from a much earlier age,” he said. He added that he remembered that “the grown-ups were constantly stressed, constantly worried”.
The freedoms that Hungarians enjoyed had been erod- ing since the communists cemented control after the war.
On the day the Hungarian uprising started, Leimdorfer joined 200,000 citizens calling for political openness, the end of one-party rule and more independence from Moscow.
A day after the protest, Imre Nagy, a communist with an independent streak, was appointed prime minister by the party, giving many Hungarians hope that a new period of liberalisation was beginning. Leimdorfer said his relatives had no plans then to leave Hungary, even if they could.
“There was no way we were going to just take the opportunity to leave when it looked as if things were going to change,” he said.
Soviet crackdown
When Moscow sent troops and tanks into Budapest, young Hungarians, some of them only children, took to the streets alongside adults to fight the Soviets. The image of the “Hungarian freedom fighter” armed with a Molotov cocktail became an international symbol of resistance.
The decision to leave
Leimdorfer recalled tanks rolling through the streets. As the capital grew more dangerous, he and his mother, Edit, sought refuge with friends in a quieter part of the city. He said they would keep up with events by listening to Radio Free Europe.
“We realised that the whole focus of Western politics had shifted away from Hungary,” Leimdorfer said.
By early December, Leimdorfer recalled, his mother and her friend Gyorgy Schustek made plans for them to leave the country with Schustek’s two children.
“We had news that lots of people, thousands and thousands, were leaving,” he said. “And we were beginning to get news that it was at the same time getting more difficult.”
The borders had been closed, so Leimdorfer’s mother procured a vacation voucher to visit a resort near the Austrian frontier, where travel was restricted and police checks likely.
Making their escape
The five of them never made it to the resort. Instead, they joined a group of fellow refugees in the back of a truck heading towards the Austrian frontier. After they were stopped trying to cross into Austria by Hungarian border guards, they sought refuge in a village near the frontier, where a local farmer put them up.
Before dawn the next day, Leimdorfer recalled, the farmer led the refugees through a field, careful to avoid detection. When they got to the border, they balanced on planks laid over a stream to make it across.
The route Leimdorfer took 60 years ago was similar to the path many other refugees have used in the years since his exodus: East Germans who crossed through Hungary in 1989; families fleeing war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s; and, most recently, the asylum seekers who flocked from the Middle East and Africa.
Finding a new home
Leimdorfer said he had spent only one night in a refugee camp in Andau, Austria, before a former business partner his mother’s friend helped them find accommodations in Vienna. Soon, they got a visa from the British Consulate and, along with other refugees, received free passage to London.
Leimdorfer, his mother, her friend – whom she would later marry – and his children arrived in London on December 16, 1956. An estimated 30,000 Hungarian refugees arrived in London that winter, holed up in camps while waiting for resettlement agencies to find families to take them in.
Leimdorfer was fortunate that his mother’s older brother, who lived in London, was able to help them settle quickly. His mother and Schustek got married, though five months later, she died from an undetermined illness.
Intent on integrating himself into his new home, Leimdorfer said, he tried to learn English and get to know the country. A summer trip to the Lake District in the northwest of England was pivotal.
It was after that trip, Leimdorfer said, that “we began to feel less like refugees.”
After 60 years
Now living near Bristol, Leimdorfer, 74, is a retired head teacher and serves on the elected local council as a member of the Green Party. He has three grown children with his first wife, Valerie, who died in 1991. He remarried in 1994.
Since he arrived in Britain, Leimdorfer has maintained a keen sense that he was a citizen of a greater Europe. Over the years, he and his family have made several trips to Hungary, including a memorable visit in 1989, as the Iron Curtain was falling. On that trip, Leimdorfer said, he walked the same border he had crossed decades earlier and cut a strand from the barbed-wire frontier fence.
That fence has since been demolished, but Hungary erected a new razor-wire fence last year along its borders with Serbia and Croatia, an act that Leimdorfer laments.
“How,” he asked, “can Hungary build a new Iron Curtain to try and keep people out?”