She’s grateful for freedom after daring escape
In May 1972, Agnes Rozsa closed the door to her life in Soviet-controlled Budapest, as she prepared for a secret flight to freedom to the United States. She’s never looked back. Then just 18, Rozsa, her older sister, Eva, and their mother, Klara, left everything behind in the neighborhood where she had grown up, including her maternal grandparents who were heartbroken about the trio’s departure.
Rozsa remembers they made sure nothing seemed suspicious as they boarded a crowded streetcar to the train station for a trip to the Olympics in Munich, their stated reason for leaving the country. Soldiers checked their suitcase and found nothing amiss. But there was something that escaped their scrutiny — the sisters’ diplomas, hidden in a carved-out sandwich bun.
They stayed a week with relatives in Munich who had bought their tickets for the sports event to support the ruse. Then the three women sought political asylum at a police station. They were sent to a refugee camp in Zirndorf, Germany, where they stayed for eight months before leaving for the United States to join relatives in San Antonio.
When they arrived in the Alamo City, Rozsa’s aunt and uncle, Rose and Stephen Safran, were waiting.
“Words can’t express how I felt,” Rozsa said. “I took it all in, the sounds, the smells, the mannerisms of people were so different than what we were used to. All of a sudden, the world opened up like a big adventure.”
The Safrans, who were their sponsors, and the San Antonio Hungarian Association provided a head start with a house on Newcome Street, complete with furnishings and the first month’s rent paid.
Those first weeks, Rozsa would walk along Callaghan Road and explore her new surroundings. Wanting to find a job, Rozsa walked inside a Pizza Hut, and was greeted by the manager.
The only English word she knew was “work.”
Rozsa said the manager, from Italy, smiled and hired her on the spot. She started the next day. For eight months she learned basic, conversational English on the job, chatting with students who frequented the restaurant. She washed dishes and cut vegetables before moving to cleaning tables. Then Rozsa was promoted to cashier, closing out at night.
In Hungary, she was trained as a high-current electronics technician and worked at a factory. Rozsa said if she hadn’t immigrated to the United States, she probably would have stayed in the factory job for the rest of her life.
Instead, she started a life of travel and exploring her adopted country, taking on different jobs. After Pizza Hut, a Hungarian family friend helped her get a job at the Houston Zoo.
In Houston, she started at the tropical bird house, then helped raise a baby orangutan named Anak and cared for two gorillas named Vanilla and Ye Ye. Rozsa still stays in touch with her old co-workers through a Facebook Houzoo Group.
Her travels took her across the nation. Rozsa’s first trip was with relatives and friends in a van from San Antonio to Alaska. Rozsa said she was impressed by good-natured residents along the Trans-alaskan Highway, such as a trucker who pulled their vehicle from a ditch in stormy weather and never said a word.
“That demonstrated the American spirit,” she said. “This is what you do for each other because it needs to be done.”
Then she joined a friend on a three-day bus ride to New York City. She stayed in the Big Apple, working at a yogurt shop on the upper East Side, where she talked ideology with university students, about how socialism wasn’t what they learned in class.
“The value of an individual is what you contribute to society,” Rozsa said. “You don’t have the freedom to exercise your will in a communist country.”
Rozsa continued to seek out new jobs.
When she returned to San Antonio, she worked at Schoffer Brothers Motorcycles on Fredericksburg Road for 10 years. Owner Andres Schoffer, also born in Budapest, taught her how to appraise motorcycles and he taught her business skills, including bookkeeping, tax preparation and how to handle real estate.
She left the rumble of engines to work at Citibank. She moved up through the departments, delving in wire transfers and later financial investigations before retiring as a senior specialist paralegal.
She was 32 when diagnosed with a serious illness that gave her focus for the rest of her life.
“My faith grounds me, but I’m relying on God’s grace to help me with life’s challenges,” Rozsa said. “To come face to face with my mortality, I realized what was important and what was of no consequence.”
Throughout the years, she grew closer to her aunt and uncle who had fled Hungary years before Rozsa and her sister and mother. The Safrans, now deceased, had escaped in the dead of night during the 1956 uprising against the communist regime.
Rose Safran, a devout Catholic, had ensured Rozsa was baptized when she was a child. The baptism took place in secret, away from her father, a communist, who was against the rites.
As the Safrans supported Rozsa’s family, she returned the favor later in their lives, caring for her aunt in the last year of her life. She died in October at age 100. Her husband died three weeks later.
Rozsa called her aunt and uncle “true patriots from Hungary,” the last connection to her mother, who died in 1984.
Memories of relatives’ selflessness are woven throughout Rozsa’s family history. There are stories of World War II, when her aunt and mother risked their lives to carry food to their Jewish friend Agnes at the Nazi-run ghetto in Budapest. Rozsa’s mother named Rozsa after that friend who was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and never seen again.
The tales forever link her to loved ones who supported her exploration of what life could truly be.
“In this country, I learned to take responsibility for every part of my life,” Rozsa said. “That was a wake-up call because in communism everything is taken care of.
“When you come to a free country, you earn freedom every day by being responsible for yourself.”