Katalin Mester

„We were walking and walking for a while. Then suddenly we heard the babble of some water. ’What is it?’ Nobody had told about it. We found a steep bank in front of us and then a river. It wasn’t a big river like the Danube, it was a brook. First we didn’t even see it. We had to go down steeply. Since I was the younger and the more agile, I told I would go down and see it. I went down and I found a small brook which we were able to cross. Q.: Did you see it was shallow? A.: If I remember well I entered the water to see how deep it was. It didn’t matter at all, we were all wet. First I touched the bank with my hand trying not to lose our bags. Then my Mum followed me, but before she had lowered the bags to me, it wasn’t easy. We stood on the riverside then helping each other not to sink, to avoid misfortunes, we succeeded to cross the river. It wasn’t a big obstacle but that guy hadn’t mentioned that there would be some water on our way. Finally we crossed it. Q.: So you waded across it, didn’t you? And did you climb up the other bank? V.: Yes, we did, on the other bank. We sighed of relief. We took our bottle of rum, we sat down for a bit. Then to our great alarm we lost sight of our aim. The region was full of hills. We lost heart, ’where to go, how to go?’ However we followed our way and in some time we noticed the tower again. Then there must have been some nest which we roused. Q.: I imagine it was very noisy. A.: Yes, it was. The birds were alarmed… But all these things happened to us. It was getting almost dawn, it was foggy. All of a sudden we smelt dung nearby. ’We must be near to some village then!’ I will remember it forever, we were blessed. We saw unexpectedly some light, then we realized it was a street lamp, and finally we saw the village itself. We looked around, We saw a table saying Deutschkreuz. We sat down and we began to cry. Then we entered the village. We had no idea where to go, but there was a man who was waiting for the refugees.”

„It was the guide who awaked us. He told us to dress up in a hurry! Q.: He must have explained you how to walk one after the other, not to talk, I suppose. A.: He told us to be quite, but nothing else, he told us to keep an eye on him because there were watch towers all around, we could see them, and he had to control wether there were soldiers in them. There weren’t yet patrols. He promised us to see us to the border line, until the dismantled fencing of barbed wire, because he knew where it was, he would help us to cross it and then we would go on our way … Q.: He promised to show you in which direction you would get to Austria, didn’t he? What sort of land was it where you were walking? Was it reedy? A.: No, it was stubble. It was frozen stubble. Or it wasn’t totally frozen, it was sleeting. Q.: Didn’t you go on the shore of the lake? V.: No, we didn’t. It was a totally dry land, it was stubble, it was uneven, we could hardly walk. Q.: It must have been plowed up. A.: Certainly, it was. We followed him as we could. We arrived to a forest. It seemed to be a forest, but it might have been a wood. There were a lot of fallen leaves there, we were walking on them, we were so noisy as wild boars. He kept whispering and it was clear to us that he was very scared. When we arrived to the other side of the wood, when we could see the field after the forest, he made my mother stood to a tree. I didn’t hear what they spoke about, but at the end he said he wouldn’t go on because he had a child and a wife at home, and they were waiting an other child, and so on. He said he would show us the way, what we should keep in sight. And he showed us a tower and he said: ’Austria is over there!’”

„We remained alone. We began to walk in the direction of the light. It was a long way to go. If I remember well we walked until seven in the morning. It was me who led the way, my mother followed me. I was told that in case anything would happen to her, I had to go ahead and we don’t say a word. Before setting off, we took the bottle of rum, it was very cold, both of us drank a bit and then we started. After we had passed the forest there was the barbed wire on our way. We were walking in the direction of the tower … Q.: Was there a field? A.: Exactly, there was a field after the wood. It seemed to be quite flat and we could clearly see the tower. The Moon was shining, or it wasn’t, I don’t remember, but it was dark and there wasn’t anything else to orientate us. And I was just walking and walking and suddenly I noticed that my mother didn’t come after me. I looked back. First I didn’t see her. Then I noticed her struggling with something on the ground. I rushed back to her. Imagine, it was then that we understood that she was kept by the barbed wire which was there, it was toren. Q.: That was the border line then! A.: Yes, it was. She didn’t dare to call me. She thought that there was somebody who had caught her by the back. She didn’t see anything, but she felt to be grabbed and jerked by the barbed wire. The two of us grappled with that damned wire! I have to say that we were heroes, both of us, we encouraged each other, we helped each other. I told: „let me do it, I’m more patient.” Finally we managed to free her and we said: „All right, it was the border line. Now we are in the „nobody’s land”. We sighed of relief that we were going in the right direction.”

„The Pintér couple tracked a guide down for us. Q.: Did you remain in their house for the night? A.: Yes, we did. They offered their bed for us. I don’t know where they slept, but we were given their bed with fresh eiderdown. And my Mum met this man right that evening to discuss about our possibilities with him. My mother was very determined, or at least she seemed to be. Later she told me that she’d preferred to go with that man and they had agreed that this man would come for us the following afternoon, we would go to Balf and we would cross the border somewhere nearby that village. I remember that I went to the church with the Pintér couple that day. Q.: In the morning? A.: Yes, it was in the morning. The whole village was there, everybody. The Pintérs were very nice people, they were good people. They supplied us with everything, they prayed for us, for me. When we returned from the church my mother realized that it was my nameday. She had a small cross around her nack, a silver cross with small diamonds. She took it off and she handed it to me. She was very sorry to have forgotten about my nameday and the Pintérs and she celebrated me. The guide arrived in the afternoon. He wasn’t old, he was about forty, he didn’t speak much. My mother discussed with him. Then she taught me some information before going to bed. She wanted to be sure that when we would cross the border I would know my father’s name, my father’s address, that I was his legal child and I wanted to go to the United States to live with him. If we were separated, if she died or she was wounded, I had to know where I would go.”

„My father contacted his acquiantances and he left for the border. He left Hungary forever. This happened in 1948. Q.: Was he smuggled out of the country? A.: Yes, he was, but he could bring with him only a briefcase. He was in a hurry. He could hardly take with him but his identity card and else, his documents in a briefcase. The frontier was closed by that time, he had to do it in this way. You couldn’t walk across the fields to Austria those years. Q.: Yes, if he had brought with him more stuff, it would have attracted attention. A.: Certainly. He was smuggled across Lake Neusiedl. What happened to him was that he entered with his briefcase some house. There was a well defined place at the lake where he was waited for, from where he would have been brought by boat across the lake. It was a marshy territory, moor and else around. However the police was on his track and when he entered the house, somebody told him he had been followed. He jumped off the window, into the boat, fortunately he was an athletic type man, but he left all his stuff behind. Q.: Including his briefcase? A.: Yes. And the police could get every data on him on the basis of these documents, who he was, where he lived, everything. But he could escape by God’s help, I can say. There were a few miracles in our lives. The first one was that I survived as a baby, the second one that my father succeeded to fly Hungary. Those years there were still these different, how do you call them… There was the American sector, the Russian sector and so on. Q.: Did he row across the lake? A.: Yes, he did, and then he managed in some way to cross different sectors to arrive finally to Frankfurt am Main where his sister, Erzsébet lived.”