For the Children

For the Children is a narrative memoir that tells the true story of my family's escape from Hungary and immigration to Canada in 1956, told from the viewpoint of the seven-year-old child I was at the time. It is a gripping tale of bravery and the will to survive, of my parents’ readiness to risk all to provide a better life for their children. 

The book starts out by telling of the difficulties of daily life in post-War, Stalinist Hungary. The intelligentsia professional class of my parents is the wrong cadre; spies are everywhere, and my father is regularly beaten for refusing to cooperate with the secret police. My parents desperately wanted to follow in my uncle’s footsteps, who managed to escape right after the war by tying himself to the bottom of a train that was crossing to the American occupied part of Austria. An opportunity came when the Soviet overlords allowed the Hungarian football team to travel to Vienna to play against Austria, and with difficulty, my father was able to secure tickets and laissez-passers. My mother though, was very pregnant, and on the bus to the station her water burst, and instead of going to the soccer game and hoped-for freedom, she went to the hospital to give birth to my older brother.

They had to wait for nine long years before an opportunity to leave arrived again. As the Russians were crushing the Hungarian Revolution, late one night we set out from our family home in Buda on the back of a truck that my father and two colleagues had borrowed to take us to the border. Arriving at the village that was their destination still thirteen or so kilometres from the border, we waited in the back of the truck until darkness fell, then jumped out and ran across frozen fields to disappear into the forests beyond. We followed a path until we got to the edge of some fields; here we laid low, the men watching carefully for any activity along the road on the other side of which was the border. Once the lights of an armoured car had passed, despite the hesitation of the others who were for turning back, my mother insisted that we go forward. We ran along the edge of a cornfield toward the road, but just as we got there, out from behind a big oak tree jumped a soldier shouting in Russian and shooting in the air. My father quickly told us to put our hands up, and my brother and I clung to my mother’s skirts whimpering with fear, as a jeep drove up. Four other soldiers jumped out, pointing their machine gun at us, as the soldier who seemed to be in command approached my father and addressed him, first in Russian and then in German, which he understood. This was the first attempt and capture; there are two more exciting attempts until on the last try, we managed to escape.

The book chronicles these escape attempts, as well as our struggle to get to Canada, where my uncle had gone at the end of the Second World War, and, as an epilogue, my return with my wife and children to try and help create a modern democratic and capitalist society in Hungary.

The themes are timeless and universal: the search and struggle for freedom and a better life, the unrelenting drive of a mother to provide the best for her children, and the wonder and difficulties inherent in starting a life in a new country. This is a tale especially relevant now, with the Russian aggression in Ukraine and the plight of the millions of refugees from there.

This discussion guide was created and shared by the author, Geza Tatrallyay.