A REFUGEES POINT OF VIEW

I am a refugee. I am also human. And I'm ashamed of it.

As a young child, I lived with my sister and parents in Budapest and often listened to my parents, our neighbours, and friends, talking about things I didn't understand. At the age of four I could read and just started practicing writing and it was my mother who made me read the bible every day and was upset when I inquired why there was a tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden if god didn't want his creation to have knowledge. To me it didn’t make any sense. My father called repeated lectures “Brainwashing” and by the time I turned nine, I had a better understanding what my father meant about brainwashing and freedom. I began to think and question everything. Why did god choose one nation over another and even commanded them to kill others or be made slaves if they were all his children? Why did he gave them free will, but then judged them when they exercised it? Did another god create us or did we descend from apes?

I remembered in school we had to do what we were told. There was no choice, no freedom and we all wanted to escape that repression.

My father told us frequently about the horrors of the Second World War in Stalingrad. He had killed other people and had been wounded seven times during the war to fight someone else's war. From him, I learned one version of freedom and strict discipline, from my mother another, but it eluded my understanding how obedience would be freedom of choice. Freedom to me was something that had to do with living life without fear. That wasn't the case with the life we lived.

My father was rather bold and outspoken and often had outbursts of immense anger and violence. He cursed the Jews, the Bolsheviks, Communist, the church, and god, more or less with the typical coarse swearwords Hungarians are so fond of. Even today at my age I often catch myself using the same words in my mother tongue when I'm upset about something.

Why am I writing about this and what does it have to do with a refugee's point of view?

First, and foremost, for the simple reason to settle you into my shoes as a refugee and someone yearning desperately for freedom, peace, and self-determination.

Second to point out the differences between a more or less peaceful childhood and that of a life in a country that doesn't have these luxuries.

We struggled every day to get food on the table and often went without it. My parents didn't belong to the elitists' communist party and had no privileges. My mother had to line up for rations a day before it was distributed and on occasions came home with tears in her eyes, hugging instead of feeding us. She worked as a heavy crane operator at GEMA, a steel and heavy equipment-producing factory and left the house at five in the morning and returned exhausted in the late evening just before dark. It was up to me to take my sister to the kindergarten before school and pick her up and take her home when school was over. My father was gone somewhere else and was rarely home, or perhaps I just didn't see him being home. I think he was earning a living as a butcher and commercial painter and didn’t spend much time with us.

Of course, we as children thought that was normal, but from the remarks and comments from them and others, it became clear something was not as it could be. Reading bible stories also painted a completely different picture of what peace and happiness were supposed to be. It sounded like a fairy tale, but with other, very scary elements. There were for my taste too many stories of atrocities and murder committed by the will of god and it caused me to ask many questions for which nobody seemed to have good answers.

Then 1956 happened. Students staged a peaceful demonstration in Budapest and it ignited a bloody revolution. My father thought I was old enough to be going along and fight the, as he called them, oppressors as other kids did the same. As the fighting intensified, it seemed the Hungarian people won against the Russian and Hungarian authorities, and then the tables turned.

Russian tanks rumbled into Hungary and flooded Budapest. From a hill I watched them passing by at about one hundred yards away while we dug for potatoes in the ground. Two of my friends, young boys, one twelve the other fourteen years old stood up to have a better look and were mowed down from a tank's gunner. Their bodies exploded with the hits and turned them into an unrecognizable bloody pulp in front of my eyes.

Before I was hit, my mother jerked me to the ground and pressed my face to her while bullets chirped like angry hornets over our heads. An eternity later someone lifted us to our feet and I will never forget my mother's sobbing at our survival, that I was still being alive with her, and over the two boys who were our neighbours, now dead. Other men tended hurriedly to the bodies of several people, many of them dead. They seemed worried, expecting the return of the tanks to finish what they started.

I remember the heavy silence in our house and the grim face of my father as he refused to talk to my mother or us children. The next day my father took me along on his motorcycle to see what we could do against the tanks. It was about freedom and survival, he said. My mother had no idea where we went.

With a bottle full of gasoline and a rag for a fuse we waited for an opportunity to single out one of the war machines and when that moment came, I rushed the moving vehicle, jumped up on it, clambered to the hatch, and as my father had instructed, lit the fuse, and dropped the bottle into it. For me, it was about payback for my friends, but the most frightening experience was the screaming, encased in flames men, trying to escape the tank and being killed by my father and two of his comrades while the horrifying surge of power over life and death of another that cursed through my veins. That has haunted me for many years. The rest is history.

We fought for freedom and survival and then my father left one morning from home and we didn't hear from him for weeks and thought him dead. The night following his disappearance a truck with a mounted machine gun, a huge, bright searchlight, and six uniformed men stopped at our building, lit up the house, and a booming voice demanded my father to come out. My mother ushered us under the bed while she stepped outside to confront the men. She told our neighbours later that one of the men got off the truck and roughly shoved the barrel of his Kalashnikov into her stomach and demanded to stop our dog from barking or he would turn him into a sieve. During her dealings with those men I held my sister tight to stop her from whimpering, myself shaking like a leaf. I feared for my mother and heard her talking to the man, telling him what a brave man he was to threaten a woman and a tethered dog with a gun while five more gave him cover from the safety of a truck. Then she informed him that her husband, my father, was probably among the other dead freedom fighters where he too ought to be, not among the government soldiers.

Does this scenario sound familiar? I don't think so because you most likely never went through a situation as this in your life.

When we received a note from my father that he sent from Vienna, Austria, through a man working for the Red Cross to escape to the West, my mother gave away all that we had, packed us into warm clothes and together we took the train to Hegyeshalom, a small town near the Austrian border. She found a man to guide us to the border and promised to give him all the money she had, which was pitiful enough, plus her wedding ring. In the night, the three of us, my mother and my sister and the man by the name of Lajos, left unseen from the place we were hiding. In the shadow of the railway tracks we made our way towards the border, sometimes crawling on our bellies, at other times bent over and running. Several times we had to flatten ourselves to the ground to remain unseen when flares lit up the night.

In every shadow I saw men coming to get us and the path was rough, full of sharp rocks and thorns. Once we were shot at and I heard the sound of bees passing my head. A bullet went through my mother's coat, but she was not hit. Not so Lajos. His elbow shattered and he suppressed a cry as he urged us on, clutching his arm as we stumbled to get away from the area. The border was near, he said, when suddenly two men with guns popped up in front of us, demanding to know where we were heading. Both were from the Hungarian border patrol and my mother told them that she intended to meet her husband in Vienna and that our guide needed medical attention.

The guards tried to make her turn around and she said to them that she would take us to our father unless they killed her. After some more talking the men decided to take the money and look after Lajos and then let us go. Lajos had to stay with them. We never found out what happened to him.

Short after a walk along the tracks, we heard voices calling out in a foreign language and my mother started to cry. Other man came out of the darkness and one of them said we were safe and in Austria.

I can't really recall how we got to Vienna, but when our father met us, we all cried and hugged for a long time.

That Christmas we attended the Johann Strauss Festival at the States Opera in Vienna and for the first time I saw and felt what beauty could be. It was the kind of heaven I imagined it to be. My parents were happy and talked about a future in Germany, painted everything in glowing colors. The only important thing for my sister and I was that we all were together. People brought us food and clothing and took care of all out needs. We visited the Prater, an amusement park, and it was one of the highlights in my life and then came New Year.

We were asleep when all of sudden all hell broke lose. Somehow it slipped away from my parents that it was customary for the West to celebrate New Years with fireworks. They were caught by surprise just as us kids. I remember how I grabbed my sister and fled under the bed like greased monkeys, my heart pounding and my bladder spilling its contents. It took some time to calm down and relax.

Naturally, over time we got used to it and even celebrated New Years like everybody else. But still today I recall the times during our revolution in Hungary and feel grateful to have escaped the horrors and the oppression. I never realized then how careful we had to be about what we said and did, the hardships of our daily lives and the struggle our parents had to keep us fed and clothed.

Still, I remember being an outcast because of the stigma being a refugee and being treated as an unwanted entity. I was seldom chosen to play in a team and it wasn't because I wasn't good. I learned inside of weeks to speak German and a year later a linguist told me I that I spoke better German than my contemporaries, but I was never accepted and remained an outsider, a "Rucksack Deutscher" (Backpack German).

I had many fights in school and was the most favourite person to be picked on and it was never one-on-one. The stigma of being a stranger had stuck on me persistently and had been refreshed year after year by my peers. I'm still seen as a strange person and this is nearly sixty years later. It has shaped who I am today. Among many other things I'm an author, but above all I'd like to see people understanding what it is like to be seen as a stranger and what it does to a person's life.

Most of the people living in the western world didn't live a life of turmoil, wars, oppression, poverty, and slavery or being persecuted for an ideology, color of skin or for what they believe. They didn't have to fight for their very survival every day, wondering if any of their loved ones would be alive next day. You only see your suffering, often committed by your own people and think it unbearable, but never look at the lives and suffering of the people who are looking for a peaceful life and some happiness. You deny them that and I'd like to invite those people to live one week in those war-torn places where it is a daily occurrence taking cover from attack from the air, or from the ground while scrounging for food and shelter and being exposed to the whims and mercy of others.

When you get lucky to escape all that and arrive at the border of another country that promises safe haven, you would be turned around, refused entry based on your ideology, heritage or nationality. I wonder what your state of mind will be then. Will you still spout your political views the same as you did before from the safe place of your present home?

Those people yearn for their freedom to be happy and have peace every day. You people fight for leadership and prestige. Refugees fight for a life in peace while you fight for an ideology, wanting to be someone that people recognise; a movie star, a rich person, a beauty queen, or a president. And don't come up with terrorist as an excuse that they want you to convert to a religion you don't like. You insist the same way to be right as they are. There is not much of a difference, only the methods are. There is something called physical violence and something that is called ideological violence. Telling another what to believe is belligerence no matter what you believe. Any belief system to me is BS, but that is only what I believe. By letting go of beliefs, you'll lose all reason to disagree and fight over it.

Personally, I shed all beliefs and feel no need to convert another to my ways of thinking. Facts can be interpreted any way you like, but it won't change the facts. Your interpretation of facts is what is causing the entire ruckus. From experience, I can tell you, no matter how you interpret being hit with a stick over the head, the fact that it hurts will be the same, no matter what you believe.

As a refugee, I'd like to tell you; all that bluster of how to deal with refugees boils down to one thing, COMPASSION. It has the power to change minds. Hatred begets hatred. Welcoming attitudes create a friendship. Study that in depth. Take this message to your neighbours, your politicians, and priests. And please, be aware of whom you support; it tells a lot about you.

André Schwartz