Hungary, 1956

[kate_schaefer]

I had a friend in high school who had been a small baby, sedated, stuffed into a knapsack, and carried across the border from Hungary fifty years ago this fall, after the failure of the uprising that began fifty years ago today. Which border? I never asked, but it must have been the border to Austria; it mattered then, but all that mattered to me was that they had chosen the correct direction, the right drugs, the right dose, the right time, and my friend's parents made it away, to western Europe, to Canada, to the US. It was so long ago, that failed revolution we lured the Hungarians to try, that revolution we failed to support, so long ago then.

Now I think how fresh and raw my friend's parents' wounds had to have been when we were teenagers, and how lightly they wore them despite that. I was fourteen and she was still thirteen when we met, so it was just twelve years after they left Hungary. Twelve years is a long time even in an adult life, but it's not the eternity it seemed to people for whom it was their entire lives. Her parents were the most elegant and worldly people I knew; they spoke Hungarian, French, and German at home, so that their children would be as multilingual as they were themselves, as at home anywhere in the world, as quickly adapted to exile wherever they had to go. They were younger than my parents, who were in turn pretty young for parents of baby boomers; they had been children and teenagers during the second world war. They had no reason to believe in any permanent peace, any stable freedom.

She could tell the story as if she remembered it herself. They would have killed me if I cried, she said, but never as if she believed it. Maybe it wasn't true; maybe they would all have died with their crying baby. She didn't cry; they weren't caught.

They became US citizens, and they voted Democratic. It's fifty years ago. We still believe in those ideals of democracy, and we still betray them all the time, with force, with lack of force, with money spent and unspent, awkward, desperate striving after the right thing, constantly doing the wrong thing and saying that somehow it will get us to the right thing, whatever that right thing might be.

I have no conclusions here, only memories borrowed from people who told them to me so many times I can see the heavy khaki of the knapsack, the truck that carried them the first part of the journey, the hedge, the stone wall, the run in the dark forest. Never forget; but what do these memories mean?

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[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Every time Mr. Bush talks about the unprecedented dangers of terrorism, I wonder: was he not alive during the Cold War? Does he not remember it? Did he never have to practice scooting his 10-year-old butt underneath his classroom desk in the hopes that this would save him from nuclear holocaust?