1968, my first trip abroad at the
age of thirteen.
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| Karpacz |
I suppose two things happened in
our family that year; my parents judged me mature enough to take me along on a
trip, and they
had enough money to take both my brother and me with them on
vacation abroad. The trip was partially financed by the University for which my
mother was working, thus our group of fellow travelers consisted of all sorts
of eggheads, non-productive freeloader professors who all worked for higher
education. These individualist moochers did not even travel together they just
showed up in Karpacz, one of the most popular mountain resorts of Poland at the
time.
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| Tar Creek Waterfall |
On our way, we took our time
driving through the Carpathians and I went above 1,000 meters (3,300 feet) for
the first time in my life. My love of nature and mountains can be traced back
to the Tar Creek Waterfall. On our way we stopped at Zakopane, another
beautiful resort town in Poland.
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| Zakopane |
Years later I returned there with my brother in the winter.We bought dollars
in the Hungarian black market and sold them in the Polish one. The profits were
staggering, so much so that we literally did not know what to do with our money.
Some of the aggressive Polish girls helped us. As we were walking in town we
noticed that two girls were following us. First, we dismissed this idea as
being preposterous, but after crossing twice back and forth the street with the
girls still in tow, we began to believe in our good luck. We entered a church
and sure enough, the girls followed us.
Little did we know then that they were on familiar territory. We knew we
had to make our move now, so we tried to talk to them. The willingness was
there, but the common language was not. One of the girls spoke a few words of
German, which actually matched my brother’s language skills perfectly. The
other spoke perfect Polish and nothing else. My famously non-existent Russian
came in handy, and we all four understood each other perfectly. I don’t know
how but we figured out that just barely two months earlier these girls were
still members of a convent and were walking around in nun uniforms. They
decided that convent life was not for them and quit being nuns. I suppose, when
they met us they wanted to make up for lost time. We took them to a restaurant
where we had no idea what was on the menu and the girls were not much help. So
we ordered everything on the menu. (Not to worry, we were in Poland in the late
70s, they only had about 8 different entrees). I guess, like all Poles, the
girls also liked vodka. My brother was, and still is, a teetotaler and I am not
much of a drinker myself so we only finished one bottle. After dinner we agreed
on meeting up later that night. But our luck ran out, the girls direct line to
God must have been reinstated, and they never showed.
My other memory of
Zakopane is how little we knew about skiing. Since there were no chairlifts
people hiked up to the top of the mountain and took their time to come down.
We, the experienced skiers we were, also joined the long line of hikers. Right
away something was strange. We were the only ones walking in our brand new ski
boots, purchased from the profit of the currency manipulation. Everybody else was
carrying their boots alongside with their skis on their shoulders. It did not
take too long to find out why. The boots were called ski boots for a reason;
they were not designed for walking. By the time we got up to the top we were
half dead and our feet were bleeding. Couple that with the fact that we did not
know the first thing about skiing and you can
imagine what a sorry sight we must have been. Yet, we had a great time coming down the
mountains.
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| Playing Bridge with Family 2009 |
Back to Karpacz and to my 13 year
old self. Every time my parents went on vacation a small part of the first day
was spent on interviewing others at the resorts trying to find bridge partners.
In Karpacz they only found one person who could play, so I blurted out: “I
could play”. They looked at me incredulously and laughed the matter off. During
the second week they reevaluated the situation and let me play. I had been
watching my parents and my grandparents playing bridge since I was three years
old. In the beginning they tried to send me away from the table, but soon they
gave up since my fascination with cards never stopped. They never explained the
game, dismissing the possibility that a child can comprehend the game. So,
there I was, claiming I could play. So we tried, and grudgingly they admitted
that I was OK. When we got back to Hungary, I was dismissed again as
being too young. At university, years later, I learnt nothing but playing
bridge. From then on I was the one who did not want to play with my parents any
more, they never understood what that wonderful sport (not game!) was all
about.
In Karpacz I learnt that girls
could come and ask you to dance. They often came and asked my brother, maybe
because he was good looking but more likely because he also looked Italian.
Towards the end of our two-week vacation, one morning in August we woke up to a
strange noise. Every 30 seconds planes were flying over us always coming from
the North West
and never returning. At breakfast, one member of our group, the only one who
spoke no other language but Hungarian, came in running and excitedly
gesticulating: “Czechoslovakia is being invaded” he screamed. Nobody believed him
at first, but we found out, he was right. My parents immediately saw a parallel
between this invasion and the events in Hungary in 1956. At that time the
crisis at Suez diverted the world’s attention
from the struggles in Hungary.
The Yom Kippur War was still fresh on their minds and they felt that the
Russians and their allies again used the world’s divided attention to crush the
Human Faced Socialism of Dubcek’s Czechoslovakia.
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| Prague 1968 |
The vacation in Karpacz was
abruptly ended, we were told to go to Krakow immediately.
The dorms were emptied for us and we were given free food and lodging there. My
brother and I enjoyed the extended vacation while my parents worried themselves
sick. The borders were open between Austria and Czechoslovakia; it must have
crossed their minds that we should do, what we had not done in 1956, leave
Socialism behind and move to the West. Soon the order came to leave, go back to
Hungary. Special trains were put together and people were transported home, but
rather than taking the direct way through Czechoslovakia they had to go around
thought the Soviet Union. For the few of us, who came by cars, a convoy was
organized and we were to drive to the Polish border where we were given a 24
hour pass through the Soviet Union. We were
given enough money for gas and some meager meals, but no hotels. “Let’s get out
of there as fast as we can” was the slogan for all of us.
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The roads were somewhat better
but it was dark and raining |
The trip though the Carpathians
was treacherous. The roads were narrow with no signs showing where the road
ended or tuned. Missing one of the turns could have meant a dive down the
abyss. Driving conditions were hindered by an unrelenting downpour in which
only cars with engines in the back could really move at any decent speed. My
brother was the “Mitfahrer”, sitting next to my father in the leading car
navigating and calling the turns. The rest of the convoy followed our stop
lights. One of the cars in the convoy had a license plate starting with the
letters “CS”. Some of the “comrades” on the roadside mistakenly took that as
the country sign for Czechoslovakia, and let the passengers know what they
thought about the mischievous Czechs by throwing rocks at them. We were forced to improvise; we put black
tapes over the letters making them read 08.
Somehow we made it to the
Hungarian border by 4 am, after 20 hours of driving in a small Fiat 850. We
spent the night in Miskolc.
1969, my second trip abroad but
the last one when all four of us went together.
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| Belgrade |
We crammed in our little Fiat and
drove south, to Yugoslavia. We spent some time in Belgrade, in fact more than
it seemed necessary. Years later I found out that my parents were looking for a
connection to hook us up with a mountain guide to lead us across the border to Italy.
In Belgrade they found the first link of the human smuggling ring, but our guide
at the Italian border never showed up. I was oblivious. I am not sure how
serious this plan was, but my grandparents were in the US at my uncle’s place and they
were waiting by the phone to get news from us after the crossing. Yet, my
parents planned the whole vacation like they have suspected that we would never
succeed.
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| Dubrovnic |
We went down to Dubrovnik and
Kotor. We watched the crazy divers jump from the bridge of Mostar. We toured
the Mestrovic Gallery of Split. We stayed at the lake near Bled. We slept at a
campsite that had doghouses for bungalows at the lakes of Plitvice. Somewhere
along the way my father got real sick, some said he had typhus. So my brother
graduated from “Mitfahrer” to first pilot, while my mother turned into the
worst back seat driver ever. But we survived and got back to Hungary. My
grandparents also returned, my grandfather holding ten thousand dollars in cash
in his hands as he deplaned; asking where he could exchange that legally. That
amount of money was a fortune legally, but would have made us all real rich if
he exchanged it in the black market. Well, he did not.
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Bridge at Mostar
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1970, my last trip with my
parents and my first trip to the West.
We drove to Vienna and were put
up by a man who had some business dealings with my father’s company. They were working on some plastic doors,
which to my knowledge, never materialized. But we got free lodging and my first
rotary chicken out of the deal. Our way
took us through Germany for a short time. My father was still not at peace with
the Germans, but my mother and I took a more sensible approach and convinced
him to drive through since it was a more direct route. But when we stopped at
the autobahn and a man walked up to my father and shook his hand and started to
tell him that he loved Hungary and that he spent months there during the war,
my father was not very happy. He, to my amazement, stayed calm, said nothing,
just turned around and walked back to our car.
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| Côte d'Azur |
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| Marseille |
I swam in the 15 degree lake of
Genf and saw snow for the first time in July on top of the Jungfrau. I saw
Paris and the castles in the Vallée de L'Avre. I walked around the cathedrals
of Metz and Strasbourg. But I was too tired to go out at night and see Avignon.
So I did not dance on the pond but ate snails in Paris and huge sea shells in
Marseille at a self-service restaurant. I marveled the architecture of LeCorbusier
both in Marseille and in the mountains where his monastery stood. In Cannes we
stayed at the luxury hotel of Gray d’Albion, courtesy of my uncle. I had my own
room looking down on the Côte d'Azur. My parents went to Monte Carlo and my
uncle gave my father a hundred dollars to gamble. He won and kept winning.
Finally he had about five hundred dollars. A fortune for us, so he wanted to pay back my uncle, who would not hear
of it. My father, the proud man he was, risked the whole amount and let it ride
on black. And he won! Well he may have been proud but crazy he was not! He took
the money and we ran. We stayed another 4 days on our own and blew the money,
eating lobsters for breakfast.
I knew we spent all the money
when we stayed in Grenoble at a hotel that was at the busiest intersection of
town, and where apparently all the motorcycles had to make sure that they roar
their engines at least once a night driving all sleep out of the eyes of the
hotel guests. Turned out, most guests rented the rooms by the hour, but this
time it was not me, but my parents, who were oblivious what was going on around
them.
The rest I don’t remember.
As most blog writer I also monitor the number of hits on my
blog. I noticed an interesting statistic. I have two pairs of almost identical
posts. How my father survived the war (134) vs. How my mother survived the war
(24) and Paternal grandparents (80) vs. Maternal grandparents (36). The numbers
behind the titles reflect the number of pageviews for each post. It must be a
male dominated society! How else could we explain the large discrepancy in the
number of people who are interested in these seemingly identical stories? It
would be different if rating after reading the stories would show that one was
more interesting than the other, but clearly, people made up their minds
before reading.
