I was in born in Budapest in 1937, just as the great depression was coming to an end. Little did we know that the industrial recovery was due to military spending as Hitler's party was preparing for war. My father, who was unemployed until now, finally found employment in a factory, and my mother who supported him could now stay home with my three year old brother and me.
My idyllic early years started to cloud over with the general anxiety in the population, of the impending war. In 1944 my father was drafted into the army and was sent to the Russian front. The Germans began their bombing campaign. I was now in grade one in school, and the ever frequent air-raids found us there. The school had no bomb shelter and we were quickly sent home, for me it meant running home in absolute terror the half a mile distance among farmers fields, with low flying aircraft overhead, sometimes machine gunning, sometimes dropping bombs.
We lived in a three-storey apartment building with a pasement for tenant storage. When the seige of Budapest began the cold damp and dark basement became our shelter, where we huddled shivering, not really fooling ourselves that if a bomb struck the building would collapse on us. Later, during the Iraq war one such apartment was actually hit by the Allied Bombings and televison brough the images of the horrific carnage of women and children blown apart, body parts and blood everywhere...
My parents had the foresight to prepare for the war, we had dry beans, peas and corn that we could boil to eat. For weaks in and out we lived in fear of air raids, hurriedly boiling the little we had left, then winter came and the pipes froze, we no longer had water. Sanitation? This is how colera breaks out...
Finally the Russians drove out the Germans and we found ourselves under occupation by a war crazed hord of armed soldiers. Looting, raping women and children and shooting the resisters on spot followed. It lasted several months til some sort of order could be restored. The population was starved and the economy had to be restarted. We were ordered out of the shelters and people ordered to clean away the ruins. The monetary system collapsed, we survived by bartering away the little we had. Poor diet and nutritional deficits have taken their toll, if people got sick they died or not, children were born with physical defects or already emotional cripples with lifelong effects.
The school reopened. I lost a year, but was happy to get back to grade two, even thought we shivered in an unheated classroom with nothing but rags on our backs, our hands red then blue from trying to hold a pencil. My first meal of the day was after school and when my mother got home from work at three a clock. My father never came back from the war and we did not yet know lthat he has been killed. We now had potatoes to boil, and that was pretty well all we had to eat. I began to have nightmares. Sometimes I woke up screaming in panic attacks. There were no councellors to deal with post traumatic stress then, you just had to learn to cope all your own.
I understand the war for the Americans was a blast, especialy for those on top, parading in smart uniforms and having parties where the ladies admired you... but we did not know anything about it then, we just trudged along.
