Communist Hungary: You Had to Cheat, Lie, and Steal Just to Survive | Robert Ratonyi

[00:00:14] Welcome to The Jenny Beth Show. On today's episode, we have Robert Ratonyi back with us. If you missed the first episode with him, be sure to go back and watch it. We aired it on October the 7th. He is a Holocaust survivor from Hungary. And the first episode that we did with him talked about the period in his very early childhood as he survived the Holocaust.

[00:00:40] He's lived under Nazism, fascism, communism, and liberty and democracy. And so we're going to be talking today much more about the communism aspect and how that was. So, Robert, thank you so much for joining me again. Robert Ratonyi My pleasure.

[00:01:00] Jennifer So in the last episode, we talked about how you were born in 1938. Very tough year for a Jewish child, Jewish boy to be born. And you lived through extreme conditions in the Holocaust. Your mother survived. Your father did not.

[00:01:21] Jennifer So in the last episode, you lived through extreme conditions in the Holocaust. And you lived through the Holocaust. And you lived through the Holocaust. And the Russian army came in to help liberate you from the ghetto, from the ghetto there. What happened after that part in your life? Robert Ratonyi Well, let me provide the context or a little bit of a background of what happened. Robert Ratonyi Sure.

[00:01:50] Robert Ratonyi Sure. And it goes back to the Yalta Conference in January 1945, when Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill got together. They already knew that the war is going to be won by the allies. And the decision, they were deciding who was going to get what and who was going to liberate the rest of Europe because the war was not over yet, like Hungary or Poland.

[00:02:18] Robert Ratonyi Sure. And the reason why the Yalta Conference, in my mind is interesting, is that Stalin made three promises, which he didn't keep a single one of them. Robert Ratonyi Of course not. Robert Ratonyi And one of them was that these countries that he's going to liberate will be free.

[00:02:42] Robert Ratonyi They're going to be able to choose what kind of government they want to have. There'll be free elections. And that Soviet Union will join the United Nations. And they're going to be working toward peace around the world. Robert Ratonyi And basically, he was like, because he didn't intend to keep any of them. And he didn't. So that's the background to what happened.

[00:03:07] Robert Ratonyi So what happened was Stalin didn't care so much about the Russian Red Army soldiers who now had to go in to liberate Hungary and these other countries. Robert Ratonyi Whereas Roosevelt was more interested in not losing more American lives. And this is, of course, against Stalin's being a dictator. Lives didn't matter to him.

[00:03:34] Robert Ratonyi Whereas as an American president, he cared more about the lives of Americans. And he said, okay, we'll let you do that. We're not going to interfere. You liberate these countries, but promise us to do these three things. And he said, of course. And of course, Churchill was suspicious. If you read the history, he never trusted Stalin. So that's the background to what happened to Hungary. The Russians liberated.

[00:04:00] Robert Ratonyi They never withdrew all their forces. They maintained a few divisions of Iran. They withdrew from Budapest, so you couldn't see a Russian soldier just around the corner.

[00:04:14] Robert Ratonyi After they liberated Hungary. I think it was in March when the final liberation was the Arrow Cross and the Nazis who were left there unconditionally surrendered because they knew that they were going to be dead if they don't. Robert Ratonyi So that's what happened. Robert Ratonyi So that's what happened. Hungary was liberated in the spring of 1945.

[00:04:39] Robert Ratonyi And what happened then, there's a person called Matyash Rakosi. Robert Ratonyi That's a Matyash. He's a very strange Hungarian name for an English speaking people.

[00:04:53] Robert Ratonyi But he participated in the Soviet Union and spent his youth in prison first because he was involved in the earlier uprisings after World War I in Europe. Robert Ratonyi And he grew up in Moscow, married a Russian woman.

[00:05:23] Robert Ratonyi And when Europe was liberated, Stalin decided to send him to Hungary to be the head of the Communist Party. Robert Ratonyi And they decided, or with approval I guess, everything had to be approved in Moscow of course, Robert Ratonyi And they decided to take it easy in Hungary and instead of immediately imposing a totalitarian communist system and just take over everything,

[00:05:53] Robert Ratonyi They're going to use what we called it later, use the salami tactics. Robert Ratonyi Just a little bit of one slice at a time. Robert Ratonyi So they actually allowed free elections in 1945 after liberation. Robert Ratonyi And this was a parliamentary system in Hungary before it was, when it was free. Robert Ratonyi And there were many parties, but the biggest party was the,

[00:06:21] Robert Ratonyi I know the Hungarian name, but the people who owned the farms, the farmland, farm owners were at the biggest party. Robert Ratonyi And they had maybe 27% of the vote and the communists got 10% of the vote in 1945. Robert Ratonyi So that didn't sit well with them. Robert Ratonyi And so they said, well, we're going to have to do something about this.

[00:06:47] Robert Ratonyi And that's when they started to, the communist party got instructions from Moscow that you have to do something about it. Robert Ratonyi And that's when they said, we can't live with that. Robert Ratonyi And gradually over three years, what they'd done was they co-opted the social Democrats. Robert Ratonyi And they co-opted some of the other parties and gradually eliminated the leaders of all the opposition parties in Hungary. Robert Ratonyi And they just disappeared.

[00:07:15] Robert Ratonyi And 1948 came and that's when the decision was made that that's enough. Robert Ratonyi We cannot win it by election. Robert Ratonyi They decided it was impossible no matter what they did. Robert Ratonyi And they were just going to have to impose it. Robert Ratonyi And that's when they took control. Robert Ratonyi And on the Raku, she now remember Stalin lived to be died in 1953. Robert Ratonyi So I was already 15 years old by that time.

[00:07:44] Robert Ratonyi So we lived under the system, the new system. Robert Ratonyi And what was the new system? Robert Ratonyi New system was that they nationalized everything. Robert Ratonyi There was no, all the businesses, factories. Robert Ratonyi We had quite a bit factors, like factors in the bus business and there's a big island called Chapel. Robert Ratonyi There was a big manufacturing facility in the middle of the Danube. Robert Ratonyi And the Russians took over everything.

[00:08:13] Robert Ratonyi No, no private enterprise would exist under the new system. Robert Ratonyi And the government owned everything. Robert Ratonyi And all freedom of speech was gone. Robert Ratonyi Freedom of religion was gone. Robert Ratonyi Freedom of assembly was gone. Robert Ratonyi You couldn't travel from, if you wanted to move from one city to another,

[00:08:40] Robert Ratonyi You had to register with the police and you had to get papers and permissions to move. Robert Ratonyi So basically all the things that we take for granted that we call freedom, Robert Ratonyi It was done with every factory had to have a political leader of the Communist Party that really, everything had to be approved by the Communist Party.

[00:09:03] Robert Ratonyi And that happened suddenly, literally, not suddenly because it's from 45 to 48, but that's when the big change happened in 1948. Robert Ratonyi And after 1948, it became a totalitarian dictatorship. Robert Ratonyi Everything was dictated. Robert Ratonyi Every schoolroom had the picture of Stalin and a picture of Rakosi. Robert Ratonyi Everywhere you went, streets, marches were forced.

[00:09:30] Robert Ratonyi I remember as a kid, we had to go on march because we had to celebrate the victory of Stalingrad, the victory of the Workers' Day, May 1st. Robert Ratonyi That's probably still a holiday in many parts of the world. Robert Ratonyi The communists still make a big deal about that. Robert Ratonyi The communists of May 1st. Robert Ratonyi Well, we had to wear a red kerchief and we had to go and put on that shirt

[00:09:55] and we had to march and everybody was singing the songs that had to be sung because only those were able, you could only sing songs that were approved by the Communist Party. Robert Ratonyi So, at that time, my mother, both my parents had eight years of schooling,

[00:10:16] so my mother had no skills and she ended up working in manual labor in a chemical company. And they had, the, Hungary adopted the same system that the Soviet Union had already had, which was the five-year plan. Robert Ratonyi Under the five-year plan, the bureaucrats, not the people who worked in the factories or the fields

[00:10:46] or the agricultural industry, it didn't come up from the bottoms up of what could be produced and what could be, you know, the budget and so forth. Everything was top-down. The bureaucrats and the politicians said, this is the plan, it looks good. And of course, not a single five-year plan was ever achieved. It was always revised and so forth and so on. So the system was, you lived in a fantasy world.

[00:11:15] We used to say that the government protects to pay us and we protect to work because under the communist system, the propaganda was, of course, censorship was absolute. All the textbooks that we had had to be either rewritten or completely new ones had to be published. We couldn't learn about Western history or like America and freedom and so capitalism.

[00:11:44] Anything that you heard was capitalism was terrible, exploitation of the workers and the same old BS that was on the radio, which we didn't have television. So the newspaper and radio was absolute total control. Every censorship.

[00:12:03] The only thing that you could listen to carefully, very carefully, was listening to Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. But when you did that, you had to turn the radio very low in volume. You had to close your windows, pull the shades, make sure that nobody heard it.

[00:12:23] Because under the communist classless system, as the utopian idea, of course, they developed a very class structure. And it was a pyramid where the very top of the pyramid was the polybureau and the communist. And most of these were true believers, not all of them, but most of them were true believers, true communists,

[00:12:50] like the guy Rakosi who had the communist party in Hungary. He grew up in Moscow and he really believed it. And in fact, I had people in my family, not in my, actually my wife's family, very nice, educated people who really believed in communism.

[00:13:08] Because they said under communism, we can take care of the poor and we will control the ones who want to be rich and, you know, reckless about spending money. That that's not fair and we're going to equalize everything. Well, the communist party members were the top layers of the class. The next layer was the secret police.

[00:13:33] So these two layers, these people had Western access to Western food, Western clothing, West, they had cars, they had drivers in cars and they live like kings. And then everybody else was underneath them. And what did they do with the bourgeois class that was there before? Well, they all got, you know, punished in many ways.

[00:14:00] For example, the one that I personally experienced was that when I was in high school, half of our teachers had doctorate degrees. My physics and math teacher had a doctorate degree. The history teacher had a doctorate degree. The biology teacher had a doctorate degree. And I never really thought about it.

[00:14:21] Why does that high school people, doctorate degrees, why are they in industry and develop new things and invent new medications and do all that? Well, I discovered later that they couldn't because the punishment was that they were downgraded and they had to teach in high schools.

[00:14:41] Now, we benefited from that because I had a terrific high school math and physics teacher who probably is responsible for me to become an engineer because I was very good at math and science. So, but that's an example of the bourgeois. Those who had big apartments, they were taken away from them.

[00:15:03] They gave a certain square footage that you could, depending on how many people you had or how many family, you were allowed to live in a place that had a certain number of square feet or square meter, as we said. So, they were basically ended up all of a sudden from being, let's say, the educated class. And we had wonderful people in music and art and so forth and science.

[00:15:29] I mean, the Hungarians contributed to the atomic bond, the Manhattan Project. Teller, David's name, and Szilard, they were all part of it. They all went to the same high school in Budapest and they managed to escape from Hungary before the Nazis took over, but they were all Imerian. So, we had a really nice upper class strata.

[00:15:56] All these people lost everything they had or basically were given, you know, enough to survive on. And who was more promoted? People who come from the working class who had no education. Now, I was lucky because my parents had no education. So, I wasn't on the blacklist. And, but that's the society we ended up with when the communists took over. And life was tough.

[00:16:26] Hungary, the Russians took advantage of controlling everything. And they actually moved factory equipment out of Hungary, moved it to Russia because they needed manufacturing that they didn't have the equipment and so forth. So, a lot of people were out of a job.

[00:16:51] The key emphasis about the economy was that everybody should have a job. So, what happened was almost every business that they nationalized had twice as many workers as they needed to produce the goods that they produced. And, you know, there was, you could buy, they said, well, you can buy anything you want to.

[00:17:19] Like, you could buy any kind of shoes you wanted to as long as it was black. Right. Because the five-year plan said this is how many things we're going to produce of this and that and that. And so, it wasn't market driven. And, therefore, it was totally inefficient. The three things all the communist country, Hungary included, didn't have. And that's why they were always behind the West.

[00:17:45] And that's why they lost their, you know, the Cold War later on. They didn't have capital because they couldn't trade. They couldn't compete against the Western world that had the capital. They didn't have technology, so they couldn't invent things. And they were three generations behind in every production facility.

[00:18:10] And I witnessed this when I actually went back to Hungary as an investment banker in 1993, hired by the USAID, the Agency for International Development. They needed Americans paid by American taxpayer dollars to teach the Hungarians after the Iron Curtain fell in 1989. I was there in 1993 and 1994. Even I actually moved there. We took one of our guys.

[00:18:40] And I was there one of seven American investment bankers, they called us, teaching the Hungarians how to run a business and how to package the businesses to sell them to foreign investors.

[00:18:57] And all these companies, companies from America, Britain, mostly Europeans, French, the Italians and Israelis were invited to come to Budapest and buy, invest in, buy the businesses. But they had to bring capital and they had to bring the technology.

[00:19:20] And they also, the third thing was, which is the problem for everybody, the Americans and the Hungarians, they wanted to keep the employees employed, the same employees. And it was impossible. So that. Right.

[00:19:37] And I was involved in, in the agricultural ministry and teaching them that in order to sell this canning factory, you can't have twice as many employees as you really need to produce the cans. Right. And so forth. So there was an enormous change that had to take place. But that came later. Right.

[00:20:01] But during the system, until the Iron Curtain fell, there was inefficiency. And the one thing that I discovered that I suspected, but I really got to know it firsthand, is the degree of corruption under the communist system.

[00:20:24] And, you know, the corruption was so pervasive there that, and what happened was when you liberate a country that was run by communists for decades, who is going to run the, you know, the corruption was so pervasive there. And just because you nationalized it, somebody has to run the businesses. Who is going to be there? Who knows something?

[00:20:54] It was all the old communists. Right. So they managed to make themselves rich. And they had a system of doom. Because when they nationalized these businesses, they, they had, they, they had a system of having shares that ordinary people could buy.

[00:21:14] They were really given, almost given shares so that, but what the communists managed to do is they ended up buying these shares from the people who were given these shares to own part of a business. And they bought them themselves. And then they were sold to a Western company and they got dollars instead of the people who actually were given these ordinary shares.

[00:21:40] So it's a very complicated system, but they managed to make themselves very rich. Very few of the communist leadership really paid for what they did. And that's why it took a long time for these countries to fully recover, but you had to get rid of this top layer of management. And they were already corrupt to in plain language in order to survive on Hungary. And I assume the same thing in Poland.

[00:22:10] You had to cheat. You had to lie. And you had to steal. If you didn't do that, you could not really literally survive. And I know this, I hate to admit it from personal experience, because when I was graduating from high school, I was 18 years old in 1956. That was Rakosh in charge. And Stalin was not denounced yet. So that, you know, this, this was a Stalinist regime.

[00:22:40] My mother wanted me to have a suit. I never had a suit. And in order to graduate from high school, she wanted me to have a suit. And we had two tailors in our neighborhood. And my mother decided to have a bargain because she didn't have enough money. She didn't make enough money to pay for a suit. We could, you could, there were no department stores. You can't just go in and buy a suit that was hanging and was your size. And that was, didn't exist in 56. It came much later.

[00:23:10] And I was like, I'm sorry. So my mother was working in a chemical company called Kinoin, which was later bought by a French company, a very nice big French company. And she did manual labor and her salary was not enough to live on. She had to depend on a family and some of her brothers and sisters to provide us to have food. We didn't have meat, but maybe once a week. And having eggs was a, you know, luxury.

[00:23:39] And having butter was a luxury. I could tell you stories about that, but I don't think we have time to do that. And when I stole a bar, some butter from my grandparents, uh, ice box when I was eight years old, I put it in my pocket and I went on the streetcar and halfway there, all of that melted in my pocket. And I had to admit to my mother and she said, what's going on? Why is what's, where is this, you know, butter coming from?

[00:24:09] And I had to admit that I put it in my pocket because we barely had butter. I said, we should have butter at home. So, you know, this is the life that we had to live. And people and my mother, back to the stealing, she managed, they used alcohol. This was a chemical. They did medicine, medication that required alcohol. And she managed to steal some alcohol and to pay the tailor with that.

[00:24:37] And I had a beautiful blue suit that I graduated in high school. And that's the same suit that I wore when I escaped from Hungary. Wow. Uh, you know, some six months later, I graduated. Okay. Before we go to the escape, um, it, the, the rationing, were there long lines? What was that like? Yes. Right after the war was everybody was starving. Right.

[00:25:03] It's not just the Jewish people who survived, those who survived. No, there was basically no food because the peasants couldn't bring food in. And then they were starving too because the war was on everywhere, not just in Budapest. Right. But Budapest was particularly hard to get food. And there was not enough production because they nationalized everything.

[00:25:28] So the, the, the, the, the economy wasn't healthy enough to produce, you know, goods. It wasn't meeting supply and demand. It was doing what somebody on the top. Everything was the five year plan. Every year was done by like the Soviet model that was never met. And at the same time, they raised the quota. I know my, the, not the quota, the norm was called the norm.

[00:25:52] My mother was given a norm of how many things that she had to, she was sitting with a Bunsen burner on the big table with a lot of women sitting side by side and sealing these, uh, little glass, uh, um, what do you call it? And where the medication was inside and they had to be sealed. Vials. The vials, right. The vials had to be sealed. And that was her job.

[00:26:19] They wore glasses and they had a burner and they had to produce so many vials a day. And the norm would always, if they met the norm next year, it was raised. And so they were very careful as to how fast they would work. The understanding was they knew everybody knew what was going on. So they were very careful not to produce too much because they knew that if they meet the norm next year, the norm is going to be 10% higher.

[00:26:48] And then a year later, 10% higher again. So the whole system was like a one big fake system, which it was. And corruption was like I said, those who were, uh, the party people, of course, I mean, they were given everything and they really didn't have to be so much corrupt, but the ordinary people were in management position or everywhere.

[00:27:14] It was impossible to, to be an honest, decent person. But of course, religion. Yeah. If they found out that you were a religious person and you regularly went to your church, your career was gone. And the fact that I was bar mitzvahed when I was 13 was a miracle. And I had to tell you about it because it really is a big event in my life.

[00:27:42] It's a tradition in a Jewish community that when you're 13, you get bar mitzvahed and then theoretically, at least you become a man. Now you're responsible for your own actions. Well, we had a synagogue, a beautiful synagogue near where we lived in Köybanya. Köybanya is a quarry in English. And I never seen that quarry. I don't know where it was, but that was a district's name. Beautiful synagogue is still there today.

[00:28:13] Um, I was 13 years old and my mother ensured that I had a bar mitzvah. And we had a synagogue, there was a Rabbi Kalman, uh, who, uh, did the bar mitzvah. But in order to be bar mitzvahed, you had to read portion of a Torah, which is in Hebrew.

[00:28:37] So the cantor who was the singer would come to our home and teach me a portion of the Torah and taught me how to chant it. And there's a certain, I had a good voice, you know, and it was kind of fun. And, and I already learned a little bit of the Hebrew letters, but we would come at night or during the day.

[00:29:05] We had to close the doors, pull the shades and do it very quietly so that the neighbors wouldn't know what's going on. And then, uh, because if they found out that, that, uh, somebody that Robert Reich, because my name was Reichmannn until 1956. It's a German name. Just another story is why, why do all the Jews in Hungary had German names? I finally did the research and I found out, but that's another story. And they, they would wonder, well, where is Reichmann?

[00:29:35] We, we hear some strange singing that doesn't sound like Hungarian. And if the word got out, my mother would get into trouble because, you know, so that there was, there were very much against any religion, the communists. And, and, but some people managed to go to church and, and some people paid the price for that.

[00:30:00] They, they couldn't accomplish, they couldn't, their career was not as good as it might have been if they weren't religious. So that was major thing, no religion, no freedom of speech, no freedom of association and spies everywhere. The secret police was everywhere. We were told when we were young, be very careful what you tell your friends.

[00:30:25] Very careful when you're in a streetcar, when you want to discuss something with somebody, because you never knew who was next to you. Even within families, there were people who were spying because the kids were indoctrinated to spy on their parents. And, no, in my family, it didn't happen. And I was smart enough, I guess, to understand that this was a false system.

[00:30:50] Did you find that a lot of the, the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, did they, were they much more distrustful of the system than maybe others or, or knew? Interestingly, a number of Jewish survivors became communists, through believers. They really, they're, I remember having conversation with my wife's uncle who was one of them.

[00:31:17] And he kind of said that, explained it, that he was more of a humanist because their concern was that, how do you take care of the people who are hungry, who don't have a job? Well, in Hungary, there was no such thing as not having a job because they just put you to some place to do something. But they were worried about the poor people.

[00:31:40] And they thought that the communist system, ultimately, if it becomes finally, it's going to take care of everybody. And nobody's going to become a billionaire or a millionaire, but everybody will have a decent living. So they had good intentions. But a lot of them were just, you know, fake communists. They said what they had to say. They went to the meetings and they had certain jobs.

[00:32:07] One of them was my mother, best friend who served, who saved his, her life. She came home and she became a communist, but we knew that she wasn't really a communist. But because she was active in the communist party, she was given a fantastic job of managing a store in our neighborhood. It was a little bit like Ace Hardware store. It's just so that she had a wonder.

[00:32:35] She was allowed to stay in her old home, which had a large, you know, bedrooms and living room and shower and rumbling water and so forth. She couldn't have done that if she wasn't a party member. So that's kind of how life was.

[00:32:58] And, and I don't, I remember growing up from the time I was very young to the time I left Hungary. My mother bought me a meal ticket. You could, they had a restaurant, but you can, you had to use meal tickets. You know, we weren't paying for the meal and a meal ticket. There are two kinds of meal tickets, one with meat and one without meat. And my mother could only afford for me to have meal tickets that without meat.

[00:33:27] And the meal in Hungary was to be the, the big meal was what we call the abeit, the late lunch. So after school I would go home and I had a ticket, went to this restaurant, gave them a ticket and I would order a pasta or vegetable or something. I mean, the Hungarian food is pretty good and you can have 50 different kinds of pastas and a lot of potatoes and vegetables and so forth. But meat was very rare.

[00:33:55] Maybe we, if we had any meat, it was chicken on the weekend. And that was, that's why when my mother took me to visit my family that lived inside the city, it was always around lunchtime so that I could take advantage of it. You know, they knew that we were poor and they always had some nice food for me. And, but that's how we live.

[00:34:18] And, you know, there's, there's the, the fact that you could not read anything that was, you didn't know what was real when you read the newspaper. And we discovered most of us, as we got older, that it was fake news. And, and, and, and, and as you know, the cold war was the big thing about the East and the West.

[00:34:47] And we knew, we were told how terrible it was in the West. And America was the most, the worst of all the countries because there was, you know, all the, all the workers were exploited in America. That was the, the, the given that it was exploitation of the workers and only the very rich survived.

[00:35:16] And there was a country that was terrible and had to fall and had to change. And this was, that was the propaganda. And we learned about, we had to learn Russian. Russian became compulsory. I had six years of Russian. We didn't learn English. We didn't learn French. And the access to Western literature was particularly painful to me because I became an avid reader.

[00:35:42] And only by pure luck that I had access to Western literature in Hungarian. And when, what literature of that do you remember? Oh, I remember reading classics. I have to think about some of the classics that my, there was a neighbor of ours where we lived for 18, 17 years.

[00:36:13] It was Mrs. Klein. She was an educated woman and she had a son, Robert, same age as I am. And she had a library of books and they didn't confiscate the books. They did come and take your books away. But, you know, she had these wonderful books in Hungarian. And I would, she would let me borrow some of the books and I could read it. And I read about, you know, I don't think so. I think maybe Huckleberry Finn. Yeah.

[00:36:42] You know, that, that I was able to read when I was very young. And I'm not sure if the three Musketeers was, but I love the three Musketeers. And I loved the several of these books more than once. And then I started reading some of the more serious books that, this is Klein was one of the sources of Western literature because the libraries didn't have any Western literature.

[00:37:08] And then one of my aunts who is now 96 years old, still in Hungary and speaks only Hungarian. And she's still alive today? 96. Wow. Yeah. She's going to be 97. I call her once a month. Oh, that's wonderful. And we speak Hungarian. She doesn't speak English, but I promised myself I call her once a month. And she's totally with it mentally, but she's in a wheelchair because she didn't allow them to do a hip replacement when she was in her eighties. Okay.

[00:37:36] And after she got to the nineties, she needed it. And they said, sorry, you're too old and it's too much of a risk. So now she's in a wheelchair and she has somebody to like, she's living very near to the world. And she's in a wheelchair to her two daughters. So they take care of her. She's very well taken care of. But the point about her, her name is Magda. Magda got married when she was 16 and it was a beautiful marriage.

[00:38:02] And I got to know her husband and his first name was Tibor. And, and he had a library of books. So then I would go and we would visit them everywhere. They lived again in a very nice apartment and he would lend me books to read. So that's how I became a big reader.

[00:38:24] And, uh, uh, but of course we had to read about, uh, the, the, the capital, you know, Karl Marx's book. We had to be read. We had to read about the battle of Stalingrad. We had to read all these Russian books. Some of it we had to read in Russian because in order to graduate from high school, you had to be able to pass an exam, which was both a written and an oral exam on virtually every subject that we had.

[00:38:54] So graduating from high school was a lot more difficult than graduating high school in the average high school year. The one thing that somehow the, uh, they, they, they managed is to keep the level of education high. There's lots of good teachers. They just demoted some of them. Right. And they ended up teaching, you know, in the high schools and so forth.

[00:39:19] So we had a good educational system, but I started learning about stories and history about the Western world, about these books. And then I did start listening to the voice of America, which shows, uh, turned out to be a big appointment when the uprising came. But that's another story.

[00:39:44] I have interviewed at this point, um, several, several different people who have survived communism and voice of America just keeps popping up as something heard throughout the world. And then voice of America and radio for Europe was also available. Uh, available. You had to find it. Find it.

[00:40:05] Um, it, it, one, one more thing about the, just a day to day life there. What about healthcare? Okay. Well, uh, I didn't know much about it because I was young and I didn't need anything.

[00:40:26] I know that, uh, the, but, but I got to know the healthcare after I went back when my mother was in a hospital because she died of pancreatic cancer. And this was already still under the communist regime. And it hasn't, it has gone, became a terrible system. The healthcare, the hospitals were dirty. They didn't clean the rooms. You didn't have a private room.

[00:40:55] You had to have two or four people in one room. The smell was awful. And what you had to, what I did, this is illustrate how the system worked. I took hundreds of dollars with me, cash. And when I went to see her doctor in the hospital or if the doctor, when she was out of the hospital, I give the doctor a couple hundred dollars to make sure that she, my mother gets some special attention.

[00:41:21] And when she was getting older, I started to freak, more frequently to travel to Hungary. And when she was in the hospital, I went back almost every two months. I gave her an excuse that I'm there on business because I was already there in 1993 in business. And she thought that I was to, but I really went there just to see her and to give money to her doctors.

[00:41:46] That's how the doctors made a living because the doctors could make a living if they just, they were on salary, just like, no, the technical workers were a little better off. Because they had a skill and the skill was needed. And, but still, my father-in-law was an extremely good skilled technician.

[00:42:12] He couldn't become an engineer because when he graduated from high school, he learned a couple of languages and he wanted to go to college. But by then, Hungary implemented a law in 1920, the first country in Europe to implement this law called numerous clauses to Latin words, which means limited number.

[00:42:35] Which means that they had the law would only allow a certain percentage of Jews to go to college. And my father-in-law could not go to college because he was the core system. Now, I read the law, the Hungarian law.

[00:42:52] It doesn't say a single word about being Jewish or Jews, but it's written in such a way that in order to prove that you weren't Jewish by then, you had to prove that your great, great grandparents were Hungarians. And, you know, so you had to go back and have actual documentation that you were a real, what we call Magyar. Magyar is the word for Hungarian in Hungarian.

[00:43:17] So we were, you know, you had to prove that you were a real Magyar in order to, that's how you, they screened the Jewish population out of colleges. That was in 1920. Now that changed later on. Uh, the Jews were kind of emancipated, uh, and were allowed to, uh, uh, you know, become professionals and so forth.

[00:43:43] So there's a lot of, but what happened was there's so many, so much, such a high percentage of the doctors, lawyers, and, and, uh, uh, skilled people were Jews. And they, they said, well, we can't have that. They're only represent the Jewish people represent only 8% of the population. And we have 30% of the doctors are Jewish. We can't have that.

[00:44:06] So that's what happened to my father-in-law, but he was at extremely good tool and die maker, which is a special skill. And that's how he, that's how they lived. Well, better than we did where I lived. My, my wife's family, because of him, he was as what they call us, Stahanovista.

[00:44:31] They created the name of Stahanovista after a Russian worker who was, his name was Stahanov. And he was here a hero because he produced, exceeded in production all the time. So if you were a star of Stahanovista, you got extra money, earn more money than the others.

[00:44:52] So there's all these were the ways they were trying to, you know, control life of ordinary people, unless you were in the secret police, unless you were in the, you know, Russian or Politburo or the Communist Party. Life was dry, life was dry, you didn't have access to food, you couldn't travel.

[00:45:22] And if they caught you, like what happened to one of my aunts whose sister escaped and she helped her escape. But she had, using a smuggler who somehow managed to get her out of the country under the Communist regime. And then the sister wanted to have her jewelry sent out after her.

[00:45:51] This was Ann Clary, not my uncle's wife, not a real relative of us, but my uncle Lutz's wife. And she organized something and she had the phone number of the smuggler in her, with her.

[00:46:13] And when they came to search her house and they found this phone number and they found out who it was, they took her and imprisoned her. And she nearly died in prison and extremely fortunate. She came down with a sickness and they didn't know how to treat it. And after three or four years of being in a prison, they allowed her to leave. But she was near death when this happened.

[00:46:43] And I got to know her real well in the 19, late fifties. I was already a teenager, used to visit her all the time because. She had a son, was my cousin. And, and Peter Osman was his name. His father died. And this was a mother that married one of my uncles.

[00:47:10] So, you know, you hear, you, you see, and you heard these stories and my own family of what happened to somebody who was trying to help someone to escape. And, and if you go to Budapest today, the destination for visitors, tourists is the torture chambers. Yeah. In the same house where the Nazis had their headquarters.

[00:47:39] And then the communists came and they took over. They had their headquarters in the same house. It's one of the most beautiful part of Budapest, right in the center. It's a boulevard, which has not only sidewalks, but in the middle, there's an area with trees and so forth. It's a beautiful avenue under a shoot it's called. And that's where these houses and they now made it into a museum. And I took my children there. I took my grandchildren there.

[00:48:06] We took them to show them their roots and to show them what communism is. Yeah. So they learned something. And the reason I actually wrote, published the book is for my grandchildren, because I needed to write down what common, what the Holocaust was, what communism was, what it, what it take to escape the uprising in Hungary. I wanted them to know about it. That's why I didn't, I don't make any money at the royalties.

[00:48:36] All the royalties go to charities. So it's no, you know, the book that I wrote is strictly for teaching purposes. And talk about the, talk about your escape. You mentioned that there was no freedom of religion, no freedom of speech, no freedom of assembly, no freedom of movement. So how did you get out? Yeah.

[00:48:58] But as an example of freedom of movement, my best friend, life friend, who's still alive, same age, is one month older than I am. Unfortunately, he's in a memory care in a Florida place and he lost his dementia. He graduated from a technical school because he wasn't good in calculus and so forth. So he became an electrician. And after he graduated, he lived in 20 minutes from where I lived. And then I got to know his family and we used to see each other all the time.

[00:49:28] We played sports together. And he was told after graduation that you got a job in a city that was 120 miles from Budapest. So he had to leave his mother and his sister at home. His father died in 1955. And had no choice. The company said, this is it. There's a job there waiting for you. That's where you've got to work. It's a good example. And that was life.

[00:49:54] And so there was no freedom unless, even if you were a politician, I mean, you couldn't just pick up and say, oh, I'm going to spend a week in Lake Geneva or something. You know, you had to get approval and whatnot. But you could travel. Right. And you can wear Western clothing and you can have import Western food. That was a lot for the top. The top tier. Top tier.

[00:50:21] But us, if anything was produced and there was a need for it in Russia, it was exported to Russia first. And what was left, it was left for the Hungarians. So that's why we were second class citizen in the satellite countries, Soviet Union. So that's how we lived. That's. And that's why the uprising, I think, took place.

[00:50:47] It's the pressure was such that it was an organic situation. And I was there part of it. It wasn't fed by American money or, you know, which the Russians, of course, tried to say that this is all done by the imperialist countries on the West. It's uprising. No, it wasn't.

[00:51:12] The real thing what happened was, and I don't know if you want me to tell you that if that's the right time. Yeah. On October 23rd, I got on the streetcar, went to like technical university, which was on the Buddha side of the city because the Danube separates Buddha and Pest. Buddha is on the West. Pest is on the East. And the university was on the Buddha side. So I had to take two streetcars to get there. They're early in the morning.

[00:51:38] And I got there in the morning and something I found out that there'd be no classes today. And I said, well, what's going on? I said, well, we're going to have a peaceful march to commemorate a Polish hero of 1848 who fought because in 1848 when there were revolutions in Europe, all over Europe. And this was going to be a peaceful march. I said, OK, well, I guess we're not going to go to class today.

[00:52:08] And then we waited because in order to march, you had to get permission from the interior ministry, which of course, the interior ministry meant the police and the secret police. And we were waiting and waiting. And finally, I think it was around noon, we started the march that was on the Buddha side to this police, Polish hero. I can't remember his name right now. I have to look it up in my book if I remember.

[00:52:38] And by that time, things changed. Something happened. I noticed that as we're walking around in the city in the Buddha side, the white street, people started singing some patriotic songs that were not allowed to sing.

[00:52:57] And that's why the approval came so late, because the ministry was debating, should we allow this march, which God forbid, you know, the other universities would find out, which they did. And they also decided to march. And now it was to be like hundreds of thousands of students marching to this place. And the word got around.

[00:53:21] And along the way, we noticed that the Hungarian communist flag, somebody cut out the sickle and the hammer and the sickle that was part of the Hungarian flag. I don't think I have. I do actually do have a picture of the cover of my book because I have that flags. Right. That's kind of what the anti-communist movement is thought of in Hungary. Yeah, right.

[00:53:48] So people were cutting off the sickle and we said, what's going on here? There's something strange. And then we got to the square. By that time, it was tens and tens of maybe over a hundred thousand students that came over the bridge where this statue was very close to a bridge. And all the streetcars had to stop. The buses had to stop because they could move. And we were singing songs.

[00:54:16] And then the decision was to move to Pest and go to the parliament and demand that one of the Hungarian politicians be rehabilitated and put in charge of the government. His name was Imre Nodj. He was a communist, a real communist, but he was a conservative communist. He didn't believe in doing all these extreme things that the communists demanded.

[00:54:45] And so he was removed from his position. He wasn't put into jail, but he was allowed to live. And this demonstration in October 23rd lives in my memory if it was yesterday. You could feel the something in the air that this is totally different than we ever experienced. And the government, they allowed this to get out of hand.

[00:55:14] And the hundreds of thousands of the workers who left early because sometimes the work shift started at six o'clock in the morning and the workers would leave at three o'clock in the afternoon. And now they joined this mass movement. And there's a leaflet that was passed around before we started the march. Obviously, the upperclassmen were all involved in it. But I was a freshman. I didn't know anybody. I just wanted people to call me Ratun and not Reichmann.

[00:55:45] Because nobody could spell Reichmann in Hungarian, but Ratun everybody knew. And I was just hanging around there, not knowing what's going on. And then I noticed, the next thing I knew, I was finding myself in front of the parliament. There was a major mass of people there. And we had this leaflet that was prepared that had 16 points of declaration.

[00:56:12] And it included that we wanted the Russians to leave Hungary. We don't want compulsory Russians. We want freedom of speech or freedom of religion. 16 points. And then the crowds parted around late in the afternoon. And I was hoarse already from all the singing.

[00:56:37] And some part of the group went to the radio station to ask the radio to allow us to announce on the radio what these declarations were. And the other part stayed in parliament. And I had to go home to the suburb where I lived. From where I was, at least two streetcars. And the streetcars stopped going at 10 o'clock.

[00:57:07] They went along the denier where the parliament is. And so I stayed at the parliament. I didn't go to the radio station. So I got caught the last streetcar. I got home late around 11 o'clock. And I thought, okay, this was a wonderful day. And it's just something unusual happened. And it was great. We could sing things and... You experienced freedom. Yeah, experienced freedom for like 24 hours. I went to bed.

[00:57:36] And the next day I got up to go to school and the streetcar wasn't coming. And then a lot of people were standing around the streetcar station and they said, look what's going on on the wall there. And I looked across the wall and there was this big placard with the 16 points of declaration. And then I said, I went over there, looked at it. I said, whoa, that's interesting. What happened? I just came home and I had no idea. Well, what happened?

[00:58:03] And the group that went to the radio station demanded to be let in. And the radio station, of course, there was secret police was there. They always had secret police at the radio station because it was a very sensitive thing. So they had to be protected. Freedom of press. You can't have that in a communist party. So they started shooting and they killed a dozen students who were trying to break the door.

[00:58:29] And that's when things turned from a peaceful march into a bloody revolt. The police, the secret police called out the police, the regular police and the army to come to the radio station. And what happened? And they parted with the students, with the uprisers or the freedom fighters as later became known.

[00:59:01] And they were chasing the secret police and they gave out guns. They gave ammunition to the people, most of them students, like I was 18, 19, 20 years old. But I knew nothing about it until the next day. And then I found out what happened later on. And of course, the radio was announcing what was going on.

[00:59:29] And the news spread to different cities around Hungary. And this whole thing just was a big uprising. And that's when the Russians were caught off guard. The total surprise. They didn't realize that how weak this system was. And a lot of the march and a lot of these people together, so many people. So what did they do? They said, well, the way we're going to do this is we're going to ask them to negotiate the Hungarians.

[00:59:58] And we're going to negotiate with them and we're going to agree to a lot of things. And then let the things come down. And then we're going to come back with new divisions. They didn't trust the ones that were living in Hungary by then because many of them, for a Russian soldier to be stationed in Hungary was likely being in Paris. Oh. You know, because they were farmers or God knows what. They never knew any. They never saw any Western civilization until they came to Hungary.

[01:00:28] So they came back with, and they brought in Mongolian divisions. And they said, this is a fascist country and you've got to take charge and no, you know, holding back. Any resistance, shoot. And that's how they put the revolt done in November. And so the whole freedom lasted just a few weeks.

[01:00:55] And that's when I discovered, I heard that my close friend that I grew up with, Tibor, the border guard, that he was going to escape. And then my other lifelong friend, who is still alive, he's a half a year, six months younger than I am. He now lives in Ottawa. He was a, turned into an insurance salesman. But we grew up together from elementary school. We knew each other when we were in elementary school.

[01:01:25] And later on, we lived close by. So his father, who married, who was divorced, is Jewish. His mother was not Jewish. So he was half Jewish. And after the war, his father was courting my mother. They knew each other because we lived so close. Right. My mother was there, you know, looking for a husband because there I was one child and she had to work.

[01:01:53] And he was not married. And he had one child, Gabi. And they were courting each other. So we could have been stepbrothers. But it did work out, that marriage. And it's another reason why it didn't happen. But, which I wrote about it in my book. But Gabi, my mother told me, well, guess what happened? I said, what happened? I said, Gabi Ered left Hungary.

[01:02:23] He escaped. I said, oh. So this is the second friend of mine. Two friends that I grew up with that I knew escaped. And that's what gave me the idea. Plus the fact that I got caught up in the uprising. It was amazing. Because the next day after October 23rd, the police opened up the armory in our district. And anybody, young men like me, would get a gun.

[01:02:49] So I was, next thing I know, I had a gun in my hand that I was, you know, assigned to protect the post office that was next door to us. And I thought, well, you know, when you're 18 years old, I said, okay, this is an opportunity to get rid of the Russians and the secret police. And I, but in order to get the gun, you had to sign your name into a book at a police station. Oh.

[01:03:18] So I did. And, and I actually didn't put my new name in Ratoni or Ratoni. I put in my old name, Robert Reichman Robert. Robert, you used the surname first and the nickname second. And after that, I started thinking, but that was kind of stupid. Everybody in this district knows who I am because we lived there not for 18 years. You know, it's a close neighborhood.

[01:03:47] You don't get to know your neighbors. Right. But I signed it. And I told my mother, and when she saw me with a gun, she almost fainted because she cried. She said she couldn't believe it. She says, because, and I was so sensed, unsensitive to the fact that she was taken away at gunpoint from a very courtyard we were still lived in. And here I am showing off with a gun on my back. And I regret it so much.

[01:04:16] I was, I just felt so guilty about it that I didn't think of her experience. Right. And I was lost with guns and what happened just, you know, 10 years or 12 years earlier. But I was scared that, that I'll be in trouble with the communists when they come back and that they already put down the revolt. but the border was not completely sealed yet and that's how my two friends escaped

[01:04:45] and that's when I decided and I asked my mother's permission to leave and we had a deal that once I leave and find a new home someplace then she'll come after me somehow or other that I can bring her out but the truth of the story is that she didn't really want to leave and my uncle, her brother talked her out of it because she could have left

[01:05:13] but he told her to don't leave because your son will be better off without you because he's going to be able to take care of himself but you're going to be a burden on him because now he has to take care of you and you don't speak a word of English but your son is going to learn another language in six months and so he talked her out of it and that's why my mother never left but I decided to leave

[01:05:41] so Billy who got the job in under 20 miles from Budapest came home and then the revolution took place because it spread all over and I went to see him but we were, we became close friends in high school not in the same high school he went to a technical school I went to a gymnasium as we called it the real high school where we played sports together Bill and I I call him not Bill because we changed his name William he analyzed his name

[01:06:11] when we got to Canada but we played a lot of sports together and that's what brought us together and I said, it would be nice if I could have a friend to go with so for sake of just safety and two is better than single I didn't have any money Tibor knew the border so he went by himself with his best friend who was Jewish which is an interesting thing told me you know, a Jewish guy and a Christian guy two best friends

[01:06:40] and I had my best friends they were all, these are all half Jewish or Bill was a Catholic but we became best friends lifelong friends and I said, Bill I'm going to leave I want to escape from Hungary how would you like to join me? and almost without hesitation he said, yes and that changed our lives and we sat down one night in a square and we just said how are we going to do this?

[01:07:10] and we figured out a plan of how to get to the border and then from there just take our chance and find a way to cross it and it turned out to be a very risky business because by then there was smuggling going on that it's a story that is too long to tell but we got to the city that was halfway between the border and Budapest and the station master we knew

[01:07:40] because we played handball finals in that city and he was involved the the the Hungarian locomotive industry sponsored our teams so we got to know him and we said we're going to ask him which train would take us to the border and that's what we did what we did know is that he had a smuggling deal set up he would tell people which train to go there was a singles car he says go there

[01:08:10] wait till 10-11 o'clock when it gets dark this is December now and then an engine will show up and we'll take you to the border and then you'll be free to go that's all we knew and we did that except when we got to the border we didn't get to the station but close to the border suddenly the engine stopped and there were maybe 20 people in the car with us but this time Bill and I had some other people who wanted to join us

[01:08:39] there were two young women who were older than we were but they wanted safety so they said would we allow them to join us so we were not I'm the one who instigated this whole thing I got bill involved the next thing I know we had two young women they were 20-21 year old and they were depending on us to provide safety and then Gabi's new mother because his father remarried and

[01:09:09] she wasn't a Jewish woman but she had an 8 year old son Gabi's half brother she decided to escape and came to my mother and said I heard that Robi is leaving from Hungary could I join them so when Bill and I Bill showed up with a truck because he had a neighbor who had a truck showed up at our house at 4 o'clock in the morning to go to the train station instead of just him they were like two women and another mother with a young child

[01:09:39] and there I was the leader of this group and responsible for safety kind of crazy because the women could have fend for themselves a lot better than we was still 18 I was 18 years old I didn't get to be 19 until I was in Indiana so and it was a smuggling operation and I didn't have any money I had a briefcase and I had

[01:10:09] one nylon shirt extra shirt and I had a pair of socks and maybe an underwear and a toothbrush and and I had my mother gave me a bottle of liquor to take and I had a can't carton of cigarettes in KV Russians and Bill had the same thing so we had nothing and I had no money with me and then the train would stop and all of a sudden

[01:10:39] we heard somebody yelling everybody out in single line and that was strange we didn't expect it and there was a Hungarian soldier with gun in his back as you stepped off the train and we were in a plough field very dangerous it was frozen it was cold December 9th and he said everybody line up in a single line and you see there's another soldier

[01:11:08] about 50 yards ahead flashlight just go to him and he'll let you across the border and people started going that way well I wasn't gonna do that because I had no money so we got off the train and I had Bill I thought behind me and then the two girls and the mother and there's another teenager that joined us I forgot about there was another teenager your group's getting bigger and bigger

[01:11:38] and it's pitch dark the train lights were off soldiers with a flashlight and I turned to Bill behind me because I thought he was right behind me and I couldn't see him it was so dark I said Bill let's go around that soldier with a flashlight I'm gonna go left and you go right and you pass the word along to the others that step out of the line and just let's make a big circle and we meet

[01:12:07] after that and I took off without thinking and as I went along make sure that I didn't break my ankle or something because rough terrain after a while I looked back and I didn't hear anything and I didn't see anybody and I said what's going on where's the rest of us and I did make a circle and I because I just kept my eye on the flashlight and I could see people handing money to the soldier so the soldier had to

[01:12:37] be paid anybody had that money and of course most of the people they had money there was a family with two kids I remember they had suitcases in their hands and they had two small kids one was a boy and a girl six years old and I made the circle and then I made the circle I all of sudden heard some Hungarian speaking and a bunch of peasants who were waiting for the Hungarians who

[01:13:07] were escaping they were waiting for them because they were the ones who would take you to the border because they lived near the border and they were collecting the Hungarians and then when enough they knew that every night there would be a train load

[01:13:38] couple definitely remember with the two kids and the tension of course was terrible we were you know everybody sitting there without saying anything waiting not knowing what going to happen and then I hear these peasants and I go to them and they knew who I was they knew there's another Hungarian refugee who wants to leave the country and they said well I have a number of friends that were

[01:14:25] I recruited Bill then we agreed to take all these others and there I am and one of the peasants they assigned me to one of the peasants young guy he took me to his home it's a typical village home with the oven as you go in and you

[01:14:55] and I was in a panic really panicked I said how am I going to do this now by myself and I asked this young guy the peasant I said look I have 240 which was very little money that's all I so I had

[01:15:25] 200 in my pocket I said I'm going to give you 100 would you go around the other houses and look for a name called Fodor Vilmos that was his formal name Vilmos which is William in English so look for Bill not Bill but Willie and I'm his friend he came with me and we got lost somehow and I want to connect with him so he disappeared

[01:15:55] came back 45 minutes later I could feel the alcohol in his breath he says I looked every place nobody around liked that name so I said okay what do we do now and he said well do you have money I said no I wasn't planning on it being entangled with them right you know human

[01:16:25] smugglers he says well I tell you what there's two kids here with this couple the eight year old boy I'm going to carry on my back and you carry the eight year old girl and that quick pro call he didn't say that but that was the deal he says you don't have to pay me you take that girl and discuss it with the parents and in an hour or so we gotta go and he gave instructions there were 10 of us there's a

[01:16:56] swamp big swamp between the right on the border of Hungary and Austria but there's a road that you can cross it and they knew the road and it was as wide as maybe this wide and said we gonna go in single line and if you hear any noise whatsoever you have to eat the ground you gonna know no noises know nothing because the border is already being taken over by the Russian guards and they knew where the mines were so we could avoid

[01:17:26] that and that's how we started our march to the border around midnight drizzling cold night and if you run into the well it wasn't the Russians it was the Hungarians and that was a march I never forget I was in

[01:17:56] really good shape I was a runner 18 years old girls got my legs dangling here and held on to me around mine and I held on to one her leg and I carried my briefcase in the other hand and I was the peasant was number one I was number two with the girl behind me the father with the boy and then his wife and then the others and we started our march and I was okay but after

[01:18:26] about a half an hour or 40 minutes I noticed that she was getting heavier and heavier she was a six year old girl I don't know how many pounds it might have been maybe 60 pounds or something like that I said okay I know how to deal with it because one thing I learned in sports always in my life I learned what pain is and

[01:19:05] a half in March we may have stopped once or twice just to stop and I would take the bottle of liquor and I would take a drink and I

[01:19:35] you just continue straight ahead and you'll be in Austria and then he collected the money from the others I didn't pay him but the parents and the others paid him too because they paid the soldier paid him and of course the station master that we talked to he got a cut this was an organized human smuggling operation and we had no choice we had to trust him that the

[01:20:04] border is really 10 yards or 10 meters ahead and he told us that was true because we marched and then suddenly we heard halt and we knew we were in Austria and they were waiting for us there were a horse drawn big carriage with straw and they put us all in there 10 of us and I think I immediately fell asleep and the two kids

[01:20:34] were asleep and they took us into a small village near the border and they took us into a school that they had mattresses on the floor and that's where we spent the night until the morning and I was still in a panic because there I was by myself and then somebody came around saying is there a Robert Reichman here and yes that's me says well we have another

[01:21:04] young guy called Bill Fodor he's looking for you oh thank goodness so they reconnected yes in Austria right wow but what happened he and this other teenager and the mother and the child and the two girls had to go around they went around but they all went together nobody followed me and the mother stepped broke broke her ankle so Bill and this other young 18 year old kid had to carry her

[01:21:34] and they couldn't find the border because they must have gone they got lost right unlike me who was lucky because I got right to the peasants waiting and they got lost and they took hours to finally cross the border by themselves and then they got into the same village but in a different part of the village and so we reconnected and that was the escape and

[01:22:03] today and I'm often thinking about that there must be guess how I crossed the border to Austria there was this young teenager that carried me on his back yeah so that's I wish I had their name I would have searched for them to find them but I didn't when you see people

[01:22:33] in America today who say when you look at the Democratic Socialists of America's website they see things like they have the big things that have made the headlines abolish the police abolish ICE the prisons free education the things that concern me about their website are that they have a section that says

[01:23:04] imagine life without capitalism taking a day off from work and a life without capitalism you don't really need a day off because you don't have to work as hard anymore and you have to worry about bills because you'll have free housing and free health care and everything will be free free free free free what do you think of when you hear that

[01:23:33] I think there are enough stupid people who are uneducated maybe not stupid but uneducated that they don't because that's BS you risked your life and left your mother to get away from it right

[01:24:02] but they don't there are some intelligent people who actually go for that and I don't understand it in academia some students so there's something wrong in our educational system of not teaching them the realities of what happened in World War II and what happened to the Soviet Union and why it collapsed internally right okay

[01:24:32] and the reason it collapsed because they believe that this utopian idea that you don't have to work hard that everything is just going to be free they don't understand the basics that in order to be free somebody has to pay for it where is it going to come from so the whole thing is it's hard for me to believe that the social democratic party if that's the social democrat I guess they call it that they

[01:25:02] got as far as they could in terms of convincing people that this is actually could be a reality and it's unbelievable to me yeah no I do my best I wrote a book that you know but I didn't pay for any promotional activity because I didn't write it for that reason I wrote it for my grandchildren to have a legacy to know their

[01:25:32] roots and so forth right and I speak and I told you that I changed my speech after October 7 but I told it telling my speech the value of our constitution and the freedom we have and I do the best I can to support the democratic system and democracy in this country and that's why I love America because

[01:26:02] of that I mean this I still maybe I'm Navi but I don't think so I'm a realist I think this is still an exceptional country and the exceptional is not the people it's the system we have we are the same human beings as the ones who swallow these lies but we have a system we have a constitution nobody has a constitution

[01:26:31] like ours and these fundamental things are not being taught civic education is gone there used to be a time I think when it was taught and people were more patriotic and they understood it maybe they didn't quite understand how the system worked because it's a messy system but as one of my favorite person Churchill said and I have his quotes

[01:27:02] but the bottom line it said that democracy is one of the worst systems in the world but no other system is better than that it's a messy system but it's hard for people to understand it and the thing to me that most upsetting and disturbing is the media because we always counted on the media as the fourth leg of the system that we have that

[01:27:32] they will track down the truth and report it correctly and they don't go completely biased and unfortunately we lost it and I'm worried about it that without a free media how do we can the system survive and our fathers knew that we were worried about and I don't know which one who said that we gave you a republic if you can keep Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin right

[01:28:01] these guys knew what they were talking about but they studied the literature they studied the Bible they studied the Torah they knew you know they knew the roots of where the freedom comes from and that has to be taught it does when if the democratic socialists had their way and they could take over America liberty would be gone in America this country will not survive

[01:28:31] as it is what happens to the rest of the world when America no longer has liberty well there's got to be followed up between the Chinese see the communists we call them communist China and communist I mean you know it's a joke there's no such thing as communist North Korea none of these countries are communist anymore the true sense it was back in when the Soviet Union was started up there were believers

[01:29:00] I mean Stalin and Lenin and so forth so on they really believed in what they thought but China is a dictatorship yes it's as simple as that so they have to fight you know you're going to have to fight the dictatorship and who knows what they can do because they are billion and a half people against 400 million or 350 million people that we have here it's not a

[01:29:31] rosy picture yeah so the future I'm worried about my grandchildren not myself you know I'm going to be gone by the time anything happens but it's a very very serious situation we find ourselves and that's why Charlie Kirk was such a such an enormous fresh breath of air to you know get the youth involved in

[01:30:00] in knowing what freedom is and appreciate it and so forth and he had to pay his life for that and I don't know how strong the system is I was very happy when I spoke to the Republican Party of Forsyth Comte because there was a guy who represented the

[01:30:27] you know the Charlie Kirk foundation the turning point and he was very good and he told me what's going on what he's doing and I was very glad to hear that that there and I just don't know how strong Erica is you know she's a beautiful and a wonderful person and I heard her speak and her saw her cry but I don't know how strong

[01:30:57] she is because you need a very strong personality to lead that movement maybe you know more about it than I know I know this the people who are running turning point and I was friends with Charlie and I know several of the people who are over there I don't know I don't know Erica but I do know this they are very active they're still growing they had Charlie left a

[01:31:27] solid foundation for them to build upon and so as they had that sudden growth after his assassination they had a solid foundation to be able to handle that growth and they are they are working with pastors around the country they are working still with the youth and the college students and then they have an action where they're doing things to get out the vote but that's

[01:31:57] that's where that's where I see the hope with the new generation and turning point USA and they should be the voice of the future of our country because they really understand what you and I have been talking about and Charlie was just an amazingly brilliant guy just

[01:32:27] truly an amazing person I mean look what's happening I mean they already tried to assassinate our president twice at least twice I think it's even more than that yes three times we know the Butler the White House Correspondence Center and at the golf course and then there are probably other and we know there are other plots that were foiled that didn't get that you never know and and I'm just so disappointed

[01:32:56] that we didn't finish Iran and I'm a very conservative when it comes to that and my closing statements when I talk to the kids that now I speaking as a Jew that what I learned that the only way to treat with people will declare that we want to kill you won't believe them

[01:33:26] right and you kill you that's it I don't care how people think that it's a cruel thing it's not a matter of cruelty it's a matter of survival and we can't let people like we should have believed the who's it I'm thinking of kept saying that you know think

[01:33:56] about what look at their constitution that clearly says that yes you know it's in their is that Yasser Arafat you have to believe them right and you have to do something about it you can't negotiate with them and this is where my biggest disappointment with Trump and his people around him

[01:34:26] negotiating with Iran is useless I think that President Trump has figured that out based on the things that he said in recent weeks he's saying you can't believe them you can't trust them I think he's trying to figure out how he wants to end it and he knows how to end it but he's not able to do it what he knows to do is to have troops on the ground and provide ammunition and weapons

[01:34:56] to the 90 million or 80 million who are not part of the revolutionary guards because not everybody there's no 80 million revolutionary guards there it's a small group of but they are not

[01:35:26] allowed to I mean you know what happened when they start to march and they just killed 25 thousand of I

[01:35:56] don't know how he's going to he's got two more years he's going to be president unless somebody well you know hopefully that doesn't happen he will be president for two more years and we'll see I think that at the moment because we're so close to the elections I yeah

[01:36:25] you know that a lot of ships are moving through and if we just waited if we had a few more months because I think the gasoline prices will come down and the inflation if you look at the economy the indicators of actually it's a great economy yes and then it just takes a while it doesn't turn on a dime and I hope that what I hope that the conversation that we've had and the

[01:36:55] conversation that I've had with other people who have survived communism and socialism is that we can remind Americans what's at stake we are up against right now people who want and I don't think that everyone who believes what is what the democratic socialists of America are saying I don't think that they're evil people at heart they just don't understand that the allure it's it's alluring

[01:37:25] it's sexy it's appealing to them but it's part of it is not being taught early on right what things are and just ignorance and just taking the easy way out to say well you know so would I I think my goal from these conversations is I don't think I can educate those people right now not in the time we have left before the election but what we can do is remind the people who are

[01:38:36] for

[01:39:06] he Tel Aviv to Jerusalem 40 years gone by all these presidents promised oh we gotta do that they were all scared that the world will come to an end and what happened nothing right and you know what would have happened if they took care of the Gaza they let these if we let the Israelis take care of it which is what I'm sure Netanyahu had in mind finish the war

[01:39:38] Abraham Accord already implemented a long time ago because all the Arab countries just love what happened to them you know to the Iranians and to the Hamas and all that so even with Iran you just pointed out moving the embassy with Iran he was addressing a 47 year problem 47 year problem and he is he is correcting things with the economy and the Republicans in

[01:40:07] Congress are doing that right now they have secured the border in a way that we haven't seen in decades in this country crime is down 18 the murder rate is down 18 I just saw the murder rate is down the lowest since the year 1900 did you listen to it he was interviewed on radio on Fox News I guess he was in charge

[01:40:37] of our intelligence service Patel yes Kash Patel I mean he's done everything right yes he's an amazing guy yes so we just have to understand things are getting better it's going to take a little bit longer but if we vote for the people who want to take this country into communism we're going to be in trouble and there's nowhere

[01:41:07] to escape to you were able to escape because western democracy still existed in the world if it goes away in America it's going to go away everywhere and there'll be nowhere for us to escape to you're right you're right and I told you earlier that I'm an optimist and I still am deep down I really believe and I tell my grandchildren and I told my children I said look when I see people risking their lives to

[01:41:37] leave this country as opposed to seeing people risking their lives to come in here then I know we're in trouble that's right because that's what happened in Hungary I risked my life to leave the country yes to get in here Canada same thing so that's we're not there yet no and I hope we never get there I hope not too so thank you for being here sharing your story and reminding people why it is so important that we save liberty in America

[01:42:06] really appreciate your invitation and I and I I've been doing a podcast have you ever been interviewed by somebody on Fox News I haven't been on Fox in a

[01:42:36] while I am not sure but I am on Newsmax three or four times a week so I'm on Newsmax quite frequently and the show we we did it weekly for a couple years and then this it's really giving us the ability to do is to do some of these kind of special segments where we're really educating people we've gone through a series on the

[01:43:06] founding principles of our on an episode and then other times it may not be quite as much it just it sort of depends are you able to grow we are growing

[01:43:36] we are growing and that's been very exciting and we continue we continue to do that and I talk about you and what you're doing I did go of course and I looked at your website

[01:44:06] and I saw some of the things because I I I can and just you know as long as I can stand on my feet well thank you I'm working on that too

[01:44:36] I'm trying to stay in shape so that I YouTube Rumble Instagram X and your favorite podcast platform The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin The

[01:45:05] Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea