Robert Ratonyi went back to Hungary in 1993 as one of the American investment bankers sent to teach a newly freed country how to run its businesses, and what he found confirmed what he had suspected as a boy: under communism, everybody was corrupt from the top down, because the system left no other way to live. In this clip he puts it in plain language. In order to survive in Hungary, you had to cheat, you had to lie, and you had to steal. If you did not, you could not literally survive.
Then he tells the story he says he hates to admit. In 1956 he was 18 and graduating from high school, and his mother wanted him to have a suit. There were no department stores. Her job sealing medicine vials at a chemical plant did not pay enough to live on, so the family depended on her brothers and sisters for food: meat maybe once a week, eggs a luxury, butter so rare that an eight-year-old Ratonyi once stole a bar from his grandparents' icebox and let it melt in his pocket on the streetcar. To pay the tailor, his mother stole alcohol from the plant. He graduated in a beautiful blue suit, and six months later he wore it the night he escaped the country.
He also explains the norm, the production quota every worker was given, and why the women at his mother's table were careful never to meet it: if they did, it went up ten percent the next year. The whole system, he says, was one big fake.
Robert Ratonyi is a Holocaust survivor and the author of From Darkness into Light: My Journey Through Nazism, Fascism, and Communism to Freedom. This clip is from his second conversation with Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party movement and Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.
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00:00 — Corruption from the top down: what he found in 1993
00:37 — Who runs a nationalized country? The old communists
01:55 — In plain language: you had to cheat, lie, and steal
02:32 — A graduation suit, two tailors, and no money
03:21 — Meat once a week, eggs and butter a luxury
04:11 — Stolen alcohol pays the tailor; the suit he escaped in
04:41 — Rationing: everybody was starving after the war
05:37 — The norm: sealing vials, and a quota that rose every year
06:49 — Impossible to be an honest, decent person
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