Robert Ratonyi returns to The Jenny Beth Show for the second half of his story. His first interview, which aired October 7, covered surviving the Holocaust as a small child in Budapest. This conversation picks up where the Red Army left off: Stalin's broken promises at Yalta, the communist takeover of Hungary by 1948, the five-year plans and food rationing of the 1950s, the secret police on every streetcar, the October 23, 1956 uprising that gave Hungary a few weeks of freedom, and the December night an 18-year-old with no money crossed a frozen field into Austria carrying another family's six-year-old daughter on his back. Then Jenny Beth Martin reads him the Democratic Socialists of America's promise of a life without capitalism, and he answers it.
Guest: Robert Ratonyi, Holocaust survivor, author of From Darkness into Light: My Journey Through Nazism, Fascism, and Communism to Freedom, and a longtime speaker for the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust.
Today's topics:
• Yalta, January 1945: Stalin made three promises to Roosevelt and Churchill and kept none of them
• Salami tactics: how a party that lost Hungary's 1945 election held total power by 1948
• Nationalized factories, forced May Day marches, and a picture of Stalin in every classroom
• Five-year plans that were never met, and a production norm that rose every time the workers hit it
• Meal tickets without meat, butter as a luxury, and a graduation suit paid for with stolen alcohol
• The class pyramid: party members and the secret police lived like kings, everyone else sat underneath
• A bar mitzvah held behind closed doors and pulled shades so the neighbors would not hear the chanting
• Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, heard with the volume down and the windows shut
• Six compulsory years of Russian, and the neighbor's library that kept Western books in his hands
• Why an aunt spent years in prison for keeping a smuggler's phone number in her house
• October 23, 1956: the student march, the 16 points, and the night it became a revolt
• The escape: a station master's train, a soldier who wanted money, and a child carried across a swamp
• What Ratonyi says to the Democratic Socialists of America's promise that everything will be free
• Why America is exceptional because of its system, not its people, and why civics has to be taught again
• What Ratonyi tells his grandchildren about the day people start risking their lives to leave America
The Jenny Beth Show airs live Monday through Friday at 1:00 PM ET. Hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party movement and Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action. Subscribe for daily analysis of politics, policy, and the fight for constitutionally limited government. teapartypatriots.org
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