In December 1956, Robert Ratonyi was 18, standing in a Hungarian village near the Austrian border with 200 forints in his pocket, all the money he had. He had organized the escape and recruited his best friend Bill, and two young women, a mother with a child, and another teenager had joined for safety. Then a soldier stopped the train in a frozen field, Ratonyi circled him in the dark because he could not pay, and when he reached the peasants waiting on the other side, Bill and the others were gone.
This is what happened next, told by the man who lived it. The young peasant who was to guide him wanted money he did not have, so they made a different deal: a family in the group had two small children, the guide would carry the boy, and Ratonyi would carry the six-year-old girl. That was the price. Ten of them set out at midnight along a narrow path through a swamp, under orders to hit the ground at any sound, while the guide steered them around the mines. For an hour and a half Ratonyi carried the girl on his back and his briefcase in his hand, with nothing to keep him going but a bottle of his mother's liquor and what he says sports taught him about pain. Then the guide stopped and said the border was ten meters ahead.
He has thought for decades about the woman that girl grew into, and the story she must tell her own grandchildren. He never learned her name.
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.
Watch the full episode and subscribe: jennybethshow.com
Learn more: teapartypatriots.org
00:00 — Alone near the border with 200 forints
00:33 — Looking for Bill Fodor in the village
01:32 — The deal: carry the six-year-old girl and you do not pay
02:00 — The swamp path, the mines, and the Russian guards
03:05 — The march: a girl on his back and a bottle of liquor
04:36 — The border is ten meters ahead
05:22 — Halt: Austria, and a night on a school floor
05:58 — Is there a Robert Reichmann here?
07:09 — A grandmother somewhere tells how she crossed
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