| Tower of London, September 2014 |
… Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and
Rumania
I
began blogging again last week, after a long break. I was encouraged to begin
writing again mainly because one of my much valued readers wrote me a wonderful
motivational letter. That reader is Emma McDowell. Today I received a comment
from her prompted by reading my blog about the wonderful series that BBC Radio 4 is currently running about
Germany –
Instead
of publishing it on that blog posting as a comment I have decided to give it a
more prominent position as a blog in its own right.
This
not only reaches more readers it also gives me a good excuse to post some of my
photographs!
Thank
you very much Emma.
Dear Susie,
I enjoyed your blog in the Conductive Post about
the radio programme. With the Armistice Day celebrations coming up - and
everybody walking about with poppies in their buttonholes – I finally also feel
myself to be British enough to wear it. Not everybody does in N.Ireland, this
is another contentious issue here. Andrew S. should know all about it, since he
and Chas were here at one of the biggest
atrocities in 1987 when an IRA bomb went off at a war memorial in
Enniskillen, killing 11 people on
Armistice Day. (Andrew and Chas were our main
speakers at the R.A.C.E. Northern Ireland Conference at that time.)
As for the forced evacuees after the war, I lived in Hungary during the “big amnesia” of so called “Socialism” when neither Hungarian nor German soldiers, who perished in the World Wars, were officially remembered, nor were the many thousands captured or rounded up (civilians, too) and transported to Russia into slave labour. If they were lucky enough to survive they were ordered not to talk about it. Neither could the so called “Benes Decree” be mentioned which forced thousands of Hungarian civilians (as well as ethnic Germans) out of their homes and into exile at the end of the 2nd World War in the newly re-annexed (ex-Hungarian) territories in Czechoslovakia. The lucky ones went to Austria, but – as refugees – into poverty. The “issue” is still not solved, no compensation has been agreed on. The present (by hostile foreign press much abused) Hungarian government keeps the matter on the agenda…
There were many
ethnic Germans, enjoying Hungarian nationality for generations, who also had to
flee the land they regarded as home, from the Southern part of Hungary, known
as the Banat. When it was annexed to Yugoslavia, then to Rumania, at the end of
the 1st World War, the majority of these people were taken in by
(the territorially much reduced), Hungary, my mother’s father, and many friends
and relatives, amongst them. It was still a fairly civilized affair, even
pension rights of civil servants were guaranteed. The ones who stayed behind
had a much harsher destiny at the end of the 2nd World War: they had
to flee for their lives, leaving everything behind.
Again, many of
Mother’s close relatives were amongst them – their crime being that they were
regarded as “German sympathisers”. Mother’s cousins ended up in Graz (Austria)
and they were able to build up their lives again. Some of the older relatives
who couldn’t move died in abject poverty in the geographic area where they had
been brought up and which they had helped to make prosperous in times of the
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. It wasn’t until 1958 that my mother was able to
visit her Aunt in her native village, which lay at a distance of about 40 km
from Szeged (where we lived), but on the other side of the border
with “friendly” Rumania.
