fleeing hungary

Both of my parents considered avoiding communism a matter of life or death because their families were 'intellectuals' with a history of challenging authority - not good communist material. And indeed, a few of the relatives who remained behind disappeared and were either never seen again or returned with broken minds and disfigured bodies. (You only need to look at the 1956 revolution to understand what a bad idea it is to mix Hungarians with Communism.)

In September of 1944 my mother, my grandmother and 2 of my aunts fled Timisoara just hours ahead of the advancing Russians. They begged my uncle Janos (a surgeon, and the only male member of her immediate family still alive) to go with them, but he was treating soldiers at a badly understaffed field hospital and refused to leave. (He was never seen again.) Their intended destination was Stuttgart, where my third aunt had been teaching mathematics for many years.
For the next three months they fled on foot through Austria and into Germany. I'd rather not go into the specifics (which are graphic and disturbing). There were hundreds of thousands of refugees in columns that went for miles and the winter of 1944 was particularly harsh. There was death and destruction all around them - freezing and starvation and bombing and rape and murder. They had to steal food from local villagers (many of whom were starving also) to survive and many died in the violence. And when they reached Germany the concentration camps awaited them.

The stories my mother told me were of indescribable cruelty and kindness and of destruction and beauty - the absolute worst and the absolute best of humanity. Those of us who've grown up in a safe and insular society cannot begin to comprehend that level of chaos and horror...

Once they reached Germany my mother's family was placed in a group that was headed for Dachau, where food and shelter supposedly awaited them. At that point in the war the German military was fighting the Battle of the Bulge and refugees were left largely unguarded. Most of them stayed with the group because they didn't have anywhere else to go. But on Christmas Eve 1944 my mother and her family sneaked away and sought refuge in a nearby church. They remained hidden there until the Allies arrived a few months later.
And they finally made it to Stuttgart where my mother continued her opera career and met my father.

One evening during the flight my mother grabbed some clay from beside the road and fashioned a small sculpture of my grandmother resting. When my grandmother passed away in 1952 they commissioned a larger stone replica of that sculpture to be placed by her grave. It remains one of the most moving pieces of art I've seen. It could not be more perfect...