I’ll always be grateful for what my mother did for me

By John Toth

The Bulletin

My mother had her poker face on as the border guard entered the train cabin and said, “papers, please.”

The train just left Budapest, Hungary, where I was born and lived for the first 10 years of my life. We were poor, but all of Hungary was poor. The country became part of the Soviet Union’s bloc of countries over which it maintained control.

My mother saw no future in raising her only son there. At the time, the situation seemed hopeless to her. She started planning. Two years later, she and I were on a train heading toward Vienna, Austria. That country got lucky after WWII. It was placed under Western control  and was thriving. Hungary was struggling, as the Soviet Bear was siphoning whatever remaining wealth Hungary had following the war.

Hungary rejected the USA’s Marshall Plan reconstruction aid. Its communist leaders did not want to be aligned with the West in any way or form. The country continued to struggle while its neighbor to the West was being rebuilt.

My mother calmly reached into her bag and pulled out a bundle of neatly organized documents. She handed the package to the border guard.

The guard combed through the stack. He was reading mostly forgeries my mother managed to acquire on the black market in Budapest.

The guard spent quite a long time looking at the key document - our passport. It was real, sort of. There were some changes made, like including my photo and information on the passport, along with the official stamp. The stamp was the real McCoy. But it was not placed on the passport by normal means. It was a very expensive stamp.

There were other documents, including all the permission slips required to make the journey. Hungarians at the time were allowed to leave the Eastern Bloc once every three years. My mother had never been outside the country, so that was not an obstacle. Getting the right papers and forging them to include me on them, was.

The year was 1966, the peak of the communist era in Hungary and 10 years after the failed Hungarian Revolution, which was put down by the Soviet military after the Kremlin gave orders to invade Hungary and ‘“restore order.”

It was not easy for the average Hungarian to escape from the country. Why should anyone need to escape? Why didn’t they allow people who wanted to leave to move around freely?

Because the country was a big, open-air prison, separated from the West by high-voltage, barbed-wire fences, tall walls and border guards. The population was trapped inside. The border was open for a short while during the Revolution, and hundreds of thousands of Hungarians slipped through it to the West. Ten years later, it was more difficult. It took planning and risk-taking that could land a failed escapee in jail for many years, or even killed.

My mother was keenly aware of that, as she continued to proceed with her plans, anyway. I was not going to get hurt, no matter what. I didn’t know anything about any escape plans. I thought we were going on a two-week Spring Break vacation to Vienna.

The border guard asked my mother a series of questions, wrote something on the documents and handed them back. “Thank you. Have a nice vacation,” he said and walked out of the cabin.

A few minutes later, the train crossed the border, and we were in free Austria. My mother pulled from her suitcase a portable coffee maker, made herself a cup of very strong coffee, smoked a cigarette and smiled at me. I didn’t know at the time what that smile meant.

We breathed the air outside of a communist country, and we both looked at the countryside as the train made its way towards Vienna. It was the Austrian countryside. We both saw it for the first time.

Her name was Gizella Toth, the strongest and coolest woman I had ever known. My wife, Sharon Toth, is the second-strongest woman in my life.

Sharon and I have raised a family and operated three businesses at one time, including The Bulletin, which is in its 31st year of publication. Sharon and I built a world for ourselves that has rewarded us with a loving family and success.

My mother, Gizella, made the building of that world possible.

Happy Mother’s Day.