Erzsébet Ôrszigethy
Refugee Status
The Story of a Hungarian Family from Yugoslavia
[...]
They loved their town, with its theatre company performing in Serb and Hungarian. Up to 1989 the building bore an inscription in Hungarian only, and afterwards in Serb only. In the eighties there was a choice of five cinemas and two drive-ins, just one cinema survived into the nineties. It was only natural that there should be a stereo unit in Nóra and Péter's Nagybecskerek home, not to mention a video and a good motor car. They had been to Tunisia and Greece, had spent holidays on the Dalmatian coast and in Slovenia. They would have liked to go to Egypt in 1991 but the war had made a clean sweep of what travel agencies had on offer, the banks had restricted the use of hard currency accounts, and the value of the dinar was plummeting by the day.
Jeopardy, flight
The year 1991 was one of fear. That's when they started to tell Hungarians to go back where they came from. They tried to harrass Nóra at work. She was responsible for raw materials in the pharmaceutical works. More and more often, material ordered was not supplied to her requirements; the slightest inattention on her part could have turned medicines into poisons.
Friends received their call-up papers, others went into hiding or fled the country. Fear surrounded them, but though this or that neighbour might be dragged off to the wars, Nóra and Péter could not believe that their lives were threatened. Tragedy was for others.
The Nagybecskerek dolce vita had gone with the wind. There was hardly anyone left to meet. Only a few friends remained within reach. Fortunately, one of them was a policeman. One Saturday, in the spring of 1992, he brought the news that Péter's call-up papers were in the mails. They used what hard currency they had left to buy papers showing that Péter was exempt from call-up. On Sunday afternoon they were packing their bags. A few clothes in two overnight bags, towels, toothbrushes, the false papers exempting him from call-up, and their passports. An old friend took them across the frontier in his car. Out of the 800 forints left over from an earlier holiday in Hungary they paid their bus fare to Békéscsaba. On arrival there, in the refugee camp, they still had 300 forints, the whole of their fortune.
[...]
Erzsébet Õrszigethy
is a free-lance journalist. She has published two books on the life of village women in Hungary.
