Читать книгу From Darkness into Light - Robert Ratonyi - Страница 7

Introduction

The urge to record the stories of my turbulent early life had arisen every now and then, but I was never motivated to do so before my grandchildren were born. After my second grandson was born in 2002, I realized that if I did not leave something behind in writing, they would never learn about the details of their grandfather’s journey during the first three decades of his life. Each of my five stories in this book is a personal account of important historic events and experiences that occurred in the middle of the twentieth century.

The first story begins in 1938, when I was born a Jewish child in Hungary, the year that also happened to be the start of one of the largest twentieth-century genocides, the Holocaust. My fifth and final story ends in 1964 as a twenty-six-year-old college-educated professional, husband, father, and American immigrant, ready to embark on living the “American dream.” By the time my grandchildren are old enough to develop an interest in their ancestral history, I could be long gone. Even our children have only limited knowledge of their parents’ background. Therefore, in 2003, I decided to write down my stories. Many years later, after many pauses and interruptions, I finished them.

Each of the stories focuses either on a specific period of my life or on a major life-altering event. My childhood and adolescence coincided with a number of major historical events in which I was an unwitting participant. As a Jewish child, I lived through the tragic events of the Hungarian Holocaust as the Second World War was ending. I grew up under Communism, a repressive political and corrupt economic system that subsequently followed the liberation of Hungary by the Soviet Red Army in 1945.

On October 23, 1956, I was a freshman at the Technical University of Budapest when a student-led uprising shook the foundation of the Stalinist puppet regime in Hungary and provided the opportunity to flee the country. The Soviet Union crushed the Uprising within a few weeks. However, I managed to escape and left behind my mother, my friends, my large extended family, and a promising engineering career. I celebrated my nineteenth birthday in Vienna, Austria, and experienced the “free world” for the first time.

My dream of coming to America was not without its challenges because by December 1956 the quota for Hungarian refugees had been filled. My next best choice was Canada, so I immigrated to Montréal in February 1957. From 1957 through 1961, I learned how to live in a free society and restarted my academic career, studying at night and working during the day. That is where I met my future wife, Éva, who shared many of my experiences because of her Jewish-Hungarian immigrant background. Due to some unanticipated events, I ended up coming to the United States in 1961 to finish my undergraduate engineering education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) instead of going to McGill University in Montréal.

My original plan was to get my engineering degree, return to Canada to obtain my citizenship, and embark on my professional career. Getting married and starting a family was far from my mind at that time. However, fate intervened again, and three years later, in 1964, I was married, had a new baby, and became an American immigrant. Armed with my master’s degree from MIT, and a student loan of approximately $6,000 (around $49,000 in 2019), I embarked on living the “American dream.”

I must admit that while my original intent was to write my stories only for the benefit of my progeny, and for some close friends who encouraged me, I have also benefited from this experience. As I recollected many painful events of decades ago, I had to come to grips for the first time in my life with deep-seated feelings that I never examined or spoke about. As I wrote these stories, instead of being just a passive reteller of them, I found myself incorporating newly discovered emotions that I never realized I had before. Undoubtedly, some of these new feelings and emotions lay dormant in a subconscious part of my brain, and writing them down became a cathartic release.

I did not intend to write my stories as pure memoirs. I have included extensive historical background to provide the proper context for these accounts.

Because short stories have always been one of my favorite literary genres, each of my stories was originally written to stand on its own. Each one has a different theme, a time and a place, and a beginning and an end. Each of my stories has “lessons to learn from” that I hoped to pass on to the reader.

By 2010, I thought I was finished with my writing career. However, fate interrupted my retirement, and I became a storyteller. A close friend from my corporate days convinced me to give a speech about my Holocaust experience at his church, which led to my being discovered as a child Holocaust survivor by the William Breman Jewish Heritage & Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust.

Since then, I have spoken to over ten thousand middle and high school students as well as adults in Atlanta and other towns in Georgia on behalf of these organizations. In addition, as word spread around the Atlanta community, I was invited to speak to several civic organizations, such as the YMCA Leadership, Rotary Clubs, World War II Round Table, the Winston Churchill Society, and several academic institutions (Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Georgia, University of Georgia).

The feedback I got from my audiences during the Q&A period made me realize that not only were they interested in hearing my Holocaust story, but they also wanted to know what happened to me after the Holocaust. Typical questions following my presentation ranged from how I grew up under a communist regime and managed to escape Hungary, to when and how I ended up in the United States, got an MIT education, and came to Atlanta. There were also other questions that had no relevance to the Holocaust. I was often asked if my stories were published, and the answer was always no. Therefore, I decided to integrate my stand-alone stories seamlessly into a chronologically ordered book.

There are many Hungarian names in this book because the first three, and most of the fourth story, take place in Hungary. I kept the original Hungarian spelling for the sake of authenticity. The only concession I made to English custom is that I put the first names followed by the last names, in reverse to the Hungarian custom. Most of the first names are nicknames, the way I learned to address family and friends. A complete guide to these nicknames, their formal Hungarian version, and their English equivalent is provided in Appendix C.