Glimpse of Other Worlds

Béla F.J. Osztián

$23.58

Chapter One - Growing Up Happily

A Glimpse of Other Worlds cover image I was born in a little rural farming community in southeastern Hungary on July 18th, 1929. The size of my home town was about 5-6,000 people, and was located in the so-called stormy corner where the Hungarian, Romanian and Yugoslav borders came together.

Many thanks to my parents and grandparents who gave me a sheltered, financially secure and very happy childhood during the great depression of the nineteen thirties. My grandfather and my father were teachers with impeccable reputations for over half a century.

Leading psychologists of our time say that the influence of the environment in the first ten years of a child’s life is the most vital and significant which affects the future development of every human being.

I was born of ordinary but stable and upright parents with ancestry in the Roman Catholic faith, and I was reared in that faith also. I became a baptized, confirmed, wafer-swallowing altar boy at age six, who did and believed everything that bigger and older people said. Having had most of the childhood diseases in the book, I was a tiny boy with frail stature so everyone else seemed giant to me. I had two older sisters, and, being the only boy, I should say I was the “mommy’s boy” in my family.

We had a flower garden at the front of our house, a vegetable garden at the side, and grandmother kept plenty of animals for food - chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese and pigs - in the back yard. There was no need to go to the farmers’ market for meat. We had a dog, two cats and three kittens, so our back yard looked like a children’s zoo.

The neighborhood boys were my best friends and we really had a ball; we thought it would never end, but it did.

I was ten years old in 1939 when I heard on Radio Budapest the overpowering, infamous voice of Adolf Hitler and the German “Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles”.

I asked my father innocently, “Dad, why do people speak German on the Hungarian radio?”

“This is politics, my son. Keep out of it and you won’t get hurt. I still have a scar on my left arm from the First World War and it aches very much when the weather changes,” replied my father. But anyway,” he continued, “you have to go to the city of Szeged to grammar school because we have no secondary school in our town.”

“Yes, father,” I agreed.

So I travelled 60 km north from my home town and moved into a first-rate boarding school exclusively for teachers’ sons. There we were 120 students from all over the country, aged between 10 and 18. I missed my mother, my friends, my toys, my dog and my cats; I felt very lonely and cried every night in my bed.

Near the beginning of the school year, at the end of September, I contracted a dangerous virus, a so-called boarding school infection: the deadly meningitis.

They put me in the isolation ward of the children’s hospital in a bed which had metal frames around and it was enclosed with a net made from cords.

I realized that the people in white uniforms milling around my bed had actually locked me up in a cage. They were looking at me suspiciously and I wondered to myself, “What have I done?”

My religion came to my mind for the first time in my life, the words of my Lord on Good Friday: “Oh my God, why have you forsaken me?”

I cried out for my mother in despair, but little did I know that she was dying of cancer in the nearby sanatorium.

I was absent from classes for half of the school year, but I was able to finish it and was eligible to enter the next grade.

In the meantime the fury of World War Two escalated. The madness orchestrated by Germany’s Nazi party reached it’s crescendo in the summer of 1944.

Because of the advancing Russian army, my father was compelled to leave our home town, so my sisters and I, with my father, caught the last train to Budapest with two suitcases each.

I saw there the unimaginable cruelty and merciless sadism that human animals can inflict upon their own species. I saw innocent Jews and other people herded away to the Danube river to be machine-gunned down.

I witnessed also the vengeance, revenge and retaliation after the Russian Red Army liberated our capital city.

I returned with my family to my home town in February 1945 and found our house completely empty. Our furniture and belongings had been removed and taken to Russia while we were away. I can never forget my father’s remark in his disgust and desperation: “It seems to me this is the reward for my life-long hard labor.”

However, life went on and we survived an unprecedented inflation. The Communist Party gained absolute leadership of the national government in 1948 and in the same year I graduated from high school with senior matriculation.

There was nothing for me to do in my home town, which made it necessary to move somewhere else. I took a train to Budapest and obtained employment as a laborer and helper of the steel workers in the largest factory of Hungary which employed approximately 30,000 people.

The secretary of the Communist Party approached me three months later and recruited me to become a member. I was promoted to doing clerical work in the office and attended night school. We worked six days a week in those years and, in addition to that, on Sundays we had to volunteer to rebuild Budapest from rubble after the Second World War.

I purchased a small 100 c³ motorbike and in my spare time drove around the countryside with my girl friend, Julie, who introduced me to romance and sex education for the first time in my life.

I was young, energetic, healthy, and very happy.

I was drafted for compulsory military service in the spring of 1950. I volunteered to be a paratrooper and hoped that through the military I would get training to qualify as a commercial airplane pilot, which was my lifelong desire and goal.

I began to dislike my work at the factory as I had only stumbled into this job and hated politics. I did not choose the party of my own accord and suddenly realized that I was simply a victim of circumstance. I wanted to get far away from this mess and start something new and hoped that in the army nobody would find out that I had ever had a Communist Party membership.

Yes, I was young, inexperienced and naive.

So it came to pass that October of 1950 arrived and my wish came through. The military sent me far from Budapest to a station in a small city in the southwestern part of the country.

We were well into the designated infantry training when the chief political officer asked me to see him. He welcomed me to the Party - to my surprise - and let me know that he had received my personal file from the factory. He went on to say that at the next monthly meeting he would recommend me to be secretary of the Party for the officers. I tried to protest that I had no rank, that I had never been a public speaker, but he replied sharply, “You learn it on the job, comrade.”

So I understood fully then that I couldn’t possibly extricate myself from this tangled political spider-web and decided to go along with the proverbial flow.

One year later I had my chance to enroll in officers’ pilot training, but turned down the opportunity, because in the meantime I had become completely disillusioned with army life. I received my discharge from the army as a Private First Class after two years of service.

Chapter Two - Living in a Dysfunctional Society

I married Elizabeth in September 1952 shortly before I left the military. She lived with her parents in a lovely city (about 40,000 people) a one-hour drive north of Budapest. I had a transfer from my first workplace to this lovely city and got employment in another, much smaller steel factory, which supplied parts for textile machinery.

I hated office work and thought if I couldn’t be an airline pilot I might make a good candidate for a long-distance bus driver’s job, but I got stuck doing office work again.

I knew then that my personal file would follow me, and it did.

I was nominated to be party secretary for the workers in the following year. I had my regular chores as chief technician and energy specialist in the office, plus I had to prepare things for party meetings, and in addition to that I had to attend a technical school Monday to Friday from 5 PM to 10 PM. So I left my home in the morning before 7 AM and returned around midnight. I was totally exhausted and had no time for fun.

During my boarding school years I had seen that informers and stool pigeons were despised, beaten up, banished and ostracized by the group, so I always conducted my business, in both military and civilian life, on the basis of “live and let live”.

In 1954 we were getting ready for a great Communist celebration to commemorate the 37th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. I had the privilege to be the host of that jubilant festivity in the community hall.

I opened the evening by reciting a poem suited to that notable occasion. As I arrived at the line praising the name of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin I inadvertently made a step forward on the stage and tumbled down into the prompter’s pit which was an uncovered hole filled with dirt and yesteryear’s dust. A rickety folding chair was standing in that dark place. I stepped on the edge of the chair and fell mercilessly to the ground with a loud bang.

I learned the rest of the story from my wife who was seated in the first row of the theatre. Elizabeth said that in the moment of my predicament she was over-powered with feelings of ambivalence: pity, sympathy, embarrassment, helplessness, laughter, and love.

Somehow I climbed out of the “black hole” back to the stage and brushed up with all ten fingers my navy-blue pants and jacket. I was covered with filthy dirt from top to toe and in the floodlights a cloud of dust flew out of my attire like a murky sandstorm.

There was dead silence for a moment and suddenly the audience burst out into enormously loud laughter which filled the room. Dignitaries and the rest of the guests couldn’t stop laughing their heads off and unwittingly I became the funniest entertainer in that solemn ceremony. Later, when the dust settled, my wife said, “Thank goodness you didn’t break your neck in that high performance act of yours.” ...