everything that happened to me after I cleaned off all the dirt and mud that covered me from the storm. When I looked down I could not believe my eyes. I was completely clean and dry and there was not a speck of mud or dirt anywhere on me.
I woke up in the middle of the night completely soaked with sweat, and I cried like a baby. Grandpa woke up quite concerned, thinking I must be ill, but I finally calmed down and slowly started telling him about my extraordinary dream. He held me in his arms for a very long time, and during that night I made the decision to convert to Catholicism and give my heart to Jesus. Then I fell into the deepest and most peaceful sleep. The next Sunday I became a Christian and never looked back. Three months later I became pregnant with our first child, Aranyka, and as you know we had five more children after that: Mandika, Gabriella (my mom), Imre, Klarika, and Bela.
A few months after I became a Christian, something else happened that was very unusual. We came home from church, and I was about to start preparing our Sunday noon dinner, but I got this sudden urge to leave the house. I felt I was supposed to go somewhere, so I just picked up my purse and took off. Grandpa was completely perplexed, and decided to follow me. He must have thought that I’d lost my mind! I remember stopping at some house not too far from our home, and without knocking I opened the front door. I saw about a dozen or so people sitting in a circle, and there was an empty chair in the middle of the circle. Then everything went blank for me.
When I came to, I was sitting in the middle of the room in that chair looking at all these people I didn’t know. They asked me who I was and where I came from, and I asked them the same thing. It was a relief to see Grandpa standing by the door, but he was as confused as I was, trying to figure out what had just happened. Apparently, this group of Christians had been meeting there every Sunday after church for some time, believing that God/Jesus would send them a spiritual leader. We started meeting with this small group after church every Sunday. Grandfather, who knew how to write shorthand, kept a pretty good record of what was I was saying while I was seemingly asleep in a trance. There was so much I still didn’t understand, but I knew that I was just an instrument of our Lord and if what I do helps people, then so be it. I just had to follow the path that God had set before me.
My mother always seemed to be struggling while she was growing up. From what I was able to gather from aunts and uncles back home, she was likely sexually abused as a child, either by my grandfather, or, more likely, some friends of the family. It also could have been somebody in the church, perhaps one of the priests. I base this on overhearing some verbal exchanges between my grandmother and grandfather, in which they discussed my mother’s lack of willpower (as well as that of Mom’s older sister) when it came to resisting the attentions they received from the opposite sex. They were also talking a lot about how they would have to watch out for all the girls in the family and keep them away from some of the clergy in their church. Knowing my grandparents’ moral values, I suspect it was someone who was close to the family who molested Mom. I have no other explanation for her behavior regarding her constant need to be with men. As I understand it, this kind of behavior is not unusual for a girl who has been molested as a child. When Mother was growing up, nobody talked about it. Adults had a lot of authority over children, and if you tried to speak up, nobody would have believed you anyway.
It was also hard on my mother’s family during the war, especially with four young girls. Rape was very widespread during the World War II years, and was not even considered a serious crime by the Soviet or German military. Of course, Jewish women were particularly vulnerable during the reign of Hitler, and in fact, if a German soldier was found guilty of raping a Jewish woman he would be reprimanded for mixing the races, which was strictly forbidden, but not for the rape itself. For both the German and Soviet armies, rape was used as a weapon of war, and Hungarian women were constantly in danger. It is estimated that the Red Army alone raped upward of two million women over the course of the war and its aftermath, mostly in Eastern Europe and Germany.
Knowing that the Russian and German soldiers were committing these crimes routinely, and with girls as young as twelve, my grandmother would smear shoe polish on her daughters’ faces and dressed them in baggy clothes so they would hopefully be ignored. Grandmother told me there were a couple close calls, but with God’s grace they were spared that horror. She said the Soviet soldiers just looked so young, and often she would feed them because they were cold and hungry. She prayed that would shift their attention away from going after her girls.
Mom never finished high school, but some of her more sophisticated and well-educated male friends exposed her to literature, the arts, and (thanks to my father) classical music, opera, and ballet. As an adult she was closest with my uncle Imre, who had a doctorate in literature and became a poet laureate in Hungary. Imre taught my mother poetry and exposed her to classic writers like Arthur Miller, Thomas Mann, Anton Chekhov, Steinbeck and Hemingway. Imre and Mom also enjoyed the nightlife in Budapest, and Mom particularly loved to be around members of Imre’s famous literary circle.
She had a good heart, but that quality often got her into trouble. I remember a story my grandmother told me. My grandfather had gotten a big promotion as an engineer for the railroad, and to celebrate he had a brand new pair of shoes made. One afternoon as a child, Mom was home alone and a beggar knocked on the door asking for food. He was barefoot and it was winter, and Mom felt so sorry for him that she ran into the bedroom, grabbed grandpa’s brand new shoes, and gave them to this poor man. Needless to say, she received a very memorable spanking when my grandfather came home.
My parents were married in the spring of 1946. Dad was thirty-one and Mom was only sixteen. He was a well-educated and well-traveled man, while she was only in her second year of high school. I don’t think either of them realized at the time the obstacles they would face because of their age differences and different family and religious backgrounds. Dad was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family and Mom was baptized Roman Catholic.
The marriage was complicated from the beginning. Dad wanted a family right away, but Mom didn’t want children at all. Nevertheless, she got pregnant soon after they married, and I was born on April 24, 1947 in Miskolc, Hungary. This was two months before her due date and one month after her eighteenth birthday.
Dad was busy rebuilding the vinegar factory, and he moved his new family into a bigger home where they would have room for more children. Mom did convert to Judaism and tried to please my father, but it was clear from the beginning that she didn’t want to be a full-time wife and mother. She was just not emotionally prepared for the responsibility. My grandmother and a nanny took over my care, and that really disappointed Dad. He needed a strong partner and instead found himself with a child bride.
My grandparents had opposed the marriage from the very beginning. The age difference was a big concern, not to mention the different religions. But, ironically, they had done exactly the same thing, my grandfather being from a Roman Catholic family and my grandmother from an Orthodox Jewish one. The age difference between my grandparents was also significant—twelve years as compared to fifteen for my parents. One needed to convert, so Grandma converted to Catholicism and had six children, all raised in the Catholic faith. While they were both disowned by their parents the day they got married, my mother was able to keep in touch with her family after she got married, perhaps because my grandparents identified with her situation even though they opposed the marriage. My grandmother was deeply concerned that, being so young, Mom would not understand the horrors that my father suffered during the war and would not know how to be a supportive partner to my father.
I was almost one year old when the vinegar factory was ready for the grand opening. The day after the grand opening, Dad went to the factory to open for business, only to find that government officials had taken over the building. Unfortunately, by this time Hungary was a Communist country under Soviet occupation, and the party was in the process of taking over all the privately owned businesses. They informed my father that the factory was now officially government property, and he was told to leave. When he asked if he could go in to pick up his work jacket and the briefcase he left in his office, he was not even allowed to do that.
The Soviet Union asserted legal authority to seize private assets from occupied territories. Beginning with the Communist revolution, it became policy for the Soviet state to take lands and assets from the nobility and redistribute this wealth