Find a Place to Call Home: A Historical Nonfiction Novel

By Tibor Kamon

I am a retired professional engineer. I am seventy-seven years old. My first attempt at literary work was translating a Hungarian novel by Wass Albert to English three years ago. It gave me a helpful literary structure and encouraged me to write my own novel, Find a Place to Call Home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: May 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466925953

Tibor Kamon

I am a retired professional engineer. I am seventy-seven years old. My first attempt at literary work was translating a Hungarian novel by Wass Albert to English three years ago. It gave me a helpful literary structure and encouraged me to write my own novel, Find a Place to Call Home.

Book preview

FIND A PLACE TO CALL 

 HOME

A Historical Nonfiction Novel

TIBOR KAMON

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© Copyright 2011, 2012 Tibor Kamon.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4669-2597-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-2596-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-2595-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012908708

Trafford rev. 05/25/2012

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Contents

Chapter 1    What will happen to you now… ?

Chapter 2    The Military Years

Chapter 3    Early Days in Canada

Chapter 4    Fatal Attraction

Chapter 5    Montreal Expo 67

Chapter 6    East Africa

Chapter 7    Saudi Arabia

Chapter 8    Indonesia

Chapter 9    Summing Up

Preface

It is a question pondered by almost everyone somewhere along their life: What is the purpose of my life on this earth?

One of Hungary’s great novelists Aron Tamasi had a very simple answer to this: We have been put on this earth to find a place to call home.

When I thought about it, I realized just how true it is. Most of us will spend the greater part of our lifetime trying to find and establish a home, a place of safety and happiness.

It was this vision and my family and friend’s encouragement that started me on the road to write this, somewhat personal historical novel of the Hungarian Revolution and the life and struggles of an immigrant. It may touch a cord in the hearts of many.

Memories are cherished secrets that we keep deep in our hearts. If we tell them, they cease to be memories.

—Joan Crawford

Chapter 1

What will happen to you now… ?

It was an unusually cool day for September in Hungary in 1937. A woman hurriedly walked from the bus station toward the hospital, holding the hands of two children. She was in her late thirties, still very pretty and well dressed, with striking brown eyes that sparkled. She ushered the two boys through the entrance of the hospital ahead of herself. The older boy was perhaps twelve, the other much younger, just approaching his third birthday. The boys were her sister’s sons. The mother of the boys was the younger of the two sisters, and she had recently been involved in a bad accident. The cable of the elevator in her apartment building had broken and she had fallen four floors with it. She suffered internal injuries, and the rushed surgery that followed made things worse.

In the hospital, the younger sister knew she was dying. She had called her sister to bring the boys to her. She could never count much on her husband. He drove a taxi, but spent most of his days at the horse races. He saw a big win as the solution to all his financial troubles, but that big win never came. Often she had to borrow money from her sister to buy food. She knew that with her death, the family would fall apart and she wanted to ask her sister, who was still single and the godmother of the younger boy, to keep an eye on the children. She was all alone in the hospital room, propped up on a high pillow. Her face was pale, and she tried hard to suppress her pain. The two sisters were very much alike in their features; both were of dark complexion with deep brown sparkling eyes that made them so attractive.

When the boys entered the room with their aunt, they kissed their mother, which started tears in the corners of her eyes. She caressed the head of her younger son, then took his face in both hands, and the tears now flowed uncontrollably down her face as she repeated the words over and over again, What will happen to you now… what will happen to you now? The older boy had an inkling of what was happening, but the little one did not. He looked innocently at his mother and tried to smile. He had the good nature of his mother; he was always a pleasure to look after, always ready to smile. His eyes were the exact reflection of his mother’s eyes.

Their mother’s death and all the changes that followed confused the little three-year-old boy’s whole existence. He hung onto his torn blanket for dear life as the only familiar thing that was left to him in his new environment. The father moved the family to a small one-bedroom flat to save money and have more left over to bet on the horses. The nearby grocer agreed to employ the older boy to help with deliveries before and after school time, which would help the family with the grocery bills. The boys’ aunt came to feed the small child during her lunch-break from work; otherwise he was left on his own, alone in the apartment. He missed his mother’s caressing and kissing the tip of his nose that was her custom in the mornings. He walked from room to room in the flat dragging his blanket behind him ceaselessly but never cried or emptied cupboards for something to do. He seemed to grasp that he should behave and not cause any trouble.

The two boys slept on the sofa bed in the living room and the young child sought comfort in holding onto his older brother’s arm in his sleep. The twelve-year-old got up early every day and started delivery at six o’clock each morning before his school time at nine and again in the afternoon from three to six. He did his homework in the evening until sleepiness overtook him. He quickly took on the responsibility as the family provider and was very good with customers he delivered to, always ready to do little extras that endeared him to them. He received generous tips, and in less than a year, he had more money in his piggy bank than the father ever had in his bank account. The grocer’s wife also rewarded him every day with leftover bread, fruits, vegetables, and meat that greatly lowered the household bill. The boy suggested to their father that they could buy a small flat of their own and he would contribute all his earnings toward the payments, but their father, never ready to handle financial commitments, refused.

The small child was also a major distraction for him, and he desperately sought ways to relieve himself of this responsibility. Finally he lucked out. The boy’s grandparents (his parents) accepted custody of the child. They had just retired from their farm after fifty years of working the land and thought the little boy would bring them joy and would be better off being in their care.

Thus, the three-year-old found himself once again in a new environment, with seventy-year-old grandparents, in the small agricultural city of Bekescsaba, two hundred kilometers east of Budapest.

It would be twelve years before he saw his father and his brother again.

The two old people doted on the child, and he soon thought them to be his parents. He missed his mother’s warmth and cuddling for some time, but the image faded more and more each year. The grandparents loved the child, but it was a different, less demonstrative love. The kisses, the warm embraces were not there. He was always well dressed and well fed, and there were several children of his age on the street to bond with. His friend’s parents also treated him with special consideration. By the time he reached his sixth birthday, he was more than ready to enter elementary school. He already could read and played wicked chess games, thanks to the efforts of his closest playmate’s father. He paid special attention to developing the boy’s knowledge and character.

A favorite trick of the boys was to wait on the street corner for the girls of their age to come home with cans of drinking water, filled from the nearby artesian well, and then attack them in a mock Indian attack and empty the cans. But one day, they found their match in the sweet little six-year-old girl, who had enough of this injustice. She grabbed the two six-year-old boys by their ears and nearly tore them off. Blood was oozing down the faces of the two boys, and this alarmed the combatant little girl enough to forget her hard feelings and quickly bring them arm in arm to her mother for repairs.

This girl-boy fight was much discussed between them in between sweet kisses much later when they were thirteen years old. It was the year of sexual awakening, but in an innocent way. The two best friends were dating the same girl, taking her to the movies. One had his right hand on her left knee, the other his left hand on her right knee. Now and then, the two hands met in the middle.

The first year in school was coming to an early end. It was 1941, and Hungary was suddenly occupied by Hitler’s Germany without much bloodshed. There were German soldiers everywhere; the elementary schools were closed and Hungary entered World War II as an ally of Germany. In the eyes of a six-year-old boy, the war was just a curious spectacle. Warplanes were flying over the city toward the frontlines, and they were bright objects in the sky to watch for and count them. At the nearby railway station, one could watch the railcars rolling by and count the number of tanks on them guarded by soldiers with guns, going somewhere who knows where or why. Then one bright sunny day, the planes unloaded their chain bombs. The target was the rail line, to stop the frontline supplies to the German troops. These were American planes. Everyone ran from the station to the bunker in the basement of the hotel across the street. The bombs missed the railway station and demolished the hotel with everyone in it. The newspapers headlined the next day that ‘you are safest in the target area.’ The grandfather and the little boy were hit by the first airwave from the explosion in the supply room where the glass preserve bottles were crashing down on the floor, but without breaking on the dirt floor. They were thrown against a flour sack that opened up spewing white flour at the two, one so young and the other so old. They looked at each other with bewilderment like two circus clowns, but their faces closer to tears than laughter. From then on Grandma sent the little boy out to the farm for safety. After two weeks she sent Grandpa to bring him home. That night they were bombed again.

Years later the German troops were in retreat to the west toward Budapest, and Russian troops rolled in. The difference between the two armies was that the retreating German soldiers paid with valueless German currency for anything they confiscated while the Russian soldiers simply confiscated everything. The grandfather decided to welcome a small Russian tank brigade on the farm, his reasoning being that the army personnel might spare his livestock and confiscate chickens and ducks from the neighboring farms. The troops prepared their meal in a huge copper kettle over an open fire, borscht with everything in it but the feathers. But they were ordered to move on before the soup was eaten. The grandfather was left with the biggest bowl of soup of his life. He quickly called over all his neighbors to share in the feast, knowing full well where the raw materials came from.

The Russian troops moved quickly through the eastern rural areas of Hungary in the fall of 1944. The main defense-line was set up by the German army around the capital city of Budapest and on the western side of the Danube.

What the ten-year-old boy did not know was that his brother, now nineteen, had been drafted by the Hungarian Armed Forces and was part of this defense line. They were deployed on the eastern side of the Danube River, to protect the German retreat on the western side toward Austria, in case the Russian troops succeeded crossing the river. The brigade commander of this Hungarian contingent was fully aware that the war was lost and was not ready to sacrifice any of his men. He instructed his soldiers to hold their fire and be prepared to surrender. It was the first Hungarian brigade to surrender, and their example was quickly followed by the rest of the Hungarian army. The brigade commander was loath to throw away his leather coat despite warnings from fellow soldiers and was mistakenly taken for a German officer and was shot. He succeeded in protecting his troops, but lost his own life on account of a leather coat.

In the first election in Hungary after the war in 1945, the socialist Social Democratic Party won the majority of seats, and the Communist Party, despite the presence of occupying Russian troops, came in a distant second. This did not please the Kremlin much, and in 1949, the Social Democratic Party was forced into a merger with the Communist Party, and slowly, as the socialists were forced to step down or were murdered, Hungary became a Russian satellite firmly controlled by the Communist Party. Members of the prewar Hungarian army brigade that had been the first to surrender to the Russians were given medallions for bravery by the communist government. Whether you are labeled a coward or a hero really depends on circumstances and who won the war.

It did not matter much to