A Hungarian refugee’s tale

A mass migration is under way from the Middle East to Europe — refugees fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan and the terror of ISIS. The media is flooded with searing images: a dead child on a beach, overcrowded boats, shipping containers in which dozens have died, mass graves. For one Oceanside woman, these photos and stories have brought back memories of her childhood, when she and her family fled Hungary.

In October 1956, a Hungarian student protest against encroaching Soviet rule began, gained steam and spread across the country. Within a month, the Soviets had troops and tanks streaming across the border into Hungary, taking over the country.

More than 200,000 Hungarians fled to Austria, whose interior minister, Oskar Helmer, announced that every Hungarian refugee would be granted political asylum. “When I was 2 years old, I too was a refugee fleeing an oppressive country and trying to find a new homeland,” recalled Naomi Ferencz-Farley. Her parents told her of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, of hiding in the bomb shelters they had used just 11 years earlier, during World War II, and of Russian tanks rumbling through the streets of Budapest that November, reclaiming “their” territory.

Today’s refugees are coming through Italy, the Balkans or Greece, but thousands are being turned away, held in camps or repatriated. Hungary is rounding up refugees, taking them to refugee camps and often sending them back to their war-torn homelands.

Within days of the 1956 Soviet crackdown on Hungary, the world responded, and 93,000 Hungarians were transported out of the country in 10 weeks. Fleeing by train, truck and on foot, they were able to enter Austria because the border fences had been dismantled and the minefields removed.

A man knocked at the door of Naomi’s parents’ Budapest apartment in the early morning of Dec. 5, Ferencz-Farley recounted. “He had been sent by my uncle, who was in the United States,” she said. “My uncle had paid this man to smuggle our small family to the West. We were given just hours to pack a few belongings — then leave Hungary forever.