“We arrived from a war, fighting the Russians, overwhelmed by a tank force larger than Hitler used to overrun France,” Liptak, now 70, recalls. He and his young friends had fought those tanks with “no weapons at all—practically none” and had paid dearly. So arriving at the college “was a traumatic experience. We felt lost and miserable.”
But thanks to Bard, Liptak and his fellow refugees—ranging in age from 15 to 35—got a toehold toward starting a new life in the US. During an eight-week program that winter, they received intensive instruction in English and an orientation to American society. To commemorate this moment of Cold War generosity and to honor the Hungarians’ contributions to America, Bard will hold a three-day reunion and conference February 15-17, featuring panel discussions, lectures, a film festival, a concert, and informal discussions with faculty and students.
For Leon Botstein, president of Bard, the reunion and conference are valuable “not only as a reflection on the past, but as a reflection on something immensely relevant in the present.” Botstein hopes the event will prompt discussion of America’s relationship with human rights and justice.
In a foreshadowing of the “Prague Spring” that would occur 12 years later, the Hungarian Revolution began in October 1956, as a spontaneous nationwide uprising against repressive Soviet rule. The Russians responded by invading the country with 150,000 soldiers and 600 tanks. After bitter fighting, during which the US stood on the sidelines despite rhetoric about helping “captive nations,” the revolution was crushed. Thousands died and many others were tried, imprisoned, or murdered. Reformist Prime Minister Imre Nagy was executed and 200,000 refugees fled the country.
If Iraq is a case of misguided intervention, Botstein notes that Hungary is “a case of what America didn’t do. Because of the Cold War, we didn’t support this revolution…and you can argue that was a place we should have been. So it is a moment for honest reflection on America’s role in the world and when it is sensible to use or restrain America’s military might.”
Laszlo Bitó, the conference organizer, also arrived at Bard that December, at age 22. Before the revolution, he and his family were deported from Budapest for being anti-Communist enemies of the state. Bitó was imprisoned for two years as a slave laborer in a coal mine before organizing a camp revolt. He tried to make his way to Budapest to join the fighting, but by then it was too late. Now living back in Hungary after a career as a scientist in the US, Bitó hopes the conference looks beyond the revolution itself—or “who shot whom,” as he puts it—to focus on the extraordinary intellectual contributions the refugees made to American society.
Béla Liptak admits to “mixed feelings” about the approaching reunion. At a gathering in Budapest last October of student leaders of the rebellion, he couldn’t recognize his old friends. “Those beautiful girls and attractive boys,” he says. “You know what 50 years does. The only thing I could recognize was their eyes. Somehow there’s a little twinkle in your eye that doesn’t change.”
But Liptak has no mixed feelings about the role Bard played in giving him a second chance: “[I]t came like a blessing for an institution to say, ‘We’ll teach you English, you are welcome to have food and shelter, and you’ll be given advice on how to start a new life.’”
Liptak left Bard after the two-month program ended, but not before meeting 18-year-old Marta Szacsvay, a fellow refugee, who would become his wife. He went on to become a renowned engineer, has been involved in environmental protection efforts, and is now helping to build the world’s first solar/hydrogen demonstration plant, which he hopes will someday replace oil-based energy systems.
Upon their arrival in the US, the refugees lived in barracks at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey. To get out of the camp, they had to have a sponsoring family take them in.
“There were people who said they wanted to go to a film star in Hollywood or a millionaire in Florida,” Laszlo Bitó says, “but I figured they were going to be in Camp Kilmer for a long time. I wanted to go to the next person on the list.”
That meant Cleveland, which at the time had one of the largest Hungarian communities in the US. “All the Hungarian families wanted to have their freedom fighter,” he recalls, but Bitó grew alienated from his host family, who had been in the US since before the First World War and thought the aim of the revolution was to restore the Hapsburg Dynasty. Bitó heard about the Bard program and jumped at the chance.
After the orientation ended, Bitó was awarded a scholarship and graduated in 1960 with a pre-med degree. He valued his close relationship with the faculty. “Bard was a tremendous experience for me,” he says. “At a large university one could have gotten lost, but in the seminar system at Bard, from the first day you had to talk.” Bitó went on to become a professor of ocular physiology at Columbia University and developed Xalatan, an innovative drug for the treatment of glaucoma.
In December 1956, Nick Lyons was a 25-year-old American student attending Bard on the GI Bill. He taught English to the Hungarians and has vivid memories of how engaged and vigorous they were. “They seemed to me to be singing and chattering and talking at a higher level,” Lyons says. Several of them, he recalls, had been on the Hungarian national soccer team: “I can remember them bouncing a ball between them as they went off to mealtime or back to one of the sessions. They seemed enormously happy to be there.” It was the first time teaching for Lyons, who went on to become a literature professor at the University of Michigan and Hunter College.
None of the students spoke English, and the teachers spoke no Hungarian, so they were taught in an Army system in which only English was spoken. A 20-booth speech lab was installed and a team from Columbia University prepared language tapes and drills.
“It turned out to be a reverse of what was planned,” Liptak says, “because we taught the teachers Hungarian.”
In addition to language study, there was an orientation to American society. A film program from January/February 1957 features showings of Citizen Kane, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, All the King’s Men, and documentaries on Lincoln, Alexander Graham Bell, and Jackie Robinson.
The local community also pitched in. Hospitals and doctors provided health and dental care. A couple in Poughkeepsie arranged a donation of new shoes. A nearby A&P store supplied 200 cartons of cigarettes. Bard’s Catholic chaplain bought $300 worth of suitcases, footlockers, and duffle bags in Kingston and brought them back to the campus by truck, to make sure each Hungarian had new luggage.
Bitó, a great fan of FDR, remembers visiting Hyde Park, as well as Rhinebeck, Red Hook, and Kingston, and being invited to Thanksgiving dinner by a local family.
There were amusing moments, he recalls—mix-ups involving language and local customs. Bitó, a scholarship student, had a campus job as a night watchman to make spending money. It turned out that a wealthy American student who was an heir to the Wrigley chewing gum fortune had given up the job so he could have it. That student, like so many college students then and now, preferred to wear torn jeans and worn-out shirts.
“I had a regular jacket and regular pants,” Bitó remembers, “and here he was in rags. I said to him, ‘You need the job more than me.’”
The Hungarians got into the Christmas spirit, singing carols and attending campus parties, although, according to a contemporary report, they seemed “under evident emotional strain.” At the end of one party, having spent hours memorizing the lines, they sang the first verse of the “Star Spangled Banner” in “somewhat halting voices…an emotion-packed moment which none of those present will ever forget.”
While Bitó wants the conference to focus on the Hungarians’ contributions to America—as President Botstein says, “They did us a bigger favor than we did them”—there is no escaping the harrowing events that brought them to this country. Bela Liptak still finds it difficult to discuss the enormous anger he felt when the US government, despite bellicose lip service, did not come to the aid of the revolution.
“They misled us into believing that if we took on the Russians we’d get help,” he says. He was in a group of six or seven people, the oldest 25, firing down on Russian tanks with submachine guns from an apartment facing a square. Among the group was a girl named Marika, 18, who, Liptak remembers, was good at making Molotov cocktails.
“In three days, 200 tanks were burning on the streets of Budapest, more than what the US has lost in three years in Iraq,” Liptak says. “We had the loudspeaker on…broadcasting Radio Free Europe, and we were listening to [Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles…and we were under the impression that American troops were on their way.” But no help came and the fighters were routed.
The human cost of that defeat still haunts Liptak. During their last fight before being captured, they saw the cannon of a tank raised toward the apartment and ran out to the rear of the building. But Marika went back to retrieve badly needed bread.
“And the tank fired,” Liptak recalls, “and when we went back into the apartment it was full of smoke and dust and we couldn’t see anything. And then I heard this drip, drip sound, and it was her blood.”
He found Marika still clutching the bread, bleeding from a leg wound to the bone. Liptak carried her on a stretcher to medical aid, never saw her again, and never found out if she survived.
For Liptak, who later escaped Russian imprisonment by crawling through underground water pipes, the lessons of the revolution are clear.
“[W]hat stayed with me for life, strangely enough, was a sense of optimism,” he says, “because I saw how decent the average human being is. For 35 days I was in hiding and couldn’t go home, and I ate at the tables of strangers, I slept in the beds of strangers, and no one allowed me to pay for anything. Such a sense of family.”
The second lesson has wider political implications: “A basic message is that all nations want to be free, and that occupiers—no matter where they come from—are not welcome.”
Laszlo Bitó’s first love was literature—he began to write short stories and notes for novels while working under slave labor conditions in the coal mine—but turned to science at Bard because of worries about making a living writing the Great American Novel. Since retiring as a professor, he has published a series of novels in Hungarian on biblical themes. After a career dealing with physical blindness, he now ponders blindness of another kind.
As a child during World War II—“a time when children really started to disappear,” he notes, and sons were sacrificed by the millions—Bitó became preoccupied with the story of Abraham and Isaac. His young mind found it impossible to fathom that a man would be willing to kill his own son. At the last minute God’s angel appears and stops Abraham from making the sacrifice.
But for Bitó, the story’s fundamental importance comes from a different interpretation he gives it—that Abraham alone decides to spare Isaac, without God’s help: “[A]s long as we believe that God will hold back the hand of a murderer, we can say, ‘Okay, I can raise my knife against my fellow man, and if God doesn’t want me to kill him, he will grab my hand.’ But anyone who survived the Second World War knows that God never grabs the murderer’s hand. So we have to realize that we have to take responsibility for our own actions. We cannot expect God to intervene.”
