Tear Down this Wall (Part 2)

I don’t recall where I was on June 12, 1987. That’s when President Ronald Reagan gave his famous “Tear Down this Wall” speech at the Brandenburg gate in West Germany. However, I vividly remember March 30, 1981, the day of his assasination attempt.

I was 9 years old, and my fascination with America, the West, and geo-politics reached its fever pitch. It was the result of a 3 week long visit to New York with my father just a year earlier, in the summer of 1980. That trip was an absolute shock to my dad, to our family, and to our friends and neighbors. After countless letters and failed collect calls over the years, my dad finally got an invitation from my grandfather. This sudden change of heart was no accident, and we later learned that Eugene, my grandfather’s closest friend, bugged him constantly to help the family. Hungary’s communist government did now allow entire families to travel abroad, so my mother and sister had to stay behind. The whole process was a bureaucratic nightmare from government reviews, authorization from my school, interviews, US visa applications to the nerve racking preparations. We never traveled out of the country before, and we didn’t even own a suitcase. My dad anxiously waited for the departure, and he frequently stopped near the only airport near Budapest just to watch the planes take off. We flew on Swiss Air through Zurich,and finally landed in New York’s JFK airport. The three weeks in America were magical for an 8 year old kid, and the experience deserves an entire book, or at least a couple of chapters. I saw the city scape from the top of the Twin Towers, I smelled fresh pizza for the first time, I got soaking wet at Niagara Falls, I watched the Alien on a color TV (and spent countless nights without sleep afterwards), and I marveled at the vast selection of merchandise in huge supermarkets. My dad got increasingly concerned and agitated during our last week on Long Island. He had a big decision to make. We either claimed political asylum, which would mean leaving my mother and sister behind and hoping to get them out in a few years. Or, we simply went back behind the wall and tried again later with the whole family. This weighed on him heavily, but I felt no such quandary. I knew exactly what we needed to do. We had to go home and hug my mom and sister. For an 8 year old, things seemed much simpler.

Something strange happened as soon as we landed in Budapest. The next several days, I was becoming increasingly “homesick”. America was not my home, I could barely speak a few English words I picked up during our vacation, but I felt a deep yearning for everything we left behind. It wasn’t just the material things, it was deeper. I missed the vast distances, the diverse beauty of the landscape, the happy and positive energy I sensed from everyone we met. I missed freedom. Some kids and even adults used the “American” nickname they gave me as a derogatory term, but I wore it with pride. I could easily tell a secret friend from a brainwashed foe just by the look in their eyes. In the following years, I developed close friendships with kids who understood, the families with ties to other parts of the free world. Even some of the teachers started to show curiosity and respect, and they often asked me about my trip when no one could hear them. There are so many stories to tell about these years, but for now, let’s jump to 1989, the day Eugene, a mysterious family friend from New York, parked his VW rental car in front of our house. 

To be continued in part 3