I got this repatriation certificate when I came back from Israel in 1951.
I was demobilized from the Israeli Army on the 17th September 1950. Some relatives of a friend of mine lived in a village called Hadera, who accepted me as the buddy of their relative, in Israel I didn't have anyone. We were in Hadera starting from the 17th September, and we worked.
I earned a good money, but we didn’t have an apartment. We were considered night lodgers, because the 2 of us slept in a room. I would have wanted to get hold of an apartment. I went to Tel-Aviv. The army had an office there, which administered the affairs of demobilized soldiers. I went there and said that I needed an apartment. Jaffa was empty at that time. The Arabians had run away and it was full with empty apartments. But there I was told again that unfortunately they couldn't give me an apartment because families from Yemen were coning there with as many children as stars on the sky, and they had to accommodate them first and couldn't solve my case. And they also told me that either I got an apartment or not I could go home because there was communist regime at home. I got very angry at them. I gave my blood and life to Israel, but I didn't want to be a fool. Then I wrote my mother and told her to arrange it so that I could come home to Hungary and suffer no harm.
My mother, who had been a party member for a long time, since 1945 (and this was in 1951, in January perhaps), went to the party secretary of the town and told him what the problem was. He said that it was quite dangerous, because those who came home from abroad were usually caught, but in the previous year on the 1st May I was at the 1st May march in Israel, where the company where I belonged to carried the pictures of Stalin and Lenin with a red flag and a communist banner in Hebrew. And I had sent home earlier the picture which was taken there, and my mother showed it to them so that they would see what my opinion was. Then they went with this to some local or other authority with the party secretary. It didn't even take 10 days and I got the notification that I was free to go home. I got a free ticket from the Hungarian embassy in Israel, the Polish ship called Bathori took be to Constanta [today Romania], and from there I came to Hungary by train, and I went home by train to my parents in Nagykanizsa.
