This is me (the man on the right), Zsuzsi, my wife (first from the right), my brother Imi, and my sister-in-law. The photo was taken in Sopron sometime in the 1980s; I received a referral and we went to Sopron for eight years. My middle brother, Imi, lived in the United States.
After 1956, he came here to visit every three years, he always spent part of the time at our house and part of the time in the hotel, up on the mountain, in the resort of the Union of Common Laborers. We sometimes met them abroad and traveled to the meeting place by different routes. We had many trips like this.
Once I met Imre and his family in Austria. My oldest brother was there, also. I think, at some lakeside. We were at the Salzkammergut lakes. My older brother, Imi, his wife, Marion and my oldest brother George and his wife, Rozsika, all of us, the whole family had summer vacation there. I and my wife went by Trabant, I’ll never forget it. They got into the Trabant, I say, let’s go two lakes over. Well, they’d never been in a Trabant in their lives. They didn’t laugh at us. It was probably strange for them, but they never said a word that wasn’t said in a tone of love.
It was a huge thing to go over the border to Austria then. People today couldn’t even imagine what the closed borders during Communism were like, what it meant to go to a free country. That was something! I parked the Trabant somewhere on the street in Salzburg and my wife and I went walking to look around. I come back, and they’re standing around the car, the young people. I said to the kids, ’Schon! Auto von Papier! [German: Pretty. A paper car.] They started laughing. It was good, I had no problems. I thought it was funny, too.
