Reprinted from the Globe and Mail, April 12, 2025
Although she fled Hungary in 1956, Anna Porter has returned to her hometown many times over the years. A recent visit provided an opportunity to say goodbye to the city, and to reckon with her complicated relationship with her place of birth.
No matter how hard you try, you never get over the place where you were born. Not even when your last memories are of bloodshed and tears.
For me, that place is Budapest. I left, much against my will, at the end of 1956. I had tried to resist my mother’s insistence that we escape the Soviet occupation, because my childhood was full of Hungarian stories and I doubted there would ever be other stories to take their place.
I returned for the first time in 1970, and have gone back many times since. Not counting summer trips to an island in Georgian Bay, I have visited Budapest more often than any other place on Earth. I have travelled there with my mother, with my children, with my husband (only twice because he was certain the security police recorded his every word), a group of friends looking for an East European adventure, with one of my grandchildren, and often by myself.
But my latest trip to Budapest in March, with one daughter’s family and another’s husband, was different than the others. It was to be my final visit to the city of my birth.
More than 20 years after she left, my mother wanted to see Hungarian relatives and a former Communist ex-husband. She also longed for the old baroque buildings of Budapest, the chestnut trees along the Danube, and long evenings in old-world restaurants in the “Inner City” where, as the gypsy band plays, the violinist leans in to sing or just say the words of your favourite songs.
She missed all this despite her earlier decision to take me out of the country, across a guarded border, risking imprisonment and the probability of not getting her job back afterward. After her previous attempt to cross the border with me, she had been condemned to eight months in a Szombathely jail.
We were caught again on Nov. 22, 1956, spent a cold, wet night in a field with gun-toting Russians and more nights in a jail near Hegyeshalom. Undeterred, my mother gave it one last try three days later, and this time we succeeded. She was a very determined woman.
We had already been to Matthias Church in the Castle District and everyone shared my enthusiasm for the brilliant paint work, the elegant Gothic tower and the stories about its long and somewhat fictitious history that go all the way back to King Stephen (Saint Stephen because he brought Christianity to the heathens who used to live here) in AD1000 or so, and the Golden Age of Hungary under Matthias Corvinus in the 15th century. Of course, the church was destroyed and rebuilt many times since Hungary is on the crossroads between East and West, but it has somehow retained the elements that made it the most revered church in Budapest. It was in this church that my grandfather first told me he would have to live the rest of his life in exile.
My grandfather used to tell me stories about the Mongols, the Turks, the Austrians, the Russians who had marched through here. He was a Hungarian patriot, still mourning the passing of the crown to the Habsburgs after Matthias’s death in 1490. Mathias Church is also known as the Coronation Church because this is where Franz Joseph I (a Habsburg) was crowned on June 8, 1867.
When I met Otto in 2000, the last almost emperor-king of the Habsburg dynasty and grandson of Franz Joseph, he seemed neither overbearing, nor self-important, the kind of Habsburg my family dreaded. He was cordial, comfortable in a range of languages and pleased to let me choose which one we would converse in. He lived in a rather modest house in Pocking, a distant suburb of Munich, and he was exceedingly fond of his two elderly dachshunds, something that endeared him to me immediately, because I, too, am unaccountably fond of dachshunds.
Lost in memories, I was doing a lousy job as tour guide.
We walked around the walls of the Castle, where the Habsburgs stayed when they were in residence. I had wanted to go down to the cellars where my mother had hidden for a while during the 50-day siege of the city in the waning weeks of the Second World War, and where my grandfather had once approached the general in charge of defending Budapest to beg him not to destroy it. But the man had his orders from the Germans and the city was destroyed.
Perhaps I should have explained to my family that, with unerring idiocy, Hungary’s leaders chose to be on the German side in that war and, with almost equally disastrous results, also in the First World War, but there was not enough time for such long, complicated stories.
Except for the ghosts, there isn’t much to see in the cellars.
From Buda Castle, the view across the Danube is as stunning as ever, though it may have lost some of its magic for me now that my childhood is a distant memory. My mother had watched Pest burn from somewhere near here.
It had been dangerous to go outside during the siege, but she was young and reckless and she had already lost so much of her young life to the horrors of war that she didn’t care. The Germans were firing their machine-guns above her right shoulder, and the Russians, running from building to building on the Pest side of the Danube, were firing at the Germans. There had been dead bodies everywhere. She recognized a former boyfriend hanging from a lamppost on her way back to the villa she shared with her parents.
He was Jewish. On March 19, 1944, a little more than 81 years ago, the German army marched into Budapest and the days of the city’s once-vibrant Jewish community were numbered. By the end of that summer, almost 500,000 Hungarians had been sent to Auschwitz. One in three of those who perished in the infamous death camp were Hungarians.
In 2005 a memorial was constructed on this bank of the Danube to honour the thousands of victims of the Arrow Cross’ reign of terror. Even as the Germans were losing the war, retreating toward Austria, thousands of Budapest’s Jews were marched to the embankment, shot, or just pushed into the icy waters.
Every time I have been here since then, I come by to remember all those who didn’t survive the persecution.
The memorial is close to the parliament buildings, where governments had enacted the anti-Jewish laws that had made Jews visible enemies of the state. In today’s divisive political atmosphere with summary evictions of legal immigrants from the United States, where refugees are classed as enemies of the state, it isn’t difficult to make the assumption that this could happen again.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban was the first in Europe to erect a militarized fence against refugees and to bill himself as a defender of Christianity against the mobs coming to invade Europe.
Walking around the parliament buildings, I always look for the bullet holes from 1956 when I was here with a crowd of mostly young protesters carrying Hungarian flags and signs demanding the Russians go home, when state police officers (the dreaded AVO) opened fire from a ministry’s rooftop.
This time, the building with the bullet holes was covered for construction. In a corner of the square there used to be a statue of Imre Nagy, the prime minister called back to office by the Revolution, but it has been moved. After the brutal suppression of the Revolution, he was executed by the AVO on orders from the Soviet-backed government and buried in an unmarked grave.
When I was a child, I was taught to fear the secret police, to be very careful what I said because “walls have ears” and you never knew when someone would be arrested for insulting the regime. The AVO’s former headquarters on Andrassy Boulevard are now the site of the House of Terror, a memorial to the victims of Soviet repression in Hungary.
It’s also a stark reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust, as this once posh villa served both the Hungarian Nazis and the Communists. A small section of the museum is dedicated to the hundreds of people tortured and murdered here by the Arrow Cross, the country’s Nazi party.
The museum’s cellars, despite the fact that they are mere replicas of past horrors, hold a special meaning for me because this is where the AVO brought my grandfather after they arrested him on trumped up charges and this is where they tried to extract information from him and force an admission of guilt.
He was sentenced to two years in Recsk, a notorious forced-labour camp, but my mother’s husband, a Communist, secured my grandfather’s release four months early. My mother once told me she had married the man not only so that her father would be freed, but also because he could negotiate her parents’ departure for New Zealand. Leaving a Soviet paradise was, of course, against the law.
In October, 1956, the 25-metre tall statue of Josef Stalin at the corner of Varosliget (City Park) was destroyed by revolutionaries wielding axes and chisels. I managed to pick up a small piece of Stalin for my grandfather.
The House of Terror’s Gulag Room maps the many Siberian work camps where Hungarians ended their days. My granddaughter asked where my father had gone after he was picked out of a bread line by a passing truck of Russian soldiers. They had to fill a daily quota of prisoners to transport to the Gulag. My father was one of those men, but he was lucky: They sent him back after three years at Vorkuta, north of the Arctic Circle.
Decades after his murder, Imre Nagy’s remains were dug up in 1989 and reburied with all the pomp and circumstance due to a head of state. The occasion offered a young, liberal democrat a chance to give a passionate speech demanding that the Soviet army leave Hungary.
That young man was Viktor Orban, now the longest-serving prime minister in the European Union, a friend and admirer of Vladimir Putin’s repressive, genocidal regime, a man who is proud of governing a country that has eliminated the free press, the independent judiciary, all semblance of fair dealing in business and enriched a few sycophants beyond their wildest dreams.
The country may be a “kleptocracy” by most measures, yet U.S. President Donald Trump and his followers express only admiration for Mr. Orban’s autocratic regime. Hungary is “an inspiration to the world,” said Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist, while Mr. Trump said, “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban. He’s fantastic.”
On my last trip to Budapest, I had to visit again the Cafe Gerbeaud. I once wrote in a magazine that the Gerbaud is the best coffee shop in the world, which may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it is truly a grand old place. It hasn’t lost all its charms during a couple of centuries of terrible events.
It still has some of the glitter of old, Central Europe – the high ceilings, the red drapes, the gilt on the chairs, the glass enclosed elaborate confections, the tortes with marzipan, that I used to ogle when I was a little kid, coming here with my grandfather, watching him swirl his espresso and hoping he would offer me a sugar cube he had soaked in the coffee, while he told me tales of grand Hungarian heroes who fought implacable enemies with great bravery.
The Gerbeaud is on Vorosmarty Square. Hungarians have often named streets and squares after poets and novelists, and Mihaly Vorosmarty was one of the greatest. “Our only hope of survival as a nation,” my grandfather told me, “is our language. And it’s our greatest tragedy. No one but Hungarians will ever know the true brilliance of Vorosmarty, or Arany, Madach, Jokai, Faludy and, of course, Petofi.”
I can still recite dozens of Hungarian poems I had learned as a child, including the rousing Szozat by Vorosmarty that every Hungarian child used to know. And Petofi’s Talpra Magyar that he had recited near here, in the small square named for him. It’s on this square that the 1848 uprising against Austria began with a poem and it’s here that some students may have started the 1956 Revolution. Petofi’s statue stands close to the Inner City Parish Church where my parents were married.
There were huge posters all over the city advertising a new television series about the life of one of those heroes my grandfather told me about, Janos Hunyadi, who defeated Pasha Mezid’s army at what is now Belgrade, but was then southern Hungary. There is a very grim looking statue of Hunyadi in full armour among the heroes at Heroes’ Square, another place I have never failed to visit when I was in Budapest. Six years ago one of my grandchildren climbed up and sat between Hunyadi’s massive legs.
My mind is full of similar memories of my former home. I have written many books and stories about Hungary. I returned time and again to interview people, to look at places I thought I knew, to celebrate the publication of some of my books in translation. Each time, being here felt both intensely familiar and absolutely foreign. Weird.
That I will not be walking along the Danube wondering what my life would have been had my mother decided to stay despite the large hole through the wall of our apartment courtesy of a Soviet tank.
Yet there is something magical about walking along the river, on the Gellert Hill side where the cherry trees are just beginning to flower and the river is redolent of early spring rain.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS: THE GLOBE AND MAIL. PHOTO SOURCES: GETTY IMAGES, ANNA PORTER, AFP/GETTY IMAGES