In 1952, my father received an official letter from the government, ordering him to accept a job as a buyer for army and factory kitchens. He circulated among 106 towns, and performed the job with such industry and adeptness that he soon found himself the minister of commerce of Fetter County. His command of German allowed him to conduct business with Austrian and German merchants who came to purchase the region’s famous sour cherries.

In 1951, we decided to attempt an escape with forged Romanian passports. We boarded a train headed toward Romania, but as we sat there, another train pulled up alongside us, and we saw a family friend. He motioned to us to open the window, and he called, “Katz! Oseh shalom!” That was the code to go backwards, like when we say those words at the end of the Amidah — clearly it was too risky. So we stayed on the train till Budapest and then got off.

When the Revolution started in 1956, it only took a week or two before the Jews realized that the resulting chaos had left the borders unsupervised. They rushed to send each other telegrams in Hebrew that said “Flee! Grab the chance!”

A bus was organized in our area to take people to the border. But at the last minute, it didn’t show up. Then we planned to leave with a non-Jewish friend, a dentist, who was supposed to rent a van and drive all of us. But he canceled at the last minute, claiming his children had gotten sick.

On our own, we planned to leave on December 23. The country was still in turmoil, but there was surveillance at the borders again, so Jews passed the word among each other about which guides to use to cross over. The week before our departure we lived in terror of being denounced to the secret police. One night we all slept together in the back of the house, and were terrified by a tapping sound at the door. In the end, what was it? Our dog tapping his tail against the door!

We took the train from Budapest with about 50 other people. At each stop, a few of them would leave the regular railway cars and go hide in a coal compartment until all the people were hidden. We would remain there until the train reached the end of the line.

There we got out. It was snowing hard, with big drifts on the ground. The guide pointed the way, and we began walking.

But it wasn’t so easy. Russian soldiers shooting flares caught sight of us. They promptly halted and arrested us, depositing us in the police station for the night and putting us on the train back to Budapest in the morning.

We slept at the home of family friends in Budapest, and got back on a train the next morning. This time soldiers patrolling the train decided we looked like people trying to escape, and sent us back early in the trip.

Back in Budapest, my father paid a visit to the Department of Agriculture, where a supportive boss suggested: “Why don’t you try going through Yugoslavia?” The boss gave him papers to authorize a “buying trip” for eggs and other supplies in Szeged, on the Yugoslavian border, as well as papers attesting that he’d be bringing his family along on a holiday vacation for the end of December.

In the end we left in early January 1957, arriving in Szeged late at night. My father knocked on the door of the rabbi’s house. The rabbi turned white with fear! He could have been arrested for helping us. My father said, “Just give us the keys to the shul, we’ll sleep there. You don’t have to know about this.”

But the next day the rabbi put my father in touch with a sympathetic priest, who found my family a tree cutter willing to take us to the border. We lay in a wagon, covered with straw, and would attempt to cross when the guards took a lunch break at noon.

He took us as far as he could, then pointed. “You see that white sand, where the ground has been raked? That’s the border,” he said.

We started walking, and inadvertently trespassed on the property of a farmer. His wife’s sharp eyes spotted us. “There are people escaping through our property!” she cried to her husband. “Get the axe!”

My father pretended to reach for a gun, putting his hand in his pocket to make it look like he had a pistol. It was a neis that they fell for it. My father said, “We didn’t mean to trespass, Tell us where your property ends, and we’ll get off it. No one will find our footsteps.”

Unbelievably, we kept walking and crossed the border! Yugoslavian soldiers patrolling on horseback picked us up and brought us to a local detention center, where we found ourselves among a group of 60 people who’d escaped the same way.

My mother’s brother lived in New York, and although we weren’t allowed to write letters, she wrote one anyway. She pretended to have a toothache and asked to see a dentist. While in town, she bribed a non-Jewish woman to mail two letters for her. It cost her a beautiful scarf her brother had sent from America — I think she still misses that scarf.

One letter was caught and censored, and we were rudely awakened in the middle of the night and sternly warned to cease all such efforts.But the other letter miraculously got through, and HIAS was informed. The Yugoslavians had to release us. They put us on a train to Belgrade on a Friday night. I remember my parents crying because it was Shabbos — after all our mesirus nefesh to live as frum Yidden, they forced us to go on Shabbos.

HIAS sent us from Belgrade to Italy, where we stayed in a beautiful hotel and ate in a kosher restaurant. They wanted us to go to Israel, but Israel was still a struggling country, and my parents had had enough of hardship. Furthermore, my mother had family in America.

My parents had a little money, and we continued on to Austria, to an absorption center in a large hotel called The Continental. There were about 250 families there, and we were thrilled to meet up with several of our second cousins. Eventually we were moved to a former barracks in a town called Asten while we waited our turn for papers. We spent a year and a half there; it became like a small town, with people setting up stores and a school for the children. My father started selling chicken and eggs—they called him “Chicken Katz.”

We finally received papers and passage to emigrate in October 1958. My mother’s brothers lived in Williamsburg, which was flooded with Hungarians. I was enrolled in the Pupa school. A cousin of my father’s taught him the leather-cutting trade, and eventually he opened a business of his own in the fur district. We moved to Boro Park, and while we didn’t have much in those days, my mother always managed to cook wonderful food and make our home look so nice!

The people who stayed behind mostly assimilated; only those who left have eineklach with peyos. My parents have been zocheh to see a fifth generation already!

The failed revolution was anything but a failure for the Jews who escaped. For us, it was a miracle, and a lesson that a Jew should never give up hope.

Rabbi Moshe Yaakov Perl

Rabbi Perl, currently a mashgiach at Maimonides Medical Center, was a six-year-old boy when the Revolution gave his parents a chance to offer their children a Jewish future. Despite his young age, his memories from that era are vivid.

I was born and raised in a shtetl called Pupa. Today we associate Pupa (Papa in Hungarian) with the chassidus of that name, but it was not originally a chassidish town. Most of the people were oberlanders, Ashkenazim. My grandfather arrived there in the late 1800s from Transylvania, and was from a chassidic background.

During the war, my father was conscripted into a labor division of the army, to dig ditches. They took them toward the Russian front, and in Croatia he was the victim of a kitchen accident that saved his life: he tried to push a loose lid more securely onto a pot, and the steam that streamed out blinded him (fortunately, only temporarily). The army was obliged to send him back to a hospital. Most of his friends did not make it through the war.

My mother survived Auschwitz, and they married in 1946. In Pupa we had a rav and a shochet, and the Communists, who wanted to show the world how tolerant they were, allowed the production there of kosher sausages and cold cuts that were exported to much of Free Europe. But even the non-Jews saw that Communism wasn’t good for Hungary. We were an advanced, industrialized country, and the government took advantage of that fact to produce things for their own benefit. They shipped Hungarian goods to Egypt during the Six Day War.

On the religious side, despite allowing kosher meat production, Jewish parents had to send their children to school on Shabbos, and the schools filled their heads with Communist propaganda. My father-in-law, Reb Simcha Bunim Gewurtz, who was a rosh hakahal for the Pupa Rebbe before the war, was deeply upset by the way the Communists were polluting his children’s minds. When he had the opportunity to travel to Pressburg for the 150th anniversary of the Chasam Sofer becoming the rav of the city, he went to the tziyun and poured his heart out.

He is still convinced it was the zechus of the Chasam Sofer that allowed the Hungarian Jews to get out. When he returned to Hungary that October, he found that the Revolution had started and the borders were open!

Pupa was about 100 kilometers from the Austrian border, and well removed from Budapest, which was the epicenter of the Revolution. My mother had actually gone to Budapest to shop for winter clothing for the family when the fighting began, and my father arranged with a Jewish truck driver to bring her back. But the rest of us were far from the fighting, although the Russians did send a few tanks to our village and announce a curfew. The Freedom Fighters took over the radio station, so we got some news by radio, and I remember that planes flew at low altitude over the town and dropped pamphlets that updated the news.

An older Jewish man who could easily pass for a peasant was sent to reconnoiter the border. He came back and told everyone: “Everyone is running! Don’t miss this opportunity!” In all the confusion, the borders had been left unguarded in many areas.

My parents thought they’d have a better chance of succeeding if they split up. A couple of weeks after the Revolution began, my mother took a train with my older brother, baby sister, and a cousin. My father stayed a few hours more to take care of some things, then followed with me.

I remember the train was jammed with people trying to get out of Hungary. It moved slowly and kept stopping, and we were all nervous that the authorities might board to investigate. A few hours later we arrived at the last stop, about 20 kilometers from the Austrian border. There were trucks waiting, open trucks with siding, and they told us to keep our heads in.

Eventually we came to the end of the road, and would have to continue on foot. It was November, and the ground was wet and cold; we saw trucks stuck in the mud. We saw lights flashing in the distance: they were signals from the Freedom Fighters to indicate that the coast was clear.

We eventually met some farmers and came to a creek spanned by a big wooden bridge. The bridge was hundreds of years old, and had been designed for farmers and their carts. It would be immortalized in James Michener’s book about the flight of Hungarian refugees, The Bridge at Andau. When the Russians later came back to close the border and put up barbed wire, soldiers stationed there got cold and chopped up the bridge for firewood. It’s as if the bridge had served its purpose to help Jews flee to freedom, and no longer needed to exist.

On the other side of the bridge we met some other Hungarians, and Austrian border guards who were extremely welcoming. My father kept asking around for information about my mother, and one man said he thought he’d seen her — we should follow everyone else.

When we arrived at a holding center, my father stood tall and bellowed, “Is anyone here from Pupa?”

I heard my mother’s voice in the distance: “I’m from Pupa!”

“In that case, you’re my wife!” my father yelled back.

There were tractors there hitched up to trains of 12 to 15 wagons, and we climbed in and were hauled to a camp. We had left home at around 1 p.m., and now it was 8:00 in the evening. Every hour another group arrived. After a few days, buses came to bring us to Vienna, where the Joint gave us apartments and food coupons to use at the restaurant run by the community. Now the question became: Where do we go from here?

My future wife’s family were lucky; they left for America in some planes the Americans had left over from World War II. The Daily News ran pictures of families getting off those planes, the first Hungarian refugees to arrive in the US.

My own parents originally hoped to go Eretz Yisrael. In the end, they were dissuaded by the outbreak of the Sinai War — they’d had enough of wars by then, and socialism too. A friend of my father’s was set on going to Australia, and convinced my father to go there as well. We left Europe in January 1957, and since the Suez Canal was closed due to the war, it took us 32 days by boat to sail around South Africa and get to Melbourne.

Funny, the clothing my mother had bought in Budapest the week the Revolution began lasted us all the way to Australia. My parents would remain in Melbourne — my mother, aged 94, kein ayin hara, and my sister still live there — but they sent my brother and me to learn in the US, in the Telshe Yeshiva. I settled in New York and my brother lives in Eretz Yisrael. You could say we went “down under” to ultimately “go up” as proud observant Jews.

Vera Burstyn

Mrs. Vera Burstyn, a retired mother of four in Skokie, Illinois, was 17 when the revolution started. She describes the night of her family’s escape as the “darkest” she’d ever seen.

I  was born in Budapest in 1939. Since Hungary was allied with Austria and Germany, it wasn’t invaded during the war. There were laws against the Jews, but deportations didn’t start until 1944.

My father was drafted into forced labor, and was killed in 1943. My mother was taken to Bergen-Belsen. I was left between my grandparents and a family, but I ended up in a Red Cross shelter along with my cousin Judy, six months older than I. Her parents had avoided deportation, but felt the shelter was the safest place for her. When my aunt came to pick her up at the end of the war, she took me too; my mother came home in the summer of 1945. It took a long time for things to get back to normal.

My mother couldn’t get back her old apartment in Budapest, so we moved to Kapuvar, a small town close to the Austrian border where most of our family was from. Her brother-in-law was living there, the husband of a sister who’d perished in the war, and she married him in 1948.

Kapuvar had a small, traditional Jewish community. The top floor of the shul had been bombed, but they used the bottom floor. Many of the couples there were second marriages. I was the only Jewish girl in my school who was born before the war.

My stepfather had a dry-goods store before the war, and my uncle, a fabric store. In 1951 the Hungarian government prohibited all private ownership. The Jews would organize themselves into “collectives” to continue running businesses — like manufacturing clothing hangers — and in this way could continue observing Shabbos. My uncle stayed on in his store as a salesperson, and my mother would go to local farmers’ markets and sell dry goods like gloves and scarves from a table.

When the Revolution started in 1956, we saw the opportunity to leave. Looking back, I can only marvel at the courage and fortitude my parents showed in choosing to leave their country and start over again. In 1956 my mother was 44, my stepfather 54; my uncle was 60. They had survived two world wars! They had well-established lives, yet for their children’s sake, they made the decision to abandon their old identities, language, country, and way of life.

We left on November 11 with another man, who also had a wife and children. He organized a truck to drive us to the border. We carried very little with us — I remember taking some school books and my diaries, and my mother took a blanket that I still keep in my closet. At any rate, we had no riches to bring along. It was the darkest night I’d ever seen.

At the border, we were taken to a house to shelter till the morning. I remember they had big feather comforters on the beds. The next day we boarded a bus for Vienna, where the Joint lodged us in a hotel.

We were very, very lucky, because President Eisenhower had just given permission for thousands of Hungarian refugees to come to the US. In a matter of days, we received green cards and were on a plane to New York. We were originally housed in an army camp, Camp Kilmer, in New Jersey for about a week. My uncle had two nephews from his first marriage in Chicago, so we opted to settle there.

We took a train from New York to Chicago, arriving at 8 a.m. on December 26. I was surprised to see that businesses and transportation were running as usual, since in Hungary everything shuts down for two days on December 25. When we arrived in Chicago, HIAS met us and placed us in an apartment with room for four people, and gave my stepfather $25 for groceries.

It was a very tough adjustment for my family, although my parents did connect to other Hungarian immigrants. The Jewish community found my uncle a job in a kosher slaughterhouse — at the time Chicago was still a meat center — and my aunt worked briefly in a mikveh. My stepfather found work that September as an elevator operator for $1.60 an hour (our rent was $95 a month). My mother found work babysitting for Rav Avrohom Chaim Levin, the rosh yeshivah of Telshe, and remained close to the family for years. As for me, I was 18 years old, and after spending some time in a school to learn English, I took a job on Devon Avenue, a Jewish enclave, and was married in 1959.

My brother and cousin were immediately enrolled in a day school, and then attended the Skokie Yeshiva for mesivta. My cousin eventually earned semichah in addition to his PhD. My elders’ efforts to ensure a Jewish future for their children and grandchildren were richly rewarded: all of them married Jews. By comparison, my two cousins who remained in Budapest have very different lives. I feel so thankful for the sacrifices of my parents and the guiding hand of HaKadosh Baruch Hu.

Leah Tisser

Leah Tisser courageously left Hungary as a 16-year-old girl, leaving her parents and family behind.

Communism in Hungary meant a dreary existence, one where keeping Shabbos was a struggle. But when the Revolution started, my parents couldn’t escape, because my grandmother was too frail. We agonized for weeks over what to do, and finally agreed that I’d go alone, with family friends. At least one of us would be saved.

My parents were more worried than I was. I was apprehensive, but also excited to embark on this great adventure. I kissed my siblings, clung to my beloved grandmother, and hugged my parents endlessly as they rained brachos upon me.

I then joined the Karcag family, leaving as quickly and inconspicuously as possible, with only multiple layers of clothing on our backs. We boarded a train for Gyor, a town near the Austrian border. Since travel was restricted under Communism, we’d need to have our papers with us and a well-prepared reason for our trip, and we trembled at the prospect of an interrogation. Fortunately, no inspectors showed up; perhaps they’d abandoned their posts like the border guards.

We arrived in Gyor in the late afternoon, not sure how to proceed. But Hashem had sent us a malach: the town shochet, Rabbi Moskowitz, who made it his mission to help every Jew fleeing via Gyor. He motioned to us to follow discreetly, and every frum Jew on that train followed behind until we reached his house, where his wife fed us and we rested up.

That evening, we piled into the truck of a guide Rabbi Moskowitz had hired. He simply dropped us off some miles from the border, pointed the way, and vanished. It was up to us to proceed in the inky darkness, sloshing through slush and mud from the day’s freezing rain. We heard occasional gunshots, but the night was moonless and cloudy, so we were undetectable in the pitch darkness.

We walked for hours and hours without rest. Just as dawn began to break, we heard a dog bark and saw a village. We were in Austria! We hugged each other in jubilation and thanked Hashem.

We knocked on the first door we found, where the sleepy owner directed us to the building where the refugees gathered. By mid-morning, a HIAS bus had arrived to take us to Vienna. HIAS was very efficient and immediately began applications for entry visas. The Karcags went to Israel, but I registered to join an uncle in America. People going to Israel left within days; it took longer for an American passport. Since I was a minor, my name was pushed to the top of the list, so I only spent two weeks there. I spent the time hanging out in the soup kitchen of the Joint, in the basement of an elegant kosher restaurant, and there we refugees would gather to exchange news and stories, many of them miraculous. During that time there were even some young men who came from New York looking for shidduchim, as Hungarian girls were considered great catches: smart, unspoiled, and from good families. Two girls got engaged and received jewelry and clothing of a quality the rest of us could only dream of, but people warned me to stay away since we had so little information about these young men.

When my passport came through, I was bused with the others to Salzburg to await our flight. We were housed in an army barracks, both Jews and non-Jews. At one point, the non-Jews began claiming the Jews had received preferential treatment. They began yelling. “Dirty Jews!” and mayhem broke out.

The Austrian authorities interceded quickly, gathering the Jews outside. We were terrified, as it brought back memories of the war and Jews being rounded up for the ghettos. But the Austrians didn’t want any bloody riots on their hands. They ordered buses for us immediately to transport us to the airport.

We had to wait for the buses for two hours, shivering outside in the icy wind while babies cried and all were hungry and tired. I had to wait an extra half hour for the second bus, since small children and the elderly were sent on the first; mercifully, the last bus was heated.

I didn’t fully relax and allow myself to rejoice until our plane took off. My American adventure was just beginning, but I was overcome with gratitude to the Ribbono shel Olam.