The Spectrum, a Utah-based news site, has granted the HFP permission to republish an insightful and moving story about a Hungarian who fled her homeland in 1956 and settled in the United States. Her story, recorded by Kevin Jenkins, is very candid and is especially relevant in light of the refugee drama still unfolding in Europe.
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Helen Olsen. Photo: Chris Caldwell / The Spectrum.
As millions of refugees stream out of war-torn Syria in search of more peaceful settlement in the European Union, a St. George woman who was herself a refugee from war-torn Europe is grateful for the experiences a life of hardship has taught her but does not feel a particular affinity for the modern-day exiles.
Helen Olsen was born in Hungary on the day – March 19, 1944 – Hitler’s troops invaded her homeland. By the time she was a teenager, Olsen and her family were trying to sneak across her country’s borders to escape – not from the Nazis, but the Communist Russians who had succeeded the Germans in taking control of the East European countries after the war.
The SunRiver resident wrote a brief memoir about her experiences when she landed in the United States and was trying to learn a new language in the Ohio school system. She was afraid that, without writing it down, she might eventually forget.
“But you don’t forget it,” she said.
Modern-day refugees have been caught in a web of uncertainty as some European countries close their borders and the refugees try to find a way to press westward into Austria and Germany. Hungary has been at the center of controversy over how to deal with the estimated 4 million-plus emigres, most of whom have remained in the Mideast.
Within the European Union, many of the refugees have tried to take advantage of a zone in which people can cross borders without documentation. But Hungary’s prime minister drew some criticism when he ordered the military to build a fence to keep the refugees out amid fears about possible militant violence among the refugees.
Olsen echoed the concerns, noting that there is currently no way to guarantee that some of the refugees may not be people intent on destroying the countries that receive them.
When she left Hungary during the Cold War, she said refugees coming to America had to have a sponsor within the host country and had to hope they would fall within a given quota. The rest of the Hungarians who fled but exceeded the quota in the U.S. were scattered throughout the world, she said.
“They did a better check on people’s backgrounds in those days than they do today,” Olsen said.
Not that it was easy. She was born with polio and infantile paralysis in a country where girls were not valued as much as boys and her family life was troubled by her parents’ marital conflicts. Her father left their small town of Nyirmada in October 1956 and she followed with her mother and four siblings in December.
The youngest was 3.
Flight in the night
The family slept on the floor at the Budapest train station that first night, then proceeded to the border, convincing soldiers checking their identification that they were going for a family visit.
At their destination, “Everybody started to walk when it was dark. … When a train came, everybody went down on their stomachs in a little empty canal. … The ground was frozen. It was very cold,” she wrote in her 16-year-old reflections. “We had to carry our little brother in our arms. The field was full of holes from the bombs” (where land mines had been removed).
But 100 feet from the border, a patrol caught sight of the refugees and grabbed the little boy to ensure the rest of the group would cooperate. Olsen’s family and others who were caught were sent home on a long journey filled with stopping points as they tried to figure out how to proceed to the next station toward the country’s northeast.
“They took us to jail in Budapest, then took us back to our little town,” Olsen said Saturday.
Eventually, they learned their father had successfully made it to Austria. When the children saw their mother selling some of the furniture, they knew they were going to try again.
On their second attempt, they were more fortunate, Olsen said. After walking near the border, they encountered a man hauling fertilizer.
“He told my mother that he was taking people over that night. They made a deal,” she wrote. “The ride wasn’t too pleasant because of the smell, but it was one stop closer to freedom.”
Reflecting on the crossing attempts Saturday, Olsen said one image that still remains with her is the mud.
“This time, the mud wasn’t frozen,” she said. “I had no shoes by the time I got across. The mud pulled them off. But it was sweet. We followed the leader to where they had a stable and it was warm. … The last few days we were in Hungary, you know what I ate? Lard. Just lard. … The rest of the world is chasing the next meal.”
Olsen said her first job was cleaning outhouses at 10 years old. Communists had privileges, but if you were not in the party, you were nobody, she said.
“The biggest fear (in Hungary) was that the following generations wouldn’t know what (freedom) was. That’s what the elderly people worried about,” she said.
A whole new world
Olsen was overwhelmed by the sight of grocery stores in the U.S. and the arrays of food available – far from the pigweed pods she and her siblings used to scavenge from the fields. She built on her math and physics skills, learning English by way of a third language.
“In Ohio, it was difficult to go from Hungarian to English. I would go from Hungarian to Spanish to English. … Eventually English took over,” she said.
Olsen served in the Navy during the Vietnam War, meeting her husband Bjarne – an Alaskan of Norwegian descent – during the service. She graduated with a university degree at 33 and worked for an electronics company making signal processing cords for submarines.
She said she also did undercover work for the FBI during a Department of Defense investigation, but determined the government agents and the people they were investigating were just covering up for each other.
“Those guys stayed crooked the whole time and I just got fed up,” she said.
Reminiscing on Russian patrol guards who had been told they were headed to the Suez Canal instead of Hungary’s frozen borderlands, she said she still can’t stand dishonesty among others.
“(The Russians) lied and lied and lied. … One of the first things I told my kids is, ‘You do not lie to me.’ I cannot tolerate lying,” she said. “To this day, it bothers me.”
Olsen became a teacher who worked to inspire youths struggling with poverty and discrimination. Oddly, her citizenship papers list her as a dark-complected woman. In addition to dealing with the discrimination that accompanied Soviet policies in Hungary, Olsen said she struggled against class issues amid California’s cultural divides after her family moved there from Ohio.
She is also a three-time cancer survivor who fought with doctors to have her illness diagnosed when they were reluctant to investigate it, Olsen said.
Since undergoing surgery for her breast cancer, she has endured continual pain but, “You have to get back to the real world,” she said.
In Hungary, she had every one of her fingers frozen and was accustomed to cutting holes in her shoes as her feet grew, wrapping rags around her toes to protect them, she said. But in California, one of her brothers became caught up in the headier trappings of society as he fell in with “the wealthiest kids.”
That included their drug habits, which eventually took his life.
“I tried to tell the kids (I taught) that nobody escapes that stuff,” the one-time refugee said.
Kevin Jenkins
