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Istvánné Baranyai (* 1936)

• 9 years old during the war

• father was a company manager

• survived the siege in the buildings of Fazekas Street and Clark Ádám Square

The interviewee was 9 years old during the war and the siege of Budapest. His father was a company manager, his uncle was an employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They survived the siege in the buildings of Fazekas Street and Clark Ádám Square in the 1st district. Afterwards, they lived in Lovas Street, and then had to move out of Budapest as “class aliens”, to Kecskemét and then to Lake Balaton.

 

The Siege of Budapest

As the siege approached, her father, who was in a managerial position, decided to take his family out of Budapest. Somehow, he rented a small house in Diósd „so that we would be peaceful then”. „It was a bit harder for my father to walk from Diósd to Pesterzsébet. There was an air raid there too, so we went down to the bunker. Our maid read some funny stories.”

„They put a Hungarian unit in our barracks. He was a very young officer, and he was sobbing. He said the Red Romanians attacked from behind and killed a lot of people. That’s all. Then when things got even worse, and my father thought, poor (...), he brought us to the first district, to Fazekas Street. The worst place possible.”

Christmas 1944 caught up with them. There was dark blue wrapping paper in the window so that no lights could be seen from outside, „but we were children, it was Christmas.” Early the next morning there was a crackling sound: the roofs were starting to come off due to the bombings. „The soldiers threw us down to the basement as quickly as possible.” The shelter didn’t last long, however, because one of its walls collapsed; so we had to crawl to another shelter, through the narrow passage between the two. „There, however, they said not to be angry but that they had to go.

(...) Then my uncle, who worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that there was room there.” Getting there was a difficult journey. The Buda Castle was burning above their heads, it was as if it was lit up. Finally, they got down to the air raid shelter. „There were a lot of them. High- ranking people. There was no water. It was a very, very cold winter.”

„The other one was terrible, a beautiful woman, she was seven months pregnant, she was taken by the Soviet soldiers. We never knew what happened to her. And how the Soviet soldier came down to give her a drink! In the end, he made do with a bottle of cologne. (...) The constant hunger. If we ate anything, it was dried beans boiled in water. (...) What I remember from Fazekas Street is that when it happened, it was again very emotional, (...) that the body of a little girl was lying in our little yard. And it turned out that it was Christmas Eve and her grandmother had sent her away, saying that until the angel came…”

 

Finding a place after the war

“The apartment on Margit körút, although it was a service apartment, bomb: boom. Everything was destroyed. We couldn’t go back there, we couldn’t go back to our grandmother. The five of us got a studio on Lovas út, which was Sziklay Sándor út for a while. (...) There we got a very wet studio apartment. Then our father got a summer house in Balatonalmádi and sent us as a family. Which was another great experience for me, because we went there in a horse-drawn carriage, we loved it. Then only later, when we grew up, did I remember my poor mother, what she suffered, alone. (...) And she was also afraid in the evenings. We turned off all the lights.” Finally, the second siege of Budapest, the 1956 revolution and its Soviet suppression proved fatal, because the interviewee took part in the movements (at Bródy Sándor Street) to get her sister out of there. Later, they were afraid that someone might have documented their presence, so they decided to defect; the interviewee settled in Paris with her then-husband. Finally, already divorced, she moved back to Hungary around 1973-74, remarried and started a new life in Budapest.