Only yards separate us but on one side lie George and Petra, their bodies engulfed in mud; their lives extinguished on Hungarian soil. Lying next to me, fighting for breath, is Milan, and, huddled in my lap, shivering, is Roza. The rain falls heavily, the sound of the wind broken only by our heavy breaths and the sobbing of a little girl. Our journey is at an end; a new journey awaits us. But for now, we stare back into the blackness, our eyes blind with the abrupt switch from light to dark, our hearts breaking.
Above us, the Austrian flag flaps in the breeze.
Epilogue: Friday, 16th June 1989
I vowed never to return to my country. I am English now – and proud of it. But I, along with thousands of other refugees, have returned to the nation of our birth for this solemn and symbolic ceremony. For today, almost thirty-three years after the Revolution, Imre Nagy is to be honoured with a funeral befitting a man of his stature. There must be tens of thousands lining the routes, and here in Heroes’ Square, paying our last respects to the great man who, more than anyone, symbolised the hope and the ultimate defeat of the Uprising. Alongside him, four other coffins of leading participants from those far-flung days, and next to them, a further coffin – an empty one to commemorate the three hundred or more victims of state retribution during the chaotic days following 4 November 1956. Today, the whole country stands and remembers. Shops and businesses are closed, schools have been given the day off. In the Square, flowers and wreaths everywhere, Corinthian pillars decked in black and white, Hungarian flags with the central Soviet emblem removed, bowed heads united by grief and ingrained memories.
Yet, Imre Nagy died exactly thirty-one years ago on 16 June 1958, less than two years after the communists, with their Soviet masters, had quashed the uprising and re-established one-party rule. By this time, I was in London, in Camden with my ‘daughter’, Roza.
After that fateful night of the 4th November, we stayed in Austria until the following year, helped financially and emotionally by the Red Cross and other sterling organisations. We lost contact with Milan within hours of being taken in and never saw him again.
It was a time of recuperation, of assessment, it was a time when our emotions felt numb, each one of us coming to terms with the horrors we’d seen, the friends and homes we’d lost, and the freedom that lay ahead of us. At the time, a future of freedom seemed no less daunting than the totalitarian past we’d escaped from. But it was the children separated from their parents who suffered most, unable to comprehend the new world around them. Roza fell into a silent, dark world of her own. For months, she didn’t talk, didn’t smile, barely ate. I was never asked whether Roza was my child; it was simply taken for granted. By the time we arrived in England, we’d both slipped into the assumed roles of mother and daughter, and neither of us ever sought to correct the mistake.
Meanwhile, in Hungary, the communists returned, the AVO re-emerged in their uniforms and, with their Soviet friends, plucked out leading insurgents for execution and scores more for deportation to Russia. They exhumed the bodies of their fallen colleagues and reburied them with full military honours. By the end of the year the Iron Curtain was back in place but not before over 200,000 men, women and children had escaped into Austria. Nagy had found asylum in the Yugoslavian embassy but was kidnapped and held by the Hungarian communists for almost two years before they put him on trial that was as secret as it was pointless. In June 1958, they executed him and his ‘fascist counter-revolutionary’ followers and unceremoniously dumped the bodies. He was 62. (Only last year, on the thirtieth anniversary of Nagy’s death, the police used terrible violence to break up a ceremony in honour of his memory.) In November 1958, the communists won 99.8% in a single-party election. Everything in Hungary was back to normal.
In January 1959, in London, I met James, my future husband. Roza, by this time an Anglophile thirteen-year-old, accepted him as the perfect stepfather and she more than made up for our own lack of children. In 1976, Roza married a quiet Scotsman called Robert. It took me six months before I understood a word he said. Four years later, they presented us with a grandson – George. James and I had twenty-five happy years together before cancer took him away from me a week before our silver anniversary in 1985.
When last year, Roza became pregnant for the second time, she told me the doctors had said it would be a girl. She asked me for a suggestion for a name. Idly, I offered the name closest to my heart. Roza immediately pounced on the idea and Robert, always too timid to contradict his wife, readily agreed. Despite my best efforts to disincline them, the name stuck. And hence, forty years later, Anastasia was re-born.
When news reached us of today’s ceremony, we returned to our country, something we’d never dare hope for. And now, in Heroes’ Square, we stand and remember – Roza, her baby, nine-year-old George, and me. Roza, I know, is thinking of her parents, Zoltan and Petra, and I can’t help but feel a slight stab of jealousy – even after all these years.
As we listen to the eulogies and watch the solemn laying of flowers, we feel for perhaps only the second time in our lives proud to be Hungarian. We listen to the speeches – words criticising the government and the continued interference of the Soviet Union, and demands for multi-party elections – echoes of 1956; words inconceivable even a few weeks ago.
And now the minute silence.
I remember the two men of my youth – both footballers who once played opposite each other. I remember the afternoon in the Hotel Astoria; the Café of the Revolution; the boy, Tibor, who denounced his parents for their own salvation; the night I stepped on George’s foot; the silhouetted watchtowers on that final night, Roza in my arms, her mother lying dead next to George only yards away in a different country, another world.
And I remember my little girl. Sixteen days. I am sixty-three now; Anastasia would be forty, three years younger than Roza. Roza is not my daughter, her children not my grandchildren, but my love for them is as real as any mother or grandmother. Through tragedy, God brought us together and together we found our salvation and made our future. Thirty-three years on, Roza is with me still, her baby, Anastasia, not yet one, in her arms.
I don’t believe in reincarnation but sometimes I wonder. I used to believe that my Anastasia lived only in my memory and that once I die, her brief spell on this Earth would be swept away with the wind, her existence forever obliterated.
But now, at last, I’m not so sure.
THE END
Other works by Rupert Colley
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‘Two brothers. One woman. A nation at war.’
A compelling story of war, brotherly love, passion and betrayal during World War One.
I’m the author of several historical novels and works of non-fiction. I’m also the founder of the History In An Hour series.
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I was born one Christmas Day, which means, as a child, I lost out on presents. Nonetheless, looking back on it, I lived a childhood with a “silver spoon in my mouth” – brought up in a rambling manor house in the beautiful Devon countryside.
It’s been downhill ever since.
I was a librarian for a long time, a noble profession. Then I started a series called History In An Hour which I sold, along with my soul, to HarperCollins UK.
I now live in London with my wife, two children and dog (a fluffy cockapoo) and write historical fiction, mainly 20th century war and misery.
The photo is of a much younger me as a wannabe New Romantic. I look a bit older now.
Do feel free to email me: [email protected]
Thank you for purchasing this novel and taking the time to read it.
With kindest regards,
Rupert.
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