At 9 years old, I already knew about it. I could say like this as I had to bear only 7 short years, but even this 7 years haven’t seemed to me like a torture. My first encounter with my socialism happened when the white-hair Aunt Juci brought some sugarcane from Cuba to the school. It was in 1979. I was 7, spending my first months in school.

Actually, the sugarcane was bought by her husband. He came back from Cuba and his wife, who is my teacher brought a few pieces to share with us in a plastic bag. It was sliced to narrow sugarcane cookies. Aunt Juci was caressing our heads while she was distributing those cookies. I was a little disappointed because I found only the inner part of the sugarcane sweet enough, otherwise it tasted like a piece of wood. While I was fighting with this hard part, Aunt Juci made a remark,”We must be happy until János Kádár is still alive…”
In 10 years when János Kádár, the leader of the Hungarian communist party died, I was in Poland as a participant of a high-school student exchange program. My classmates came with the news and my first thought was Aunt Juci. For a few seconds, I expected something extraordinary..maybe an earthquake or something…but nothing happened. And nothing happened until much later…
I still had no idea about socialism even when my other teacher, Aunt Anci, spoke about it in the school. She was not totally grey, only one single mop of her hair was white that time, but that mop was always dancing and shaking in front of her face whenever she begins to speak very enthusiastically. Otherwise, Aunt Anci was totally gray. Gray hair, gray clothes even her face seemed to be gray in a way. She hardly smiled. I wouldn’t say that she was heartless or in any sense unsympathetic. She was just very plain, disciplined and implacably strict. Maybe the reason why communists did not need churches anymore was because they haven’t had sins anymore. Aunt Anci seemed to be someone without any sins, only unless if I consider her pride as one.
Once she gave us an assigment. We had to interview our grandparents about their experiences in the Second World War. We all had to write a short story about the wicked Germans and about the Soviet heroes who had set free this country. I was like 8 and it was Winter. I love working on this task a lot, I told my mother with a lot of enthusiasm in my voice that I had to talk to grandma. She said it was ok but before that, they have to remove the curtains from the cold room for washing.
They stepped onto chairs and giving the pieces of the curtains to each other while they removed them step by step. Meanwhile, I was doing my homework in the other room beside the hot tiled stove. Actually, we never used that room. There was no heating there, the bed was full of pillows, and those pillows where covered with handmade lace-cloth and all around you could find small sculptures, memories and presents. The room had a life only once. One day, people in suits arrived. Those whose trousers’ hems are jutting out in a way as they sat down making their grey socks visible. It was Summer but the room was still cool as always. I didn’t understand why my grandma made them sit there, usually during the summer, we used the little house out in the yard or the large round table under the walnut tree. But my grandma was too nervous. She didn’t have time to deal with us, though at any other time, she is always so patient with children. But now, she served the coffee in porcelain cups with shaking hands for the comrades. They came from the trade union….
At times I sneaked into that room. I couldn’t bear to be inside for too long because it was really cold, but the treasures on the shelves mesmerized me. My mother and her siblings had a debate on some porcelain after the death of my grandma. One of the issues was about a small sculpture of dancing shepherd. I don’t know why because I didn’t like those sculptures too much and on the other hand it was a group of three shepherds and my grandma had three children. My favourite was a lamp. It was an iron lamp which was actually a Chinese rickshaw pulled by a tired Chinese man and the rickshaw itself was the body of the lamp having a bulb inside.
On that wintery day in 1978, I did not managed to interview my grandma. I was very interested in the topic since everything related to war and soldiers were always very fascinating to me. I wanted to be a soldier, a border guard too. Not a regular soldier in brown uniform, but a green border guard. Like those soldiers from Pereszteg. They played football in the backyard of their camp in Dénesmajor. We have watched them with my father when my mom was calling after us since the Bors has started on the TV.
My mom conducted the interview with my grandma instead of me. I got it only second hand. She told me my grandma is too old, and these were hard times to remember for her. But my mom told me the whole story. She said there was nothing wrong with Germans. They acted like gentlemen in the village. Three soldiers set up a machine gun nest in their yard and an officier was accommodated in my grandma’s house. At times, they brought food to them and my grandma felt pity for the soldier whose dead body was laying for long in their backyard after they bombed the machine gun nest away.
But they were very afraid of Russians. Not from the first arrivals. They just arrived silently at night, rushed through the village and they have disappeared as fast as they appeared. But the second wave which arrived on the next day was terrible. They took everything they found. Fathers made the face of their daughters dirty with black coal, so as to make them looked ugly and dirty. Some young ladies were hidden to the backroom and the parents pushed the cupboards there to block the room’s door and they hoped the Russians would not recognise that there was actually an extra room. However, they recognised…..
Of course, Germans had their own stories to tell also. Before escaping from the village, they filled a whole railway wagon with bombs and ammunition. Then from the hill, they let the wagon run down into the village. But thank god, as the explosion happened right before the wagon reached the village, so nobody was injured in Királd. My mother recommended me to write this part of the stories as my assignment. She explained otherwise it would be too long, and it was really not nice to let that wagon down. I was still a bit disappointed that I couldn’t make the interview with my grandma by myself, such way there was no fight and gunfire in the story but imagining the exploding wagon was more than nothing.
Aunt Anci liked my story a lot. It was displayed on the wall for days among other successful writings too.
I became a conscious socialist when I was like 9. It was 1981 and if I remember well, it was the year when Bertalan Farkas as the first (and until now the last) Hungarian astronaut went to the space. Just at that time, we have a little cat and we named it after Farkas Bertalan as Berci. The world I used to live was still strong enough, so one day when I was walking home from the school, I was deep in my mind. I imagined that even in that moment, everyone was working in the country. Just a few seconds before a train full of coal was moving away in front of me heading to the power plant. Miners and factory workers were working and scientists and engineers may invent something very useful just today. Crossing the rails, I found myself very lucky that I was living in socialism. Here even the health service was for free! After all of these thoughts, I felt a little ashamed as to why I just walk so freely.
I had a light blue schoolbag on my back which had a little long strap. So when I had heavy books in my bag, it was hanging away, a slight distance from my back. My mom sends me to the school in blue training trousers and in a green light coat. The training outfit was not like a fancy Adidas or something with a logo. It was a noname brand and its back was hanging down in a way which made me looked sloppy and untidy.
That time I participated in football trainings. The football pre-school of the famous sport club of the city called TBSC. The guys attending the trainings were mostly from the new part of the city having fancy sports bag and shoes. When it was cold out there, they used a special cream called nicoflex or something, to prevent muscle contractions and injuries. I was one of the youngest among them and I didn’t have any sports bag. Just a purple, old fashioned sports shoe in an orange plastic tag of CENTRUM ÁRUHÁZ. My shoes were too slippery on the playground, so any time the ball was approaching, my I rather fall down because of my shoes. In that age, children are playing the football not with a teamwork but everyone is like a mass running after the ball. From a distance, it might look like two brushes on a large canvas dancing around a ball. From inside, all I could see was the dust. In a certain moment, the ball came nearer to me and I took the opportunity. I kicked the ball away. It was not like I had an intention or anything else other than kicking it further. It didn’t go too far since my legs were too weak and slim and that real leather ball seemed to be so heavy and huge to me. At home, we always play with a smaller gummy ball but I had to understand that in a real football pre-school we can’t play with gummy balls. An older guy (like 10-11) saw my movement and before he turned away he said to me:- Good job, little boy!
I was so damn proud that day. I had a feeling as if I have done something extraordinary since I could kick that huge leather ball. A real football even if I didn’t have any fancy shoes. I was the same proud when I was crossing the railway on that day, thinking of socialism. And in order for me to not feel lazy because of my ‘free’ walk, I started to march in a way like soldiers do. With that disciplined way of walking, I felt like I belong to all of this working men and scientists and in the future I will walk like this, always not to feel useless anymore.
This enthusiasm did not last for long. Just like a year after the Mundial in Spain brought a little part of the world into my life which I even didn’t know about before. A bit sooner, the football team of Tatabánya defeated the Real Madrid by 1:0 , they even sold T-shirts for this occassion. I had no money for T-shirts but I started to feel something what Real Madrid might be and those guys from the new part of the city, with their fancy sports bag and sports shoes, brought something else into the training room. They said the socialism was defeated by the Coca-Cola. I agree. But to me, Coca-Cola was still part of the system. It costs like 4 forints in the store called ABC if you didn’t bring away the bottle. It was an expensive drink since with 5 forints (later with 10 forints), every morning I could by milk and bread for breakfast at the school. But Coca-Cola was just like sportszelet, túró rudi, traubi szóda or téli fagyi in my childhood. America was far away and though I saw Kojak or Columbo on the TV…I know it sounds strange… but to me they were Hungarians. László Inke and Gyula Szabó. Just now..few days ago…being 36 I heard Peter Falk’s original English voice on a DVD. It was so weird and strange that I made the settings back to the Hungarian version and I felt it was not right with that original English Columbo voice.
To me, the real breakthrough was the Star Wars. That was when the walls started to have cracks and a new world started to come into my world on those holes. Once on a Christmas night, they showed Star Wars on the TV. We didn’t have videorecorders at that time yet, so I recorded only the soundtrack of the movie with my MK-29 cassette recorder. After the second replay, I could recall all the conversations.
Of course, the system was challenged from inside too. I was like 11 when I went to the ‘initiation ceremony’ of pioneers. It was my time, so my mom have bought new uniform for me. I had dark blue pants, white shirts and a special pioneer light brown belt. That time I didn’t know that being pioneer was in a way an introduction to militarism. My mom bought me even a whistle. A real pioneer whistle and I was very proud of it.
I went to the ceremony in my brand new uniform and it was bright sunshine. I just left our house when two older guys who were sitting on a bench stopped me:
- hey, listen! Are you a communist or what?
I got confused and I felt that they are sort of insulting me. Not me personally but the system. And they found me..the weak point of the system. Why they have asked even this? I didn’t know the answer. To be honest, I was always thinking about it and I even couldn’t make out any difference between socialism and communism. I heard several times from adults: ”if Lenin or Marx would know what are they doing in their names….”
But this didn’t bring me closer to the answer. I didn’t know what is communism and what is socialism. I felt like running away but in my brand new uniform it would have been ridiculous. So I stepped forward but in a while I turned back to them:
- I am socialist.
I was not too confident, but doesn’t matter the guys were laughing extraordinarily. I never wear my whistle anymore and I never wanted to be a communist again or socialist.
There was no marching anymore and though I still wanted to be a border guard, it was more about Rambo. From 1984 on, we watched rather Bud Spencer movies and my cousin had bought for me my very first videogame. We did not have computers at that time yet, but those small palm sized videogames were very popular. It had nothing to do with socialism anymore..it belonged to something new which came throught on those holes, and the system change in 1989 was rather just the explicit form of something which has already happened much longer before.
I didn’t deal with politics until 1988. Since that celebration day, I felt like I didn’t want to be pioneer anymore though I was disciplined enough to take part in every event. I was even a member of the drama club of the school and at times we visited local factories to perform for the workers.
In it, we were ‘the resistants’. I could say wisely that only 8-10 years kids can buy the shit they have sold, so everyone older was a resistant in a way or the other. I am not sure in this, being a teenager, maybe we would resist even in the heaven. And though I didn’t want to be a socialist anymore I wouldn’t say I have suffered from it.
Being a high school student, I didn’t join to the Communist Youth Organization. I could show it up as an evidence of my resistance but in fact, they even never invited me or bothered me. In 1990, at the end of everything after the final exams, the director of my high school expressed his congrats to a guy who has just got accepted to the Hungarian Communist party. It was like a last minute ticket to the Titanic.
In the last year in my high school, things started to move. I became enthusiastic again for a few months. With my classmates, we talked a lot about the new politics and we wanted to change that country a lot. I attanded to political meetings of the new opposites and I found it as a disaster that I was not 18 yet (few days missed) when the first elections has occured. I wanted very much the opposites to create an alliance against the communists and I didn’t understand why they have debates. I even went to Budapest to take part at a demonstration about Transylvania. It was strange to me…that why we talk about Transylvania and about the „large Hungary” ? Aren’t we here for beating the communist party? People were totally different from those who I saw in Tatabánya…a lot of „Hungarian teachers” with moustache and when these people have won the first free elections, I felt that my enthusiasm was gone just like on the day of my pioneer celebration. I didn’t want to be a socialist and neither a new democrat anymore…..