A Story to Tell; Part 5

We stopped in a border village, where most of the locals were ethnic Hungarians. Seeing the state of our little group, they ushered us into a vacated house, perhaps it belonged to a fleeing Nazi, and got us the local retired doctor, the only one for miles. The other woman wanted nothing to do with the birth, or with us. She wanted only to cross the border so she left us. The two of us drew straws and I drew the short one. I had to boil the water and stay in the door in case the doctor needed something. I was more nervous than the mother to be, in fact she encouraged me to stay calm! Luckily my services were not required! It was a baby girl! On the doctor's orders, we had to wait three days before we could take mother and child on the rickety cart to Hungary, so we settled in to wait until they were ready to carry on the journey. We left the horses on a long tether to feed in the lush green meadow. Having not been fed properly for months and now with access to a limitless amount of fodder, when we took water to them on the following day we found them grossly bloated. One of them was so bad that it had to be put down there and then. The other which was a younger horse, we managed to move about by pushing and pulling and wiping to get rid of some of its wind which it did, much to the delight of the watching local kids. We carried on with this exercise until we were exhausted, which in our condition, did not take long. The poor horse never really recovered. We put only the mother and child in the cart to make it easy for him on the dirt track and we walked beside it. The Hungarian border was soon in sight and to cross it we had to get across the deep tank trap that ran the length of the Austo-Hungarian border, that we knew so intimately. The dirt track led to a part that was somewhat filled in. We braked the cart to let it down slowly into the dip whipped the horse and we pushed to get up on the other side. It did not work at first. We were itching to get across, so we tried it again and the horse made a big effort, but heaved and collapsed. The cart pulled the prone horse back down the slope a few feet, we ran to it but he looked at us with his sad eyes, quivered a couple of times and it was all over. We were fond of him, but by this time we were accustomed to death. He almost brought us home bar a few meters.
There was no one around and there was nothing else to do but leave cart, horse and all. We helped the mother and child to the nearest farm in Hungary and made our way towards Budapest. It was the 1st June 1945 and we were back in our motherland. The dream that sometimes we could not believe, but could only hope for, came true. The half dead country was just awakening and we arrived in time. We saw the destruction along the road where we went and we looked forward to taking part very soon in the reconstruction of the country.

We followed the railway line until we found a train facing towards Budapest full of people. We joined the people on the roof of a passenger coach, lying across it. The train was pulled by a small steam engine only until the next blown up bridge across a river where we all disembarked, scrambled over the remnants of an iron bridge and waited on the other side for the next shuttle train. This was repeated some three or four times before we reached the outskirts of Budapest.

All along the homeward journey one of the saddest things was of people all kinds asking if we had seen any of their folks, their father ,their sons, their mother, their daughter, their grandparents and describing what they looked like. Unfortunately I cannot recall identifying any of the missing persons. We too, all of us on the roads and lanes of Europe, were missing!

I went back to the garage where I was still an apprentice, but because the physical state I was in and the state of the work-shop with few of my colleagues there, they suggested that I go home(?) to my granny. I thought I would go and see my aunt first who lived in the suburbs, Kispest. I thought they should be all right and perhaps they could help me as they were one of the all time communist comrades. As I went through the low front gate of the garden my aunt saw me from the veranda, screamed my name "Pista" and collapsed! She soon recovered, fed me, I had a cold bath (there was nothing to heat the water with), and she got out a mattress for me to sleep on. I had a long sleep but before they went to work early the next day they told me to go to my granny straight away as they could not feed me. So that was not my journey's end.
It took me another three days to cover the last 100 kms. to my home town, Dunafolvar but that was nothing really, having covered over 1500kms, much of it on foot, since last March. Some 5 kms from the town my hunger drove me up a roadside mulberry tree that was full of juicy ripe fruit. As I was feeding a cart approached and I recognized a school friend of mine driving it. I hailed him and it took him some time to recognize me before he let me on his cart, although he had seen me less than 10 months ago. It was both my loss in weight and my face covered with black mulberry juice!
The cart stopped outside my aunt's house, where my granny lived by then. I walked in surprising my aunt and my two cousins. They hugged me and were very pleased to see me. Granny? ...She died in March. Her last words were,........ She had seen me coming home.
I was home.

POST SCRIPT:

As you may recall from my first line, I have intended these accounts for my descendants, in reply to my six year old grandson, James's question (prompted by the fifty years anniversary celebrations of the armistice): "Papa what did you do during the war?"
To tell him at his tender age that the war caught me on the other side would have been difficult to explain so I got out of a straight answer by promising him to write about it.
This pleased my friend John Barrett, as he has been prompting me for years to write down my war experiences, saying Steve you have "A STORY TO TELL" I am most grateful for his encouragement and his and his wife's labours to read and correct my text, which was no mean task, considering my English and in particular my spelling, spell check or no!
True to John and all characters who encourage others to achieve something, John is further pressing me to describe how did I get to England. I hope I will be able to satisfy him eventually! - so watch this space...............

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