Béla and Krisztina’s 100th Anniversary

Hungary was in turmoil in 1920. In the aftermath of WWI the country was occupied by the Romanians and then by the Russian Communists. The Treaty of Trianon, the agreement that the Hungarians would be forced to sign that summer would give away half their land and 2/3 of the Hungarian people would be living outside her borders. The future was uncertain.

Béla & Krisztina, 1 June 1920

But it was springtime in Budapest. Amid the post-war rubble there were flower vendors on street corners and outdoor tables at the cafes. Life went on. And on Akácfa utca (Acacia Tree Street) romance was in the air. 29 year old Béla András Édes was recently widowed. Along with his partner he owned a growing typewriter sales and service business at #13. Across the street at #12 was the Három Huszár Vendéglő (The Three Hussars Restaurant). The restaurant manager was Krisztina Kancsal, a blue-eyed 26 year old from a town in western Hungary. The oldest of 10 children, she was used to taking charge and didn’t suffer fools lightly.

The Balaton Étterem in 1970s took over the location of The Három Hussár restaurant

Béla was born on February 28, 1891in the city of Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca, Romania) in the Transylvania region of eastern Hungary. He was the third of six children of Zsigmond Édes and Anna Terk. When he was twelve his father died of pneumonia, leaving Anna a widow with six children from three to seventeen years old. In the next year the family moved to Budapest where his parents had lived years earlier. A few years later Béla and his older brothers worked for a while in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1911 twenty year old Béla was employed there as a locksmith but in 1915 he was back living in Budapest when his sister Anna died of TB at only 17.

Around this time Béla had been married with two daughters but his wife and children all died of illness. I have not yet found any record of any of them and don’t know their names. Béla’s mother, Anna Terk, died in November 1919 followed by the death of his favorite brother Imre, a ship’s captain, in May 1920. Perhaps the loss of so many family members encouraged Béla to get married again sooner rather than later.

Desk calendar from the firm of Édes and Decsy 1949

Krisztina was born February 21, 1894 in Hahót in Zala county near the Austrian border. She was the first child of blacksmith István Kancsal and his wife Teréz Vörös. In the following years two brothers were born; Gyula and István. Then a sister Irén was born but died in infancy. In 1903 their mother Teréz died when Krisztina was nine years old. With three young children István couldn’t wait long for a new wife. Less than four months later he married Julia Lazár.  Julia bore him six children over the next 15 years. Krisztina would have had lots of chores helping out with such a large family.

Her brother István moved to Budapest when he was about 16. The family story was that their stepmother Julia told him to leave. With all those young children of her own to feed she apparently did not want to continue to feed an always hungry teenage boy. We don’t know when Krisztina moved there but it was likely that she was there for several years before she became the restaurant manager at the Három Huszár. Meanwhile István worked for Béla as a mechanic before starting his own business. Béla was kind and generous to Krisztina’s family and they respected him. Both István and a younger sister Karolin chose him to witness their weddings, and István named a son after Béla.

The Budapest Civil Registry shows that Krisztina and Béla married on Tuesday, June 1, 1920. Witnesses were Béla’s partner, Kalman Decsy, and Krisztina’s boss, Lajos Grill. It was traditional for weddings to be held in the home town of the bride’s family. But Krisztina’s life was now in Budapest and she did not seem to have a close relationship to her step-mother. The record doesn’t say where the wedding took place but as they were both Roman Catholic it was likely at their church. Don’t you think that there was a fun party that night at the Három Huszár with great food, music and dancing?

A year after their wedding their only child was born, my father Endre. Béla and Kalman’s business continued to grow. Endre excelled in school and became a doctor during World War II. After the war the political situation became intolerable. Endre refused to join the communist party that occupied Hungary. He escaped the country and immigrated to Canada in 1948 where he married my mother and pursued a career in medicine. After the 1956 Hungarian Uprising Béla and Krisztina left their once prosperous lives in Budapest and joined our family in Canada. When our family moved to the United States in 1963, they stayed on in Saskatchewan.

Béla and Krisztina’s 50th Anniversary, June 1970 – Prince Albert, SK, Canada

In 1970 our family drove from Arizona, where we were then living, to Béla and Krisztina’s home for a family celebration of their 50^th wedding anniversary. Now, 50 years later, I would encourage you to raise a toast to the romance that a century ago led to the start of our family.

Rozsa Dobokay , an Educated Woman

My great-grandmother Rozsa Dobokay was born on September 4, 1857 in the city of Brassó (now Brasov, Romania) the only child of Zoltan Tamás and his wife Heidi.  Rozsa was baptized in the Hungarian Reformed Church.

At that time Brassó was on the eastern border of the Kingdom of Hungary with the Kingdom of Romania. Zoltan worked there as a customs agent. Heidi was the daughter of a professor of German. At a time when most of the population was engaged in farming, the Dobokay family was more educated than most.

Portrait of a Woman in Lilac by Szinyei Merse Pal 1874

Rozsa was fluent in French and German and made her living as a governess. The family story is that she taught the children of a Transylvanian baron. Perhaps it was on the baron’s estate that she met György Orbán, a widower with a 2 year-old daughter, Ilona.

It seems like an unlikely match. She was protestant. He was Catholic. She came from an educated family. He worked as a groundskeeper and shoemaker. Perhaps Rozsa liked little Ilona and was ready to leave her position and start her own family. She was older than the usual marriageable age and given the sentiment of the times other marriage offers were perhaps not likely.

Most likely they were married in 1892 but we don’t know where the wedding took place. Rozsa was 35 and György was 32. Their only child together was my grandfather Balázs who was born on June 9, 1893 in Etéd. She and Gyorgy would have been very proud to have a son.

Gyorgy died in 1916 at the age of 55. Rozsa lived another decade as a widow in Etéd.

In 1923 Balázs married Erzsébet Nagy. According to family stories, Rozsa was a bit of a snob and refused to meet Balázs’ wife Erzsébet Nagy whom she considered to be a peasant. We don’t know if she ever met her granddaughters.

Balázs and Erzsébet had their first daughter, Elizabeth in November 1923. Their second child, another girl, Ibolya (Violet) was born 2 years later. When the baby was only 6 months old Balázs left for Canada in August 1926. Rozsa died of pneumonia a month later. She was 69 years old.

We have no photograph of Rozsa but this painting by a Hungarian artist of the time evokes the dress and the setting of her life as a governess.

 

Dad the ‘Football Fan Deserter’

 

A while back I published my father’s Curriculum Vitae in which he described his escape from communist Hungary.  Last week my friend György found these two articles published in Hungarian newspapers about the event that my father described and the subsequent investigation.

Here’s the official story as translated by my brother’s friend Anikó.

It is known that two groups totaling several hundred fans traveled to last week’s football game held in Vienna, on a so called collective passport. One group was organized by Rapid Travel, 220 of them took a chartered train ride from the Capital. The other group’s trip was organized by MAV (Hungarian Rail Authority) Konzum Coop and completed on a boat. This group had 377 people. At the beginning of the week after the chartered train and boats have recrossed the Hungarian border on their return trip, the Passport Office’s representatives concluded that of the total number of visitors, 38 failed to return to Hugary. For the time being we only know the identities of six people, those took the trip courtesy of Rapid Travel, to attend their first ever football game. 

The names of the boat deserters, 27 men and 5 women have not been released yet, their cases remain under investigation. 

Among the deserters from the charter train was Dr Endre Edes, a clinical doctor, whose colleagues said he had been preoccupied by thoughts of escape for a while. Also escaped with premeditated plans the former owners of the nationalized Pal Fisher cotton and wool factory, Marcel Fisher and Karoly Paradi. They have been methodically emptying their apartment for the past three weeks and boarded the train with several suitcases. Also escaped Laszlo Simon, secretary of the Trade Union, who falsly told his acquaintances that he would be moving to the west of the Danube region. 

Also failed to return from Vienna Andras Lakatos police lieutenant, who is especially guilty of fooling his superiors into promoting him, received permission from the secretary of the Police Association as an “accomplished athlete” to view the Austria-Hungary soccer game. He had mentioned on multiple occassions that he has relatives in Australia and at first opportunity he will escape to join them. The sixth escapee Mrs Pal Rados, “amateur” english teacher, also remained in Vienna. Of course she, as the others “forgot” to return from Vienna. 

Saturday – World (section)

The full list of “Football Fans Deserters” have been fully identified by police.

Three of them wanted to return back home.

The escapees also smuggled out western hard currency and valuables.

A full force investigation was launched to establish the identities of the 41 deserters who attended the Austria-Hungary football game in Vienna, that also widened to reveal those who helped plan this mass desertion. Some of the audience members took a boat while others traveled on a train to attend the Vienna game. 

The group should have initiated their return departure at Monday 9AM. At that point it became known that several members went missing from both the boat and the train. The boat waited three additional hours for the missing passengers. By then it was evident that these passengers declined to return home, thus the boat departed without them. A similar scene played out at the train departure as well. The train’s group agreed to meet in the lobby of Hotel Central, when they discovered that 9 fewer people showed up. 

[cut-off sentence here… ends with] Marcel Stern Fisher, whose factory was recently nationalized. The investigation uncovered that Fisher had stolen high value share certificates along with several thousand Forints from his factory’s safe, half of which he handed over to fellow house mate textile technician Karoly Faradi, who joined him in the escape.

Preparing to Desert…

Police determined after interrogating several witnesses that the deserters have been preparing for this illegal escape from Hungary for an extended period of time. The majority of them smuggled their money out in advance, and now they plan to catch up with those funds. It became evident that several of the deserters appeared to have fled to acquaintances waiting for them in the west. The Police HQ’s Passport Department – as it is already known -had spent the utmost care to background check all of the passengers personal details and their reliability, only those received permit to travel [sic].

The participants were only allowed to board the boat after they offered personal guarantees that they would not smuggle any foreign currency or other valuables out of Hungary on them. To ensure security, a secondary search was performed on the boat, and those who had foreign currency  [cut off here]. 

* * * * 

Deserters Official List of Names

The organizers of the event immediately reported the case to the proper department of the Police HQ as soon as they returned to Budapest, and began assembling the deserters list of names. The Passport Department gave its official report to the Ministry of the Interior on Wednesday noon, and received orders to immediately begin investigating the circumstances of this large-scale desertion. 

World was the first to report on Wednesday the Vienna Football Train’s known names, and this morning the Police HQ issued the list containing the remaining names:

[see list of names and their former home addresses]

People from the Countryside:

In addition to those, the following passengers from the countryside also deserted [list of names from various towns and villages]. Among them were the already reported deserters Dr Endre Edes physician from Kispest, Mrs Pal Rados from Budapest, and Dr Laszlo Simon from Budapest [cut off here].

* * *

Thanks to both György and Anikó for this amazing story.

Zsigmond Joins the Navy

Greetings from Pola

Zsigmond Édes was 17 when he went to Pola and joined the Navy. Military service wasn’t required until age 19 but my great-grandfather would have had good reasons to enlist. Joining the Navy allowed him to avoid being drafted into the army. He probably also wanted to “see the world” as promised by Navy recruiters.

The Navy would have been a good fit for him. Growing up in Vukovar along the Danube he would have had experience on the water. I imagine him as a young boy playing with toy boats with his older half-brother János, and watching the ships cruise by. He may even have worked on boats with his uncles.

The Imperial and Royal War Navy, as it was called, was established after the 1867 Ausgleich, which created the Dual Monarchy of Austria and Hungary. The name in German was kaiserliche und königliche Kriegsmarine, abbreviated as k.u.k. Kriegsmarine. In Hungarian it was Császári és Királyi Haditengerészet.

Twins in the Family

I found twins! While working on a story about my great-grandfather Zsigmond Édes I rechecked the birth index from Vukovar where he was born. I stumbled upon an index reference to twin sisters, Rosina and Anna, which I had not noticed earlier.

I followed the reference and found that the twins were indeed baby sisters of Zsigmond.

Hungarian History in Minutes

Check out this link for a3D time travel experience through Hungarian History.  I like to come back to this every now and then. Always notice something new.

 

Escape – My Father’s Story

My father was a young physician in Budapest during WWII when standing up for your principles was dangerous. He escaped in 1948. This is the story as he told it in his curriculum vitae soon after his arrival in Canada.

I was born on the 14th day of July, 1921, in Kispest, a city with a population of 70,000 – a suburb of the Hungarian capital Budapest. Being the only son of middle-class parents, who were merchants; I had every opportunity to pursue the career to which I felt most drawn.

At the age of six, I entered elementary school; where a four year course of studies was followed, as a preparation for middle school. In my native country, as in other Central European and most Western European countries, there prevails this middle or Intermediate school, (called “Gymnasium” ) a system assigned to give a preliminary education for University during an eight year course. I graduated from this school with the best qualifications obtainable.

Dr. Endre Édes ~ age 25

I enrolled at the Medical Faculty of the University of Budapest, and in September 1939, started my studies there in medicine. This course consisted of five years of University study, and one year of compulsory rotating internship.

During my third year as student, I was rewarded with one of the six scholarships, sponsored by the City Council of the Capital, which covered all my University expenses. In October, 1944, I graduated from the University with the qualifications, “Summa cum Laude”, among the first four of a group of 120 graduates.

Soon after my graduation, I was drafted into the Army, but refused to enter.

Then and Now: The Killer Lake

The Killer Lake, Gyilkostó in Hungarian, is high in the Hargita Mountains in the Székely region of eastern Transylvania. The name in Romanian is Lacul Roșu, or Red Lake. The ‘red’ color comes from the sediment of the Red Creek that feeds the lake, although it really is more of a murky brown. Of course the ‘bloody’ color is also the origin of the more creative Hungarian name.

A massive landslide in the 19th century caused the entire mountain side of trees land in the lake upside down. The tree stumps are easier to see in this picture of my parents in 1983. 31 years later the stumps are disappearing. I’m glad we got there before they were all gone.

This is one of my favorite pictures of my parents. They looked very happy. Dad was very hip in those flared leg pants and sideburns. It was Dad’s first time back to Hungary since he escaped in 1948, and Mom’s first time visiting her parents’ homeland.

We were happy too. We spent the day driving the crazy mountain roads with my dear cousin and her amusing husband. And this picture is one of my favorites from the trip.

Dancing with my Ancestors

The Seven Dancing Hajdú in the town square of Hajdúbosormény, with a couple of extras.

In Eastern Hungary close to the great plains, in the town square of Hajdúbosormény, the 7 Hajdú warriors are dancing. There is one for each of the original 7 villages built on the land donated by Bocskay István in the 1600s. The dancers are rugged and fierce and carry their weapons of war. They all wear big bushy very Hungarian looking moustaches.

These are the people of my oldest named grandmother, Kerekes Katalin who was born in nearby Hajdúhadhaz.

The beautiful baroque buildings on the square contrast with the shabbier businesses and homes elsewhere in town. Around the corner, the building that houses the Hajdúsag museum is in need of a paint job. It looked so sad we were surprised that it was really open. But, we were in luck.  We had the place to ourselves and were amazed at the quality of the exhibits in such an out of the way place.

Artist’s conception of bronze age couple with tools and adornments found in archeological dig in Hajdú region.

A special exhibit told of excavations of the Bronze-age treasures being discovered in nearby ancient burial grounds. An animated video in Hungarian told the story of those ancient people.

There were many exhibits of life in the Hajdú towns.

Illustration of men’s uniforms.

Beautifully embroidered ladies’ capes and men’s heavy fur coats helped keep them warm in winter. The massive fur coat on display had a pest strip tucked inside for protection.

Hajdú lady’s embroidered fur cape. “kisbunda”

An exhibit of an old style hut and household equipment gave an idea of what life in the area would have been like.

Village life. Corn grinder and bee hives.

I estimate my hajdú heritage to be about  0.1%. I’m proud of that little bit of these brave proud people.

Growing up in a Hungarian community we would go to parties where the grownups danced the csardás, dancing and stomping their feet as the gypsy fiddler played faster and faster. I can imagine the hajdú dancing to the music and keeping up just fine.

Note: The museum website had pictures of some of their exhibits but at the time of this post the site was infected with malware. 

Then and Now: Székelykerestúr

My great-grandparents Tivadar Nagy and Borbala Both shown in front of their home in Székelykerestúr sometime in the 1960s. The woman standing is Tivadar’s niece.

This page from my parents photo album from 1983 showed that the place was showing its age.