The escape from Hungary 1956

... without saying a word my son and I trudged behind the paid escape helper. Our eyes got used to the darkness and we  recognized without moonlight where to put the feet. The man stopped unexpectedly when we arrived in front of a cultivated, endless field . "You have to take that direc-tion", he showed along the boarder of the field. "Always straight on! Keep the direction: just straight ahead, just go on. You will reach the edge of the forest sometime! It was said that ap-parently the barbed wire and mines are removed meanwhile. I have not heard of any incidents since a couple of days." He bowed his head and stayed silent. "When you reach the woods, you have made it!" His description of our way to fridom seemed extremly simple! "Don't  let the sol-diers catch you", he added before desapearing in the dark.

We realized humidity and cold, darkness and loneliness. "We'll make it", my son motivated. Nod-ding  with the head in the rhythm "we make it", we walked step by step. We communicated by signs of our hands. With the eyes we scaned the area if there were any movements and cones of light. We dropped ourselves into a furrow, when we thought to discover soldiers. Aggravating was the fact, that I had sewn some family jewellery in the lower part of the coat lining. It hurted immensely when by creeping I pressed my kneecap on the pearl necklace. Why didn't  I take in consideration that I might creep on the floor?

Suddenly a solid grasp at my shoulder stopped me. My son pressed me on the ground, deep into the furrow. He pointed with his other hand to the danger of shipping: approximately fifty metres in front of us two soldiers searched with little headlights over the area. We experienced the peak of the fear when one of the men shot signal rockets into the air with a pistol. I pushed my whole body as flat as possible to a longish earth hollow. I closed my eyes because I did not want to see them coming towards us with their guns. " They will beat us with the butts, kick us with their boots and break all our bones ", occured it in my mind. Cold sweat ran over my forehead.

"You have reacted real good", I heared my son whispering into my ear, "as motionlessly as you have been, only dead bodies remain lying. He helped me to get up. "Tell me, are we free now?" "No mother. But the soldiers have gone." He stroked over mywet forehead, took me into the arms briefly and said: "We make it!" I trotted  beside him and we found our way back to the same rhythm. Unexpected he stood to the spot: "Look  there, Mamika, there are the woods the man told us! That means there is the national boundary! Liberty starts there!"