Say to Them: Survive.  Interview with Zsuzanna Budapest

Edited By Lezlie Kinyon, Ph.D., and Laurie Dietrich, Coreopsis Journal  

On the 1956 Hungarian Revolution …

      Known for her feminist writings and work in women’s spirituality, Zsuzsanna “Z” Budapest has come many miles and many years from her childhood home in Budapest, Hungary. We at CMJT were privileged to spend some time in conversation with Z, talking about her childhood after the Second World War and during the uprising in her native Hungary in 1956.

      Most Americans have little or no knowledge of what has come to be called the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. In 1944, the soviet troops invaded Hungary as a “liberation army” and imposed a Soviet-style government in Budapest, declaring a “People’s Republic” led by First Secretary of the Hungarian Communist party Matyas Rakosi. Rakosi immediately began to imprison and generally purge intellectuals, activists, and religious leaders who criticized the Soviet occupation.

      It was a difficult time in Hungary, as it was in all of Eastern Europe: the region’s countries, once many independent states were now Soviet satellites under Stalinist rule: the spoils of war.  The people of Hungary were reeling from the devastation left by NAZI occupation, many areas were depopulated and those who were left were starving and living in ruins. In the great cities, once centers of culture and commerce, the people scraped by as best they could with little money, basic resources for daily life, and less hope.  Anger and despair festered. At the height of the Cold War, on March 5, 1953, Joseph Stalin died. Hope sprang up all over Eastern Europe – and, beyond – that this would signal a loosening of the iron grip of the Soviet state. Between June of 1953 and November of 1958 general strikes and protests broke out from Berlin to Prague. Nikita Khrushchev replaced Stalin and hope strengthened for reform. Budapest, once a renowned center for art, culture and learning, now a ruin and her people starving, was ripe for revolt. When reformist Imre Nagy was appointed prime minister, and fueled by promises from the US covert CIA agents promising arms and help from the West, hope further swelled.  On October 23, 1956, 200,000 people — students, activists, and many others — began a march to demand the ousting of Soviet troops and an independent Hungary. By afternoon, the mood had changed to anger. On October 25, Soviet troops moved in with tanks – as they had in Poland and East Berlin and would do in Prague a decade later – and fired on the crowd.  

For the next three decades, as a consequence of the crushing of the revolution, the history of the events of 1956 was effectively sealed to Hungarians. Even to mention the name of Imre Nagy in public was to risk punishment. Only after the collapse of the Communist regimes in Hungary and the region in 1989 did it become possible to begin to excavate the archival records and bring out the facts. Since then, previously inaccessible records of the Soviet leadership as well as of other Warsaw Pact member states has become available that give a much clearer picture than was ever imagined possible of what happened in the corridors of power in Moscow, Budapest and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Even in the United States, government records have recently been re-reviewed and released in more complete form, and personal archives have produced documentation on RFE and other topics that help throw light on the U.S. response and the role of Hungary in the superpower conflict. (Byrne, 2002)

In the wake of the Suez Crisis and the bombing by the British and French of Egypt, Eisenhower withdrew support from the Hungarian activists. A brutal massacre ensued and the revolt was crushed. While a brief period of reform did occur in Hungary under Nagy, he was hanged by the Kremlin for his role in the uprising in November of 1958. Eisenhower claimed that he had avoided a major war in Europe. In contrast, Charles Gati, who escaped Hungary as a refugee and is now at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, says that Suez played no role in the US refusal to intervene.

“The truth is that at a critical juncture in the Cold War, when Hungarians rose against their Soviet oppressors, the United States abandoned them,” he wrote in the Washington Post. (Reynolds, 2006)

It is estimated that as many as 200,000 Hungarians died or escaped into Austria over the next year.

In 1989, Hungary did find her independence and the Soviet state crumbled over the next decade. The Cold War was over.

This is the story of one woman, daughter of the very famous artist Maria Szilagy, who was born a year before WWII began, who witnessed the occupation of  Budapest, first by NAZIs and then by the Red Army, and who participated in those events prior to escaping Hungary as a teen, eventually settling in California just in time for the social upheavals of the mid-twentieth century.   ( ~ The Eds.)

CMJT: Our readers, of course, know you and your work, but what would you like us to know about your current projects? Where can we find out more? (web links, podcasts, etc.)

Z: I am focused on a very ambitious project. I like to attract artists and animators, directors and writers to this bucket list desire.

I have been incubating Baba Boogie and the Berkeley Broads satirical comedic animation for grown-ups and sophisticated millennials. If you click on babasnation.com the project will be be there with my first stab at raising funds for it on-line. It is very important to me because the age of the books is now waning. There always will be books of course but in my lifetime this changeover is already visible. Here is the ground zero for the new collective awareness of the 21st century.

Rape culture totally eliminated grandmothers from the TV screen. (It’s only Golden Girls from the ‘80s, doesn’t count). I am now a Crone myself, I would like to bring back Baba Boogie and her sisters in comedy and political satire. We are only three women on staff, but I think I will need ten more. In my humble life I don’t really know wealthy women. All I need is a couple of Goddesses with money and we can create this, nurture the show and grow into success like The Simpsons.

I think this will count as major reclaiming of the Grandmother archetype.

CMJT: The subject of this issue of Coreopsis is the experience of women artists in war and under oppressive regimes. As a woman and an artist, we wanted to engage in conversation with you about your experiences during the conflicts that shaped the 20th century. In workshops and in lectures, we have heard some of your experiences in Hungary as a young person in WWII, could you tell us more about that?

Did you find yourself at odds with the Soviet State after the War?

Z: I was born just a year before WWII broke out, and into a horrific time where we lost everything. My parents lived on the sixth floor in a very upper-class building, which was erased by carpet bombing. Soviet occupation was scary, I was very young but I understood that my mother and her sister were in danger. We put my skinny mom underneath the mattress and I was sitting on top of that. Russian soldiers were looking for women to “peel potatoes” but we knew it was not that, since men could peel potatoes just as well. They (*The NAZI invaders — Ed.)were looking for women to rape. War and rape, the males are paid off with the conquered women.

      When the war really started in the city my mom fought her way back to where she was from, northeast Hungary. But her ancestral home was burned to the ground. She then started fighting for us to have a place to stay, and my life got much better. I had a garden now to play in. But mother got very ill, cholera. I was taken away lest I catch it too, and stayed with well-meaning peasants. I did not see my parents for a few years. Those years given me priceless memories of life in the countryside, some celebrations and pagan customs. Childcare didn’t exist back then, I was raised in complete freedom. They fed me and opened the door to the little village, and said go play. I did. I learned to be alone and have a good time. I made a best friend of a little snow-white goat kid, Rozsi, she and I wandered together. She could always take us home.

      After the war times were even worse. No food in the city, my grandmother died of starvation. My parents then decided that I needed to start school. They enrolled me into a nunnery, in Pecel.  This was the first time I was exposed to kids my age. Hundreds of them. In the nunnery they showed us how to create altars to the Queen of Heaven. Great fun. There was food and running water, they bathed us once a month in big aluminum tubs. I met my first beloved girlfriend Eva. I fell in love with her big sister who was 18 years old. My heart was full.

It didn’t last too long. But it was enough to lay a foundation for me to pray with confidence to the Great Goddess, make up rhymes and songs, sing in their choir, and not listen to what they were selling to us; sinfulness, guilt, and a lot of sins. My friends and I used to make up sins to confess because the old drunk priests were snoring through our confessions. We had a lot of giggling. Then they gave me a book as a present, “Children on the Road to Sainthood.” I just put it away, never read it. But my mother did. When she opened the book and started reading the horrific stories of masochistic kids wanting to suffer like Jesus, she lost it. She found our Mother Superior, whom I had not seen even once — I think she was in bed with a stroke — and tore the pages one by one from the book and made them into little bombs, and pelted poor Mother Superior, cussing her out for the garbage they were giving me. They expelled me that day. A big loss. No more forest, no more blessed virgin games. No more girlfriends.

CMJT: Your mother was an artist, please tell us about her?

Z:  My mother was a great artist. Before I was born she already had her own studio, she had created installations in the city. Then she married my father and became pregnant rather fast. Then the war came.

She decided to work in their Cafeteria of Radio Budapest , where there was food and she could sneak me a meal on the sly. I remember smelling the intoxicating scent of mushrooms cooking in butter. She stole me two bites.

      Under the Russians, intellectuals and aristocrats were despised. Mom, as an artist, counted as an intellectual, and my father who owned some land and had a good old Hungarian name counted as an aristocrat. I was told that I would never be able to go to the university because of this unfortunate background.

CMJT: In your own words, could you tell us about your experience of the 1956 Revolution?

Z. When I was eleven years old I moved in with my mother, who had just got married a doctor. This was the first time I felt I had a family. Stepfather was a wonderful guy, he sang arias while doing a handstand. He wanted to be an opera singer. But instead he became an orthopedic surgeon. I sang along with him. He was sent to North Korea to help fight the US. When he returned after a year and a half he had bad Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, he was over-sexualized, he wanted to fuck every female he met. His marriage was falling apart. I felt sorry for both of them. But then I was growing up. When I was 16 a strange thing happened. As I was leaving the school, right in front there was a young man passing out leaflets. Leaflets! This had not ever happened before. Supposedly they had a permit to gather on the BEM plaza . I took the leaflet back to my class and gave it to the teacher who read it aloud. We could not believe our eyes. It demanded that Russians go home. A deep wish in our hearts. We all hated the Russians.

      The entire class decided to go to this meeting on the BEM plaza. When we got there, there was no more room. It was filled. A poet stood on top of a car reciting a poem. I could hardly hear him. The crowd decided to march across the Duna river, on the Margit Bridge, to the Parliament, and demand that they put out the red star and hang out the Hungarian flag. This went on for a long time. In the meantime the radio broadcast that the gathering permit was withdrawn . At this point we were about ten thousand people, mostly young, but older folks as well, and I knew they now had the right to kill us all.

      At 16 years of age I still felt immortal. But I knew what was going to happen, and I started dropping back away from the thick of the crowd. Later that day I had a “date” with my mother for dinner, near her workplace, on the Buda side. I started going back.

      This night the Secret Police came and massacred a lot of us. Four of my classmates were killed. I found my mother and she was greatly relieved that I was not shot. We cried together and shared some wine. I stayed in the city until November 19th. When I walked on the Ulloi Ut, one of our widest, most modern boulevards, I saw what the tanks had done to us. Apartment houses showed their secrets: the bathrooms hanging down into full view. People were killed eating dinner, bodies everywhere. I stepped on something, which then flipped back against my legs. I looked down and it was the severed arm of somebody. I got so deeply frightened, I swore: “I will not stay, I will escape this, I will not be 16 years old in this dump.”

CMJT: Do you harbor feelings today regarding the US involvement in the 1956 Revolution?

Z: I do.

      Radio Free Europe was beaming lies to us. ‘Just stick it out a little more, the Americans have elections now’, but afterwards, when Eisenhower was elected, we all thought we were going to get help. There were no liberating army massing at our borders.

It was a full moon on the 20th of November 1956. I prayed to my grandmother, asking her to protect me. Before the sun came up I left the house, and started walking to the West.

For many years I hated all Russians until in San Francisco I found them as emigrants. They said they had nothing to do with the occupations, and indeed they didn’t. It took many years to forgive them for being Russians. America’s betrayal? That wasn’t a surprise. Once I met Americans I knew that they had been kept in the ignorance.

CMJT: How have these experiences influenced your art and work in the women’s spirituality movement over the years? (Or, have they?)

      What all this horrific experience gave me is a devotion to survive. When I came to California for the first time I felt this is the place I actually belonged. The people were friendly, and when feminism caught its wings in Los Angeles, I flew on that current myself. I realized feminists needed a spirituality that would sustain us. The Blessed Virgin was already here, in the form of the Lady of Guadalupe. But what I envisioned right away was a Global Goddess, all ethnic groups spiritually centered around a Great Mother. I have devoted myself to discovering and reclaiming a matriarchal philosophy. All there is is the Great Mother and her children. That’s what humanity is all about. There are no “men”. There are only variations on the female. As mother said, it’s the women who are the real human beings.

She never said she was a feminist but I think this was pretty right on .

CMJT: Today, when you visit the place where these events took place, how does it make you feel?

Z: I have visited back home many times since the revolution. First it was sweet. Oh Goddess look how well I have survived. Then came the feeling of where are my old friends? I had one very dear girlfriend, we met when we were nine years old, and stayed friends until I left the country at 16. She was married by then, and when I told her I was a lesbian she cut all ties with me. That hurt like hell. My half brother was never a close friend. We were raised separately, each of us an only child. After my parents passed, I had nothing left of me in Budapest. I still enjoy the city, which is beautiful. I enjoy the hot springs. But I am very lonely there after a couple days, there isn’t much for me to do or belong to. Even the lesbians first loved to play with me, I was a novelty. Then after a while they were a group and I was alone. They didn’t include me when a lesbian-themed movie came to town. A gay male friend bought me tickets and we went together. I saw all the lesbians there with their lovers, none invited me to share the movie. It hurt like hell.

CMJT: What would you like to tell women artists in the places in the world where conflict and repression are a daily fact of life?

      Artists are special people. I would say to them “survive.” You have come to share with the world, get away, if you can, from where there is war and oppression. The Globe is your home, not a country. Artists must empower the movement for liberation, but that can be done without the bullets flying overhead. The price of such severance is high. You actually symbolically die only to be reborn somewhere else. Only the culture is portable. And, the spirituality.

References:

Byrne, M. (2002). The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A national security archive electronic

briefing book. National Security Archive. http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB76/ Retrieved: September 8, 2016.

Renolds, P. (2006) When the Soviet Union nearly blinked.  BBC News. 23 October 2006, 11:30 GMT

12:30UK. Retrieved on September 1, 2016.