Hungary’s ‘56ers’ split over handling of refugee crisis

With their homeland in turmoil they fled by the thousand, moving mostly at night and paying smugglers to guide them through field, forest and frontier, to a western world they believed would welcome people like them – refugees.

This weekend Hungary marks its 1956 revolution, which ended in a brutal Soviet crackdown that prompted about 200,000 Hungarians to escape to Austria, from where they fanned out to new homes as far afield as Canada and New Zealand.

The 60th anniversary of the doomed uprising finds Hungary at the epicentre of another refugee crisis, but now it is the leading opponent of a European Union plan for member states to take in people fleeing conflict in Syria and elsewhere.

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Andrea Nikolits Nadasdy, who returned to Hungary 40 years after fleeing in 1956. She is a strong supporter of prime minister Viktor Orban’s tough stance on refugees and migrants. Photograph: Daniel McLaughlin

The row has put Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban at odds with Brussels and German chancellor Angela Merkel, and deepened rifts at home between his many supporters and critics who accuse him of demagoguery and authoritarianism – a split that also divides the former refugees know as "'56ers".

“We didn’t know where the hell we were, and the only person willing to lead us to the border was drunk . . . that’s why he wasn’t scared,” Andrea Nikolits Nadasdy said of her escape to Austria in 1956 at the age of 23.

"This local guy took a little money, cigarettes and palinka [brandy] as payment. That was all we had, and the clothes on our backs," Nikolits Nadasdy recalls of her flight with three companions.

Instead of leading them into Austria, however, he left them some 20km from the border and told them to follow a stream to the frontier.

“We got totally lost in the dark, crossing through woods and ploughed fields. We walked for eight hours and were totally exhausted,” she said.

"Finally we saw a house with smoke coming from the chimney. We decided to take a chance. I knocked on the door and said 'Guten morgen' to the man who opened it. He replied to me in Hungarian – 'Jo reggelt' – and I almost fainted. But he saw how awful I felt and said: 'Don't worry, you're in Austria, but everyone around here speaks Hungarian.'"

‘Different’ refugees

The fraught illegal crossing of a border in the dead of night; fear, uncertainty and stubborn hope; the duplicity of a people smuggler and an unexpected welcome from a stranger – some refugee experiences have not changed over the decades.

But, like most Hungarians, Nikolits Nadasdy rejects comparisons between 56ers like her and more than one million refugees and migrants who crossed Hungary last year, en route from Turkey to western Europe.

"It's completely different," she said recently in her Budapest apartment.

“We were very happy to get to a free country. But we didn’t shoot anybody and we didn’t rape women. We were not illegal – the whole world knew what was happening in Hungary and why we were escaping.”

Echoing Orban’s description of the mostly Muslim refugees and migrants as a “poison” that threatens Europe’s security, identity and culture, Nikolits Nadasdy complained that “they want us to adjust to them”.

“We had the same cultural background [as the countries that gave us refuge]. We are Europeans. These people are not. We don’t need them,” she said.

Such views are held by very many Hungarians, and research shows that anti-immigrant feeling in the country of 9.8 million people has increased markedly during more than a year of lurid government messaging that critics call crudely xenophobic.

In a referendum on EU refugee policy this month, 98 per cent of those who voted backed Orban’s rejection of any plan to relocate people to Hungary without the consent of its parliament.

Barely 40 per cent of those eligible bothered to vote, however, rendering the ballot legally invalid and weakening Orban’s claim that Hungarians share his existential fear over the issue.

‘Playing Napoleon’

One 56er who disagrees sharply with Orban is Janos Bak, a medieval history professor who – like Nikolits Nadasdy – lived in the United States and Canada for decades before the collapse of communism in 1989 prompted him to return home.

Bak met Orban that year, when he burst onto Hungary's political scene with a fiery speech during the state funeral and reburial of Imre Nagy, the moderate leader whose push for liberal reforms and "communism with a human face" triggered the 1956 uprising, and led ultimately to his arrest and execution.

“In 1989, Orban was one of a group of young people who looked good, interesting and promising,” recalled Bak (87). “But now he is simply unmentionable.”

He accuses Orban and his circle of abandoning their convictions for populism and increasingly corrupt rule.

“He is a nothing, a nobody, who is just grasping for money and playing Napoleon . . . He has this idea of playing European politics and being remembered.”

“To handle this [refugee] crisis with the best will is difficult, and almost impossible. But if you have the attitude of these guys, then it’s disastrous.”

Division over Orban's rule deepened further this month with the sudden closure of Hungary's main leftist newspaper, Nepszabadsag, in what its owners called a financial decision but many see as the latest move to silence voices that criticise the government and expose corruption.

Several thousand people rallied in Budapest last Sunday against the closure of the newspaper, and opponents of Orban have vowed to come out again this weekend, and boo and whistle during his 1956 commemoration speech.

Laszlo Bito (82), another 56er who spent decades in the United States, has already taken his opposition to Orban on to the streets of Budapest – attending an anti-government demonstration wearing a sign saying in Hungarian: “I was a refugee too.”

“The government for more than a year conducted a vicious hate campaign against the refugees, who were seeking shelter in Europe and some of whom . . . wanted to go through our country peacefully to the west,” he said this week.

“Especially since I was a refugee of terror in 1956, I felt I had to be there in front of the parliament, in spite of my advanced age.”