Despite an outpouring of goodwill, Ireland's shelter of more than 500 Hungarians fleeing the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising soon turned sour, with issues that echo eerily down the decades, writes Kathy Sheridan.
Anna Letoha still has her Aliens identity card. Her pretty young face gazes from it, full of life and goodwill towards the official Irish photographer, on a bleak November day 50 years ago. There is no hint of the horrors that had gone before: the hopeful anti-Soviet student marches through Budapest that she had joined almost by accident, the Red Army tanks suddenly appearing on the streets, the brutal quashing of the revolution, the realisation that there would be no religious freedom, no decent life for a middle-class couple, no education for their little girl, under a regime where their kind were now considered "the enemy of the working class".
Anna, then a 25-year-old teacher, her husband Janos, a telecommunications engineer, and their four-year-old daughter, Andrea, escaped with the help of a stationmaster, who organised guides to lead them through the border area to Austria.
"The guide brought us to within a kilometre of the border watchtowers where there were soldiers," recalls Anna Letoha in perfect, still-accented English. "We were running from one direction, soldiers with Alsatians were running towards us from the other. We ran and thought we must be over the border . . . Then when it all went quiet and there were no more whistles, no shouting or dogs barking, we started walking, following the direction of the car lights."
In the west, adulation was heaped on plucky little Hungary while governments sat on their hands. "We were a highly developed country before the second World War, but we lost everything; our borders, our assets," says Dr Janos Balassa, the current Hungarian ambassador to Ireland. "When we challenged the mighty Soviet Union, we had the sympathy of the western world, but nothing else. We were alone and were left alone."
THE REVOLUTIONARIES WHO hoped for neutrality and believed they had the backing of the West soon realised they would have neither, says Katalin Palmai, a Hungarian working on a doctoral thesis on the refugees who came to Ireland.
More than 200,000 refugees headed for Austria, which held out its arms though itself still a war-ravaged country. They were a mixed bunch, says Palmai. They included many of Hungary's brightest and best - professionals, students, athletes and artists, freedom fighters fleeing from death or the gulags and members of the despised AVO, the Hungarian secret police, who reasoned there would be no place for them in a free Hungary. Some, undoubtedly, were taking the opportunity to run away with lovers or otherwise needed to get out of town, says Irish novelist Mark Collins. Many had unhealed wounds, physical and psychological. All were wet, frozen and hungry.
Meanwhile, Ireland had joined the UN only weeks before and when its High Commission for Refugees requested the fledgling member to take refugees, acceptance represented "a badge of membership of the UN club, a sign that we had joined the grown-ups," says Dr Eilis Ward of NUI Galway, who has written on the subject. "This would be our first time to accept programme refugees. Yes, there was an element of undue haste but there was a genuine warmth towards the Hungarians. The perception was that they were Catholics, driven out by communists, they were like us."
A figure of 1,000 was agreed. What promises were made to attract them to Ireland were critical to unfolding events and are still disputed. Some were promised jobs within weeks, that initially they would stay in hotels and those who wanted to travel to Canada or the US could do so. Others claimed they were told that Ireland was merely a temporary transit camp, en route to the New World.
Anna and Janos Letoha chose Ireland because they heard it was looking for Catholic families with children and because it was as far as they could get from Russia. "I was so glad to get away from the Russians that I was grateful for anything. Janos and I made an oath that we would face whatever would face together and that we would never blame one another for the decisions we had made."
In 1950s Ireland - a poor country wracked by unemployment, mass emigration, and echoes of its own plucky Rising - sympathy for Hungary and the refugees was at fever pitch, fired by reports of Hungarian freedom-fighters handing their children to Austrian frontier guards with the plea to have them looked after, while their fathers returned to fight the Soviets.
The overwhelming image of a Hungarian refugee was of tiny Catholic orphans. When the Red Cross received thousands of applications from Irish people offering to take one Hungarian, the majority were looking for babies. A woman with 14 children put her name down for two Hungarians. A man with two children and a two-room cottage said he would like a child.
Combine the emotional outpouring surrounding Band Aid and the tsunami, and it still comes nowhere near the donor fever that possessed the country in 1956. Every town and village held concerts and dances, plays, shows and carnivals to raise funds for Hungary. In Cavan, the Red Cross received the contents of a child's money box from a family of six who had been saving to send one of the children to Lourdes. Irish sportsmen were asked to surrender their medals. Every workplace did a whip-around. The national boxing association donated the proceeds of its annual tournament. Students held huge protest marches against the oppression of Hungary, raising funds at the same time. Donations poured in to the Red Cross. Companies, meanwhile, were sending vast amounts of food and clothing to Hungary. Chemists in Cork and Waterford donated medicines. The Great Hall of UCD was used as a depot for clothing and medical supplies.
The sense of religious solidarity with Hungary was profound. The persecuted Catholic primate, Cardinal Mindszenty, became a sainted icon in Irish homes. The National Union of Vehicle Builders congratulated the Hungarians on their stand "against the murderous attack by the Godless Communist rulers". Galway students protesting against the oppression of Hungary recited the rosary in Eyre Square.
For the Red Cross, to which the government had effectively ceded the refugee effort, it was also a resolutely Catholic operation. When the first five Aer Lingus planes (whose crews had volunteered their time and services) touched down at a wet and stormy Shannon on the night of November 25th, 1956, Edmund Murphy, the charity's commanding officer at the Knockalisheen refugee camp, welcomed them with a reference to their "great fight for the preservation of Christian ideals and Catholicism".
Airport staff applauded as the planes taxied in and thousands of tearful well-wishers lined the arrivals area, greeting Ireland's first programme refugees with deafening cheers. Most carried what little they owned in a curtain or bedspread. Some had handfuls of Hungarian soil. All were exhausted and some were ill.
But there were no orphaned babies and they were far from the homogeneous people of popular imagination. They included two lawyers, a physician, a physicist, a pilot, a soldier, a confectioner, a cooper, a butcher, three tailors, a horse trainer (trotting), an optician, a bank accountant, a civil engineer, six stokers, nine weavers, 11 iron workers, four miners, a plumber, eight lorry drivers, eight motor mechanics, nine electrical mechanics, six factory workers, several teachers, an actor, seven locksmiths and a couple of journalists. Not all of them despised the system; it would emerge that many would have settled for a Hungarian type of communism.
The Red Cross would also discover that Hungary was less religiously homogeneous than suspected. While the majority described themselves as Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox, over a quarter were Presbyterian - Lutherans and Calvinists - and about 5 per cent Jewish. According to Dorrit O'Shaughnessy, a Hungarian-born Limerick woman who served as an interpreter at the camp, the Jewish families were swiftly taken to Dublin by members of the Jewish Representative Council.
They were the lucky ones. The sight of the spartan Army camp, 72 huts surrounded by barbed wire, was trauma of another kind. Knockalisheen, in Meelick, Co Clare, built to house troops during the Emergency, was a chilly, damp, wind-blown "nightmare", a place without privacy or dignity. The Irish Times reported that one Jew who had survived Auschwitz felt he had seen it all before.
The late Joszef Polgar, who became a Dublin jeweller, told this newspaper in 1992 that the first English word they learned was "tomorrow" because that was the stock response to their requests. His memories were painful ones of damp, cold and food that gave them diarrhoea.
The language barrier was an enormous problem from the beginning, despite the presence of (untrained) interpreters. "It was two years before we realised that Ireland was so poor," says Anna Letoha.
O'Shaughnessy still has the old cardboard-covered Public Service records book, with "Red Cross - Hungarian Camp" written carefully on the front. Detailed inside are the names of hundreds of Hungarian refugees, their gender, religion and hut number. The columns alongside list the precise number of chairs, cloths, cans, basins, buckets, blankets, mattresses, pillows, pillowcases and sheets that were allocated and signed for by each head of family.
'THEY SEEMED RATHER taken aback by what they had come to," recalls O'Shaughnessy. It was long way from the hotels and land of opportunity painted by officials back in Austria. "Some were genuine, some were opportunistic," she says. "Some thought that sausages grew on trees, and ice cream came from taps and sweets came out of the ground like potatoes. And some were people who had to flee because they were unreliable citizens. It was very hard to make out who was what. But I made very good friends. I still get cards from America asking me to tell the Irish people how grateful they are for the shelter."
The morning after arrival, there was already an air of impatience among the men. Two former bus drivers asked a journalist if work could be found for them. They wanted Hungarian-English dictionaries. According to Palmai, these were men "not used to idleness" and although the UN Convention conferred the right to work on them, "in reality, they were prevented from looking for jobs".
In 1950s Ireland, the trade unions had a dilemma. Unemployment was climbing towards 90,000 and the emigrant ships were taking away another 800 every week. Evidence that the words displacement and migrant exploitation are hardly new can be found in the case taken by the ITGWU against Limerick Motor Works, alleging that a Hungarian panel beater (on a work permit) was being paid less than an unskilled worker, at only two-thirds of the union wage.
Some refugees, like Anna and Janos Letoha, had managed to escape from Knockalisheen, with the help of Geraldine Fogarty, who helped many refugees find homes and jobs and organised help with the language. Some started to make wooden toys but were buying the materials at retail prices. A woman set up a babyclothes business with the help of half-a-dozen dressmakers in the camp and sold to shops in Limerick. Six men found employment with Youghal weavers.
But within a month, the refugees were talking about a breakdown in co-operation between them and their controllers, who ran the camp on highly regimented, militaristic lines. Red Cross reports to the Department of Justice were tinged with "barely concealed frustration", in the words of Dr Ward. Some refugees seemed to have returned to the camp, having secured work outside. There were allegations of petty theft of coal. Reports from the time clearly suggest that there were professional agitators involved within the camp. "That may be so," says Anna Letoha, "but given the conditions at the time, it would have been easy to get people on their side."
The language barrier and Irish inexperience created gulfs of misunderstanding. For Dr Ward, the most shocking dimension was when four refugees set off for Dublin to petition the government to relocate them to another country. "That was sheer desperation. They must have felt completely abandoned. They were effectively arrested on the way and effectively criminalised for a) trying to exercise what was their entitlement and b) a human response to their situation by taking their plea to the authorities."
Despite the continuing efforts by some extraordinary people to befriend and help them, by now 80 per cent of them wanted to leave Ireland. They issued a statement: "You will appreciate that however great the material generosity of the Irish people may be, a community of 500 people living in partial confinement, without information as to their future, can be overcome by a sense of frustration, which grows as this time of uncertainty goes on. Under such conditions nervous tension arises, smaller frustrations seem large, major frustrations unbearable."
ON MARCH 1ST, 1957, they went on hunger strike. It triggered a public debate about refugees' sense of entitlement that echoes eerily down the decades. Frank Aiken, the minister for external affairs, told the Dáil the refugees "were free to leave at any time". It lasted four days, following a commitment by the Bishop of Limerick to expedite resettlement for those who wanted it. He later told the taoiseach that the commitment was a "bluff".
For the government, however, the issue had generated embarrassing international coverage. To disclaim responsibility for the refugees, it tried, in Dr Ward's words, to rewrite history and alter its UNHCR status from a country of "resettlement" to a country of "second asylum", in other words, to shift primary responsibility back to the UNHCR. It didn't work.
Meanwhile, some refugees "disappeared" to the UK, and 17 of the camp's most highly skilled technicians headed for Argentina after being refused permission to set up a raincoat factory here. Some even returned to Hungary.
Dr Ward quotes a letter of petition from a refugee to the US Congress (carried by a refugee being resettled in Canada). It acknowledged the goodwill and help of the Irish government and people but pointed out that the Irish were "a very poor and unfortunate people". Ireland, it noted, had been "a great disillusionment. We, who never went abroad and who were blindly trusting in the Western world, did not think we could be so deliberately misled by someone . . . We are being kept in unheatable wooden huts, on unhealthy food without the possibility of schooling . . . We do not expressly wish you to transfer us to the US or to Canada, but you have promised us life, not concentration camps depriving us of work and the hope of life."
Eventually, it was Archbishop McQuaid and the National Catholic Welfare Conference who found a way out, working privately to get refugees away to the US and Canada. Within two years, only 60 of the original 539 Hungarian refugees remained in Ireland. Even that dwindled away to a few families.
Those who stayed, like the Letohas and the Polgars, carved out good lives, gave employment and scrupulously repaid every penny of the grants from the Red Cross, "so that others might be helped", in Anna Letoha's words. She became development and design director with Sunbeam, while Janos brought his advanced telecommunications skills to the ESB (from which he retired after 37 years).
Palmai believes the vast majority of the second-generation offspring of the refugees consider themselves Irish, although around half speak Hungarian and retain an emotional attachment to home. Anna Letoha returns regularly to Hungary. "After three weeks, I am homesick for Ireland. Fifty years is a long time to be attached. In my heart, Ireland is my home."
In the coming weeks, the arrival of the 1956 refugees will be marked when Ambassador Balassa unveils a plaque at Knockalisheen, a "very modern" place now, he says, with 270 refugees, though none from Hungary.
"We are celebrating, not blaming. Ireland was very very poor then, much poorer than Hungary. We know that it was a very big effort by the government and the UN." He also kindly notes that Hungarians are emotional and impatient. "It's a national characteristic. Sometimes it can be good but sometimes it causes problems."