George Friedman
My ongoing trip to Europe has brought me to Hungary, the country in which I was born. My profession requires me to be clinical and distant about the nations we study, but it is an oddity of American life that those who have come here or whose families come here retain an element of affection for the places they left. I say it’s odd because, for the most part, the life they left behind was unpleasant enough to make them leave. Immigrants from Ireland or Italy, even after several generations, have those feelings. My wife, who is an official member of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, is still fascinated by the royal family. (Later generations of her family immigrated to Australia, where she was born.) I must add if I may that it gives me supreme pleasure that a Friedman is listed on a chart showing descendants of William Bradford, once the governor of Plymouth colony. So it is that I choose not to discuss Hungary, my homeland, but the United States, my beloved home.
My mother and father survived Hitler’s camps, while my sister, 11 years older than me, was sheltered in the Swiss Embassy. It was rare that the core of one’s family survived, and yet mine did. I was born in 1949 and was regarded as our revenge on Hitler. He was dead, but they went on. It was an odd burden to bear.
Six months after I was born, my father received a message saying he was to be arrested by Soviet authorities and their Hungarian comrades for being anti-communist. At that point, the extent of my father’s ideology was that life was better than death, so we fled Hungary. My parents hired smugglers who one night took us in a rubber raft across the Danube to Czechoslovakia, also under Soviet control, and on to Vienna. It was a more complex and dangerous journey than I can tell, because I was shielded while growing up from the terrors of the time and had to piece it together much later.
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