Keleti Pályudvar (Train Station) in Budapest

In the summer of 1977, I joined my parents in Budapest for a visit to locations in Hungary and Czechoslovakia (as it was called then). They flew to Budapest from Hungary, while I flew first to London and bought an Austrian Airlines ticket to Budapest by way of Vienna.

After a few days in Budapest, we decided to take a train to meet my relatives in Prešov in what is now Slovakia. We made our way to the Keleti Pályudvar from where trains went to Košice, where we would be met with our cousin Miroslav driving his trusty Škoda.

This was during the days of Communist rule, when things were a bit disorganized at times. As our train was pulling into the station, we jumped into a first class compartment for six and took our seats. In a few minutes, as the train was departing, another man jumped into our compartment. As it turn out, the man was Romany, a gypsy, or in Hungarian, a cigány.

Central and Eastern Europe are strongholds for many types of racism. So it is not surprising that my father’s first instinct was to grab the interloper by the collar and throw him off the slow-moving train, all the while calling him a büdös cigány (stinking Gypsy).

I sat there shocked not quite knowing how to react. Obviously things were different in this part of the world. This was confirmed for me when we went through a border inspection as we crossed into Czechoslovakia at Čaňa and my father bribed an inspector with a pack of Marlboro cigarettes.

That was an interesting trip. It involved my pretending to be a Hungarian railway worker so that we could use a MÁV (Hungarian State Railways) hostel in Szeged. (My cousin Ilona worked for MÁV in Budapest.) Apparently I was able to carry off the impersonation by grunting whenever spoken to.