Back to the forest. So we walked a long time at night in the forest. One time we got lost, and it took a long while for our guide to find our way again. He finally took us to the first place that had a light on when we crossed the border. It was a tavern. I don't remember the name of the town, but there was a tavern, and my uncle took off his wedding band and he gave it to somebody to give us money so he could make a phone call and could call another relative who was living in Vienna, and he made the phone call to Vienna, and the Austrians put us up in a church basement that was set up for refugees.
The Russians could not touch us in Austria; they were not allowed. Austria was a free country. So once we crossed into Austria we were safe. However, the guide who took us across was arrested. Everybody knew that Hungarians were taking people and smuggling them across the border as escapees for money.
My mother's sister and brother escaped a month after we did, and they were arrested while trying to escape. They went back to Budapest and had to appear in front of a judge, and it wasn't until the second attempt a couple of months later that they were able to get to Austria.
My uncle's cousin from Vienna, who had been the director of the Vienna Opera House, came and met us with two very official, big cars—Rolls Royce, or a Bentley or something—and he put us up for a couple of days at his country home until he was able to find us lodging at a hotel in Vienna. Once we were in the hotel, my mother was able to find the agency that was processing the Hungarian refugees, and we went there and the quota was still open, and considering that my mother had two sisters in America, we were put on the top of the list. I think we stayed at the hotel for about a week to get the paperwork processed, and then they took us to something like a holding pen before they put the people on the plane.
So we were in these military-like barracks for about two or three weeks. Each day, people were waiting for their names to be called to get on the bus that was taking the refugees to Munich because they were flying the refugees out of Munich to America. Some people, of course, were processed to go to Israel. Some people went to Canada. Some people went by boat. It was December 24, Christmas Eve, when our names were called, and it was one of the most beautiful trips.
We got on this bus that took us from Vienna to Salzburg to Munich, and we drove through the mountains and the beautiful snow and saw the Christmas decorations, and literally when we got to Munich airport—I'm going to start crying in a second now that I remember—they played the American and Hungarian national anthems as we were getting on the airplane to come to America. It was very, very emotional. The flight took twenty-six hours. We had to stop in Iceland, and we flew into Newark, New Jersey, I think. I just remember wanting to be the first one off the plane, and I was!
We were taken to Camp Kilmer, an air force camp. We were put in marine barracks. We had them call my mother's sister, my Aunt Alice. She and her son came the next day and picked us up and took us to their farm, and I was put into tenth grade in Freehold High School in New Jersey. I understood English because as a young girl I had to learn English and piano. So I knew how to play piano, and I was learning English all along from an English lady who came and taught me when we lived in Budapest. So I understood some words. I was the first Hungarian refugee at my school, so my picture was in the local newspaper with a caption, something like: “The first Hungarian refugee, Ava Rado, in the tenth grade at Freehold High School….”
We stayed in New Jersey for a month, and my mother, may she rest in peace, decided that we were going to go to Miami Beach to her other sister, which we did. I was put in Miami Beach High School in the tenth grade. I went there for half a semester. We stayed with my aunt for about a month, until my mother—she just didn't know what to do. She didn't want to marry the boyfriend. So what she did was, my aunt knew a friend, and this friend was the mother of a very wealthy husband and wife. They had a winter home on Sunset Island, a very affluent island near Miami; his regular home was in Pittsburgh, and his summer home was in Canada. He was the head of a large trucking company. And the grandmother lived with them, and she said, “Why don't you and your daughter come live with us? You can help me cook” and help their daughter and the husband, who just ran his business, and he played golf….
So we moved to Sunset Island, I went to Miami Beach High, and then came April and we went on his private plane and he flew us all up to Pittsburgh. I went to high school in Pittsburgh, lived with them, and then my mother said, “I can't do this,” so we got our own apartment, and since my mother was a good cook, she wound up making Hungarian strudel for Weinstein's Deli in Pittsburgh. While all this was going on, her sister and her brother made it to Austria, but by that time, the quota to the United States was filled. So my aunt and uncle and cousins lived in a camp in Austria provided for the Hungarian refugees for two years before they were finally able to come to America with a visa in 1959 to New York.
So my mother and I moved to New York. My mother knew how to sew, and she had a friend who said, “I can take you into Bloomingdale's, and you can do some alterations.” She said, “Yes, sure, I can do it.” So she went, she did that for a while, and needless to say, she was really good at it and she wound up becoming the designer assistant to Pierre Cardin and Olivier [Gagnere], and that's how she wound up. She died in 1997.
I went back to Budapest in 1973. I was thirty-two years old, recently divorced, with a son and a daughter, and I said to my girlfriend, “I'm here in America seventeen years, but I want to go back.” And she said, “Well, why don't you? I'll watch the kids.” That was December 1. By December 3, I had my airline ticket and a passport ready to go, and I didn't even think about applying for an entry visa. For all I knew at that time I could have been turned back. So I got to the airport in Budapest and I said, “I'm here! I'm Ava Rado!” And I came to visit my grandmother, actually my step-grandmother. My real grandmother died in 1943. My grandfather remarried, so I had a step-grandmother. And it was a big emotional moment to knock on her door: “Here I am!” Of course, I called my cousin, my mother's other sister's daughter who stayed there, and she was in a very good position there because her stepfather was the head of the Hungarian auto factory and the biggest Communist and they traveled in diplomatic cars and all that—so I called her and said, “I'm here! Come pick me up!” And she came and she picked me up. In 1973 it still looked like it did in 1956, with many of the buildings still burned out from the revolution. I remember it was very gray, very dim. It was still under Communism, and that was weird for me because after seventeen years of living in freedom in America, I now had to report at the police station as to where I was staying, how much money I brought with me, what I'm spending my money on, etc. That was really weird!
I'll tell you one other thing. I love my life. My life is beautiful. I love where I am. However, I tell you if I didn't have children and grandchildren, I don't know where I'd be living. I say that because that's just a fact. I could live in the mountains with friends. I could live in Russia. I could live in any part of the world. So why am I in Miami Beach? Because I'm still stuck in Miami Beach. That's why I'm in Miami Beach. I had a house in upstate New York, and I just sold that because when I bought the house ten years ago, I bought the house with the fantasy and the dream that my kids would be coming over on Friday nights for dinner and I'm going to have wonderful weekends with the grandchildren and have great Sunday brunches, but the reality is this is America, where families are nuclear families. The parents and grandparents are really not in the picture, not like it was in Europe.
And one of the things that I really miss are the family dinners that we used to have on the farm in Budapest or even at my aunt's house in Miami or at my mother's house when we lived in New York—when all the aunts and uncles and cousins came—and those days are long gone. The new generations don't value this.
So what I have learned is, this is what we have. This is what is. And this is what we have to love. And it's a sad thing to say, but unless I say that…[pauses], I can't go through life not
accepting and not loving what I'm doing and where I am. I have to accept it, and I have to love it.
Am I happy? [Her voice cracks with tears.] I am happy. Well, I'm crying now, but I'm happy. I'm fiddling with jewelry, actually.
He is the longest serving doorman in New York City history. A member of Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, he has been the doorman at 460 East 79 Street in Manhattan for more than fifty consecutive years! The twenty-story apartment building was completed in June 1960, and Steve, then thirty-three, came on as the doorman before the first tenant moved in, and he has been there ever since. Now eighty-three, he is friendly, good-natured, always smiling. He speaks in a thick Austrian accent—his words come out in a short, sweet, staccato. “For thirty-eight years I work six days a week straight,” he said. “But they cut me back. I only work five days a week. I'm off Saturdays and Sundays now.”
I was born in a straw house, my father's house, in a village called Szentpéterfa, right on the Austrian border but on the Hungarian side. It used to be Austria, and then it fell back to Hungary. So I see myself as more Austrian than Hungarian. My parents and grandparents were Austrian. My name is Austrian, everything is Austrian.
However, my parents met and married here in America, in Northampton, Pennsylvania. They came here when they were teenagers—I don't know what year, before the 1920s. I don't know if they were American citizens. They found each other here; then they made some money and went back home in 1926 to buy land in Szentpeterfa. A rich man was selling his land. I was born that year, 1926.
Within a short time, they returned to America and left me with a nanny, a very good nanny. She took care of me. I never can forget her. A nice lady, and she had her own kids—but she loved me the best. She was Hungarian. We were five together. We were four boys and one girl; they've all since died.
My parents worked, saved, and after five years in America, in 1931 came back home again, this time to build a house on the land they had bought earlier. They had a farm, and we worked the land. They came back with my two brothers: my older brother, Joe, and my younger brother, Frankie. They were born in America. I was the only one who was born in Europe….
I came to this country because there was the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Before I came to America, I said to Frankie, “Come with me to Vienna and let's register, and we can go to America together.” Joe had already come here. And you know what Frankie told me? He said, “If you want to go to America, you can go to America, but I'm not going.” Because he loved the farm. He had gotten a house and everything from my father's first cousin when his son died in the war [World War II]. So Frankie stayed. He had a farm, a stable full of animals, and his animals were everything to him. He loved animals and the land. Six acres around the house. He said, “If you want to go you can go, but I'm not going.”
When I came to America, I wrote Frankie a letter. We were writing all the time. I said, “It's a good thing you did not listen to me and come here because everything here is so strange,” and also, he was not one, like me, to help himself. [He laughs.] I don't think he would have been happy here. Because he loved the farm. He was a farmer.
We lived close to the Austrian border. I had heard this one left, that one left. I knew Frankie wasn't coming. So I don't say nothing to nobody. I just went in the house. I had nothing with me. Nothing at all, and I went to the border. To the Austrian border—like from here to across the street. And I went there, and I spoke German, and I said to the Austrian soldier, “What will happen to me if I cross over and I stay?” And he said, “You're here already! You don't have to go back. Don't worry; you'll be taken care of.”
So I crossed the border to Austria in ‘56, and a lot of people knew me there, and I knew this village there very well. And then I heard you had to go to Vienna to register; America would take only so many refugees. There was a quota. I went to Vienna right away by myself—this was New Year's Eve 1956. Then they put us on a train to Bremerhaven, Germany, then a boat to New Jersey, and I came to America.
My older brother, Joe, was already living here in the Bronx. He came to the boat and picked me up. I hadn't seen him in more than twenty years. I didn't know if I would even recognize him, but I did. The boat landed in New Jersey someplace because I remember he came to pick me up there. I don't think it was Ellis Island, though. I was thirty years old when I came to America.
So Joe picked me up on a Saturday, and he said, “You have to rest up a little bit.” And I said, “No, I don't want to rest up—I've been resting enough. I want to work.”
So on Monday I went to look for a job, and I found one at Horn & Hardart restaurant [the first food service automats in New York City and Philadelphia] on East Fifty-Fifth Street in Manhattan.
The manager knew Joe, so Joe introduced me: “This is my brother. He just came to America and he'd like a job. He'd like to work.”
The manager said, “He can start tomorrow.”
So two days in America and I start to work!
I was at the restaurant for three years, and then I heard about this brand new building that was going up soon at 460 East Seventy-Ninth Street, and the super of the building said he wanted to see me. He was German. He was also the super of the building next door at 440 East Seventy-Ninth Street. So he managed both, and he told me about the doorman job, and I said to him, “Well, I don't want to quit my job. I have to make sure it's steady.”
And he said to me in heavy German, “You do what I tell you to do and you're going to be fine.” [He laughs.] And that was over fifty years ago! People started to move in in June 1956. I got my green card and citizenship early on.
I stayed here all these years because I like my job, and each time somebody didn't show up, they said, “Steve, don't go home. We need you!” I would stay and work sixteen hours a day. I was always available. How do I do it? You have to love people. Then people love you. I've gone through seven supers; I had no problem with them. [He laughs.] Also, I'm always on time. I don't think I was ever late in all these years. [He laughs.] I'll keep doing this as long as I'm healthy. Part of it is I cannot stay home. I love to be between the people. So this is my home. I like to go from home to home. I have two homes. One time I was going to work, and I told my wife, “I am going home now.” [He laughs.]
There's still a few tenants who live in the building from when I started. Most of them did not move out; they simply died. I had a good relationship with everybody, particularly the old-timers. I found my wife here also. The people who introduced us still live here. These people took an apartment when the building opened, and my wife came with them—she was a nanny for their little boy. So they told me about her. A friend said she's Irish. I say, “Oh, no!” Because Irish like to drink!
Turned out she was German. We were married a year later. Her name is Elizabeth. We had one son. He's in electronics. He lives in Long Island. He's married. I have four grandchildren. I don't see them too often. They don't come too often….
Elizabeth and I live in Pelham Bay in the Bronx. I was here in America five years and I bought my house. I have a nice garden. Everybody was jealous! My older brother Joe was jealous. Five years in America and he buys himself a house! I bought it from the previous owner. I asked, “Why do you sell your house?” He said, “Because my wife cannot walk up the stairs.” They were an older couple. I said, “I love your house—I'd like to buy it.” You know what he says? “You don't have to go to the bank to get a mortgage. The house is all paid off—we'll give you the mortgage!” He said, “If you love this house and you're only in this country five years, you don't have to go to the bank.” I told him how much we could put down, because my wife had a little saved, I had a little saved, and that's how we bought the house. And I will stay in that house as long as I live.
…My typical day to work, I take the subway straight. I live near the subway. I take the six train, the local, that's my regular train, no bus—but by the time I go home, the local is an express and then I walk home. I never take no bus
es, no nothing, and from Lexington Avenue, I walk a few blocks to here. When I get home, Elizabeth has dinner ready. My dinner is always ready. She cooks everyday something else usually.
She knows I love soup and cake. That's my secret to a long life: soup and cake! I used to bake, too. I still bake every so often. I used to bring it here to the building; people tasted it. Everybody knows my apple pie. They had a party for me. They say, “Are you going to bring something?” They gave me a few times party, you know? In the building. This last time in May [2010], they celebrated my fiftieth anniversary! And they didn't want me to bake. The party was for me, they said. They will bring the apple pie and they said, “It was good, but yours is the best!”
My favorite soup is chicken soup. Chicken soup I like. My favorite cake is any cake—but especially apple pie. Elizabeth knows how to bake very well. She makes cakes. In German we call it “torte,” and the big cakes she bakes, too. If we have parties, she makes cookies and everything she makes. Those are my two favorite things: soup and cake, and it has to be every day. When I went to doctor once, he said, “What kind of medication you take?” I was about forty-nine or fifty years old. I say, “Yes, I take medication. Homemade soup and cake! This is my medication….”
I went back to my village three times in my life. The first time was in the early ‘70s, when my parents were still alive. I went with my wife and my son. He was three years old. My wife's family is also German, so we went to Germany and then to Austria and then to my village on the Hungarian side. It was so nice to see the people. I still recognized them, and they recognized me.
Toward a Better Life Page 14