The General W. G. Haan had been used as a troop carrier during World War II and was very Spartan. We were led down metal stairways deep into the bowels of the ship to large enclosures filled with hammocks suspended four deep from the ceiling. I took a hammock second from the bottom. The hammocks were very close to each other; when we were all lying in them, there were perhaps twelve inches between my nose and the bottom of the hammock above me. Sitting up was out of the question.
In fact, sitting anywhere was not something I was going to have much opportunity to do on this trip. The recreation room had tables securely fixed to the walls, but no chairs. A sign was stenciled above the tables: “Do not sit on the tables.” Someone had penciled in an “h” after the “s.” Of course, the humor of this was lost on most of the passengers, very few of whom knew English.
The only place you could sit was in the toilets, which were rows of stalls with no doors, or in the dining halls, where everything was bolted to the floor, including the very narrow benches around the tables. I soon found out the necessity of these arrangements.
It took most of the day to get us settled in. In the afternoon, the ship finally pulled in the gangplank and we left. Slowly, Ger- many receded. Most of us were on deck, looking back as the continent where we grew up disappeared. Nobody said much.
As we moved out into open water, the ship started to sway from side to side. Some people got seasick. Refugees clung to the railings on deck and threw up over the side, or they huddled miserably in their hammocks down below. Luckily, the swaying had no effect on me. In fact, I kind of enjoyed it. I took the opportunity to roam the ship, from front to back and top to bottom, exploring every nook and cranny and marveling at the enormous polished wheels and pistons in the engine room.
The next morning, I noticed a gathering of people on one side of the deck. They were staring at something white in the distance. Somebody said it was Dover. The thought struck me: I'm looking at England. The momentousness of everything suddenly hit me: leaving Hungary, traveling through Germany, seeing the sea for the first time, seeing England. Each event by itself would have been unthinkable just a couple of weeks ago. Now they were happening in quick succession. I was overwhelmed.
Even as I watched, England slipped out of sight. Soon we were out in the open Atlantic. The ship started to act differently. In addition to swaying from side to side, it now acquired an up-and-down motion as we headed into big swells. Most of those who weren't already seasick got seasick now. In just a couple of hours, the ship looked like a hospital ward.
I still felt fine. I tramped all over the ship. It was like being in a funhouse at an amusement park. I had to watch out for doors suddenly swinging open and slamming on me, and I had to hang on for dear life on the staircases. Drinking out of a water fountain became a real challenge. The water flow would disappear one minute and shoot six feet in the air in the next.
The stench down below was unbearable, so I spent most of the time up on deck. I was bundled up to my nose against the cold, but I enjoyed the air and the motion.
Food was plentiful, but it was different from what I was used to. The coffee we got was made from real coffee beans. In Hungary, “coffee” was made from ground, roasted hickory nuts. Since coffee wasn't produced in any of the Communist-bloc countries, we didn't have it. Real coffee tasted very good.
Before leaving Hungary, I had eaten oranges only two or three times. On board the ship, orange juice came with breakfast, along with half a grapefruit. Much as I loved oranges, I quickly discovered that I couldn't stand grapefruit. The rest of breakfast was inevitably scrambled eggs with fried bacon. The smell of the bacon permeated the air, even on the deck, as it came up through the air vents. I grew to associate the smell of bacon with the smell of vomit, and I hurried through breakfast just to get it out of my nose.
As the ship swayed and heaved up and down, eating also became an increasingly difficult physical task. There were little railings on the table to keep the food trays from sliding into our laps, but they didn't keep them from sliding sideways. You had your choice of trying to steady your tray or hanging on for dear life to the table or to the narrow benches that fortunately were firmly fixed to the floor. The tray usually lost. It was a good thing there weren't too many people in the dining hall.
After a while, I found I could socialize with members of the crew. I started to hang around them just to practice my English. This led to a real job. Somebody approached me with a white helmet that had the letters MP painted on it and asked if I would be willing to stand guard at the crew's quarters to keep people away so the night crew could sleep during the day. I eagerly accepted. Besides feeling terribly important with the MP helmet on my head, I had a legitimate reason to camp out at the crew's quarters.
In Hungary, I had seen black or Asian people only in the movies. But the crew here consisted of white people and black people and in-between people who were neither black nor white but had unusual facial features. I later found out they were Filipino. The crew members were all glad to chat with me, but I had a hard time understanding them. It seemed as if they were talking with their mouths closed. Many of them chewed gum incessantly, which didn't help either.
I made friends with two crew members in particular. One was a wiry, dark-faced fellow. I found out he was Puerto Rican. The other was a husky white man of Italian extraction. The Puerto Rican was a typist for the ship's office. The Italian was a mechanic. His real job was working in a shipyard, but he had decided to come to sea so he could see more of the world. Both of them lived in Brooklyn, which, I found out, was near New York.
They took me under their wing and started to tutor me in the American way of speaking English. They could understand everything I said; I couldn't understand anything they said. It took me several days to figure out that what sounded like a single syllable stood for “That's right” and represented agreement. It seemed as though they said it in every sentence. They also said “yeah” instead of “yes,” which confused me because I thought they borrowed that from the German ja.
The crew's quarters were at the stern of the ship, which was my favorite spot to ride the waves. When my friends weren't around, I liked to sit on a coil of rope near the railing. As the ship swooped over the unending swells, the stern went up and down and my seat in the rope coil was like an amusement park ride. I was practically weightless on the way down, so much so that I had to hang on to the railing so I wouldn't fly out, then I would feel the cold rope slam into my rear end as the stern kicked upward. I loved this ride and I loved watching the wake that the ship left behind. The cold notwithstanding, it was almost hypnotic.
My new friends explained to me that this ship was one of many that had been built after the war for the sole purpose of bringing the troops home from England. It seemed incredible to me that ships would be built for just one purpose, but they assured me that this was the case.
They also assured me that the ship was safe, which was getting increasingly difficult to believe as the waves grew bigger and bigger and the ship hardly seemed to make any forward progress. It was just climbing the waves and sliding down them, again and again. It turned out we were in a major storm.
After some days of stalled progress, my friends told me we were altering our course and taking a southern route to try to get out of the storm's path. For a while, it worked and the weather got better. Then we encountered more storms. The crossing was originally supposed to take about a week, but the arrival date was delayed and delayed again. Altogether, it was delayed three times as a result of the storms and the longer path. In the end, the trip took two weeks.
There wasn't much to occupy us during the trip. One day, some official-looking people set up some tables in one of the recreation halls and interviewed each of us, one at a time. When my turn came, they asked me who I was, what had I done in Hungary, and what I intended to do in America. Then they asked lots of questions about the revolution and its aftermath. They, too, asked whether I had fought in the revolutio
n. Once again, I told them I had not. These people were as surprised as the IRC people. Like the IRC people they told me that I was the first person in all of their interviews on the ship to say that I had not fought. Once again, I didn't comment.
Another day, we were all told to line up to get shots. I didn't know what the shots were for, but I lined up along with the rest of the passengers. There were two stations, one manned by a young white doctor, the other by a black doctor. I had learned that there was a lot of prejudice against blacks in America. I quickly calculated that the black man must be really good to have become a doctor, so I chose to get my shot from him. Whether I computed rightly or not, the shot didn't hurt.
The storms, the delays, and the boredom got on the nerves of many of the Hungarians. Anti-Semitic comments started to be heard. There were a number of Orthodox Jews among the refugees who dressed in their idiosyncratic way and kept to themselves. They were targets of derisive comments, but soon so were the rest of the Jews on the ship. One of the men who bunked near me said, “You Jews all have it made. You speak English, you've got rich relatives in America. The rest of us will be in deep trouble.” Then he pulled out a hunting knife and started sharpening it in front of my nose.
An American minister of Hungarian descent had traveled to Austria to accompany the refugees back to the United States. Enough such incidents took place that he called a gathering of all the Christian refugees. He gave a sermon and told them that as we entered a new world, old hatreds and prejudices needed to be left behind. The guy with the knife grumbled about this, too. “How can he say such a thing?” he said about the minister. “I hate whoever I want to hate, and I will not change.”
There was an American rabbi on board as well. I noticed that the minister and the rabbi often talked together and seemed to be close friends. I took that as a good omen. Meanwhile, I stayed away from the other Hungarians as much as I could. My MP duties were a real blessing.
One day, to break the monotony, the authorities arranged for the Hungarian women to take over the kitchen. They cooked a meal with lots of paprika and seasonings. This briefly cheered everyone up and temporarily changed the smell in the air for the better. But it didn't last very long. The next day, we were back to ordinary food, which, as the days went on and on, became more and more dreary.
It got to the point where I welcomed any change in the menu. One day at lunch, they served a dessert of vanilla pudding. I had loved vanilla pudding at home and eagerly went back for seconds. Big mistake. Half an hour later, my stomach started to act up, and shortly after that, I was draped over the railings, throwing up into the Atlantic Ocean. I stayed away from vanilla pudding or anything else unusual for the rest of the trip, and my stomach behaved.
On New Year's Eve, the crew put on entertainment for us. They played jazz records and started dancing with each other. I was particularly impressed by the black crew members, who clearly danced more energetically and gracefully than the others. Some Hungarians joined them, but they were very awkward by comparison.
Finally, after four storms and three rescheduled arrival dates, we arrived in what we were told was Brooklyn. As we neared land, the ship stopped heaving and gradually all the Hungarians regained their equilibrium and came up on deck. It was evening and the lights of the city were shining. We could see the headlights of moving cars and street lamps and lights in the windows of houses. We were looking for the Statue of Liberty, but we couldn't see it. I wondered why. We stood in silence and just stared. I thought, These houses have not heard bombs or artillery, not ever. I marveled at this.
We had been told to prepare to disembark in the morning. I gathered my things, returned my MP hat, and said good-bye to my two friends. We exchanged addresses, and the Italian fellow promised that he would look me up at my uncle's place and invite me home for dinner. On shore a military band was waiting for us, playing jazz. After a while, they switched to a few bars of the Hungarian national anthem, followed by another serious-sounding piece, which I figured might be the national anthem of America. None of us paid much attention to it. We were silent and tense.
We began to disembark, luggage in hand, filing off the ship to a big warehouse. Our luggage was taken from us and sent toward officials on a conveyor belt. I had never seen such a contraption before. I wondered if America was so advanced that it was using machinery to make even trivial physical work obsolete.
The customs agents were looking for only one thing—Hungarian salami. A lot of Hungarians brought some with them from Hungary or Vienna, having been told that it was a precious item in the United States. Unfortunately, Hungarian salami has a characteristic smell. The agents unerringly pulled out logs of salami from bag after bag and, with a friendly smile, confiscated them.
We gathered our luggage and piled onto buses. We were told we were going to Camp Kilmer, an old prisoner-of-war camp in New Jersey. None of us were pleased about being taken to a camp, let alone a prisoner-of-war camp. We were told this would be for just a few days, but it still seemed like a step in the wrong direction.
My first impression of the United States was not very good. Even though it was midmorning, there wasn't a single person in sight. All I could see were cars parked in an unending line on both sides of the street. I'd never seen that many cars in my life. I wondered where all the people who drove those cars were, because nobody was in evidence. The streets and the buildings were ugly. The buildings were peculiar, too; they had metal stairways attached to the front leading down to the first-story level and then stopping in midair. None of us could figure out what they were for.
I did notice that every building had a television antenna on the roof. Cars, ugly streets, TV antennas, and no people— America was a strange place.
The bus suddenly swooped into a tunnel. The tunnel was brightly lit and lined with gleaming white tiles. It went on for a long, long way, which impressed us. There were tunnels in Hungary, too, but they were very short by comparison.
On the other side of the tunnel, we drove along a road that was elevated above a gray marshland extending as far as I could see in both directions. It was depressing. We stared at it in silence until a voice from the back said, “This can't be true. It's got to be Communist propaganda.”
Eventually we arrived at Camp Kilmer. The camp consisted of rows of plain wooden barracks. Inside, though, they were surprisingly clean, neat, and comfortable, with only four beds to a room, a luxury after the ship and the crowded refugee hostels in Vienna.
As we were assigned our rooms, we were handed a package of razor blades and toothbrushes and toiletries. I guess we all looked as though we could use them. I had given up shaving on the ship. The constant heaving motion had made it almost suicidal to try. So notwithstanding the profusion of razor blades that had been showered on us by various refugee agencies in Vienna, I and most of the other men had heavy-duty stubble. I thought that I could open a drugstore with all the toiletries I had been given as a refugee.
We were told we would be processed in a few days and then would be free to leave. Meanwhile, there were still more interviews and paperwork. As I was waiting my turn for one of these interviews, I noticed a black soldier sitting at a desk with a phone in front of him. I went over and asked if he would help me make a phone call to New York City. He looked at me with amusement and asked whom I wanted to call. I said I wanted to tell my uncle that I'd arrived. He said, “Sure, why not?” with a big smile. I whipped out the phone number. It started with the word Kingsbridge, and I watched him dial KI and then the number. He handed me the phone and a minute later I was talking with my uncle Lajos.
He was very excited to hear from me, and I was no less excited to be in touch with the man who would be my guardian, if I ever got out of Camp Kilmer. He said that he and his son, Paul, would come visit me the next day. I was jumping with joy at the prospect of making contact with somebody who would be permanent in my life.
The next day, they showed up. Lajos was a short, husky guy with thinning hair and a f
riendly face. He was my father's age and looked a bit like him. He gave me a firm hug, then introduced me to Paul, who was standing shyly to one side. Paul was twelve years old and slight, and he looked a lot like pictures of his mother. He, too, gave me a hug like he meant it.
I had a rolled-up newspaper in my hand when I embraced Lajos and Paul. In my joy, I kept hitting Paul in the rear end with the newspaper.
We all started talking at once. Paul spoke only a few words of Hungarian and his accent sounded really funny, but he understood everything. Lajos spoke English with a heavy Hungarian accent, so I had no problem understanding him. The conversation among the three of us was a chaotic combination of my bad English, Paul's bad Hungarian, and Lajos's switching between the two languages. We kept looking at each other and breaking into happy grins.
Finally, Lajos turned serious. He told me that he worked at Brooklyn College and that he had my admission all arranged with the college authorities. All I had to do was get out of Camp Kilmer.
I was allowed to leave the next day.
Above: I had to study a lot for my technical courses. After my morning classes were over, I would go back to the empty apartment and work until it was time to return to City College for my evening classes.
Below: Lajos took me to get outfitted with new clothes. They were good clothes, they fit well, but they looked and felt somehow different. They made me feel American.
Above: There was a short underground tram in Budapest but it was nothing like the Manhattan subway.
Above: My friend Jerry ( right ), who took me under his wing. In particular, he decided to punch me in the shoulder every time I mispronounced a well-known word.
Swimming Across: A Memoir Page 23