"Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" (Luke 12:56)
Every once in a while I come across something that reminds me what a gift of God it is to be an American, and to have the privilege of living in this country. Such is the powerful story of one Peter W. Schramm, born in Hungary, who came to the United States as a young boy with his parents and sister in 1956, refugees from the vicious Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising.
I well remember those young Hungarian Freedom Fighters, and their futile but heroic fight against the overwhelming military force of a brutal Soviet invasion. As Schramm tells it, "on October 23, 1956, students gathered at the foot of Sandor Petofi's statue in Budapest and read his poem "Rise Magyar!", made famous in the democratic revolution of 1848. Workers, and even soldiers, soon joined the students. The demonstrators took over the state-run radio station and the Communist Party offices and toppled a huge statue of Stalin, dragging it through the streets. Rebellion soon spread throughout the country. The demonstrators--now Freedom Fighters--held Soviet occupation forces at bay for several days.
"On November 1, the Hungarian Prime Minister announced that Hungary would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact [the Soviet military organization for all their satellite and occupied countries, Ed.]. At dawn on November 4, the Soviets launched a major invasion of Hungary, in an offensive involving tens of thousands of additional troops, air and artillery assaults, and 6,000 tanks."
I vividly remember what Schramm was writing about, for though I was only 16 years old in 1956, I understood clearly what was happening. I listened to the TV and radio news stories of these young Hungarians (many of them no older than I was), armed only with Molotov cocktails (homemade gasoline bombs in bottles), rifles, pistols, hand grenades, and whatever weapons they could steal from dead Russian soldiers, fighting bravely in the streets against tanks and artillery and aircraft. The West, and particularly the United States, stood by, watched, and did nothing but lodge protests with the Soviets, while daily the Freedom Fighters broadcast urgent pleas for help. I recollect clearly my anger and frustration with the Eisenhower Administration for not going to their aid. Of course, that quite possibly would have meant war with the Soviet Union, which we weren't willing to risk in order to rescue Hungary.
The resistance was crushed in less than a week. "The last free Hungarian radio broadcast spent its final hours repeating the Gettysburg Address in seven languages," wrote Schramm, "followed by an S.O.S."
Stop reading this, and think for a moment of what that last sentence means.
These young people in a foreign country--who undoubtedly had never been to America and knew little of our history--so valued the timeless principles expressed by our greatest President in his brief but eloquent remarks at Gettysburg that they chose them for their last words. How can anyone begrudge Abraham Lincoln a prominent place in the pantheon of men who have made a godly impact on the course of human history? When the Civil War threatened America's future, Lincoln was raised up by God to save the nation by summoning our people to return to the Biblically-based moral and spiritual ideals annunciated in the Declaration of Independence.
Yet, in recent years, he has been falsely accused by some would-be historians as a racist, and is still tragically misunderstood as a tyrant, destroyer of constitutional liberties, and perpetrator of big government (none of which are true) by many Southerners. In the Civil War book of our adult history series, which I am now working on, I shall do my best to set that record straight. Meanwhile, back to Schramm's story:
"Over 20,000 Hungarians were tried and sentenced for participation in the uprising, hundreds receiving the death sentence. An estimated 200,000 Hungarians--of a population of nine million--became refugees. 47,000 came to the United States." One of those young Freedom Fighters somehow escaped the Soviets, and late that fall ended up at Mt.HermonPrep School, in Massachusetts, where I was a one-year Senior. We were honored to have him with us.
Peter Schramm and his family also came to America in that fall of 1956, when he was not quite ten years old. He, his parents, and his four-year-old sister shared a small apartment with his father's parents and his brother near the eastern railroad station in Budapest. But his story actually begins some years before then.
When the Communists took control of Hungary in 1949, they "expropriated" his parents' little textile shop--he wrote that it was about half the size of his current living room--and everything in it. That same year, they sentenced his father's father to ten years of hard labor. What was his crime? He had in his possession a small American flag. When asked at his "trial" (these were nothing but "show" trials, in an attempt to deceive the Western press) why he had it, he replied that it "represented freedom better than any other symbol he knew." At that time, Peter's father, William, tried to persuade his wife Rose to leave the country, but she couldn't bear to break the ties to family and friends. Soon, William was sentenced to a year of prison. Someone had turned him in for calling a Communist a tyrant (which he had!). When he was released, he washed windows and made illegal whiskey to try and feed his family.
The grandfather got an early release from the labor camp in 1956, and returned to the family "looking like a victim of the Holocaust," Schramm writes. But his spirit had not been broken. The first thing he wanted to know was whether the family still had the American flag. They didn't, of course; it had been confiscated by the police. But incredibly, Peter's father William had managed to find another one, and had carefully hid it away. When they took it from its hiding place Peter says that just "seeing that flag somehow erased much of the pain and torment of my grandfather's years of imprisonment; it seemed to give him hope."
Now, because the Freedom Fighters had taken over the railroad station, Soviet tanks were positioned in their neighborhood. The fighting was fierce. Bodies lay everywhere; one lay just outside their window for days. As it became clear that the revolution would fail, everyone knew that the Soviet oppression would come down on them harder than ever. If they were going to get out, it had to be now, while there was still a chance.
The deciding event happened one day when William went out to get bread. A hand grenade landed next to him, but miraculously failed to go off. When he came back to the apartment--but let Peter tell it: "He came home and announced to my mother that he was going to leave the country whether she would come or not. Mom said, "O.K., William. We will come if Peter agrees. Ask Peter."
"But where are we going?" I asked.
"We are going to America," he said.
"Why America?" I prodded.
"Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place."
"He said that as naturally as if I had asked him what was the color of the sky. It was so obvious to him why we should head for America that he never entertained any other option. Of course, he hadn't studied American history or politics, but he had come to know deep in his heart the meaning of tyranny. He hungered for its opposite and knew where to find it. America represented to my father, as Lincoln put it, 'the last, best hope of earth.' "
These sentiments about America were not unusual among Hungarians at the time, Schramm notes. "Among the Hungarians I knew--aside from those who were true believers in the Communists--this was the common sense of the subject. It was self-evident to them."
They could not tell anyone that they were leaving, not even Peter's grandparents and uncle. In that way, the relatives could answer truthfully to the police that they knew nothing about it. So, the little family had to leave with next to nothing--a small bag of clothes and a doll for each child and one small bag for both parents. And William also had 17 one dollar bills, "which he had been hoarding for years; good as gold, he always said" [Alas, that was then, Ed.].
Boarding a train headed toward the Austrian border, they discovered that many of their fellow passengers had the same idea. The Russians were stopping the trains and searching them, but the Schramms kept their heads down and said nothing to anyone.
When they left the train with hundreds of others, it was dark, and the border lay many miles away, across fields and farms. In spite of trying to keep separated and take different paths, they soon began drifting together, since they were all headed in the same direction. Haystacks had to be avoided, because Russian soldiers often hid in them, and they were told never to respond to a crying child, since that was a favorite Russian trick. Soon they came across a boy whose father had been shot, and took him into their group.
Finally, the moment came. "We crossed a little bridge in the dark before morning. Someone heard the sound of German on the other side of the bridge. It was the Austrian border post!"
They were free, at last.
At first they were led to a big barn in Nickelsdorf, Austria, where they slept, then moved to an Army camp near Innsbruck, where they were housed and fed. Peter's father got a job while they were waiting to be interviewed for refugee placement by the embassies of different countries. When the representative from the American embassy came, he asked William if he had any relatives in America. There were none. "Don't you know anyone in America?" was the next question. As it so happened, they did.
Back in 1946, before Peter had been born, his father had managed to build a car out of spare parts, which was a rare thing in ravaged post-war Hungary. He would scour the countryside in it, looking for junk to trade or sell. On one such trip he had come across a broken-down Volkswagen, driven by a de-commissioned U.S. officer who had been born in Hungary and was touring the country preparatory to returning to America. After Peter's father helped him get the car running, he refused payment, but did take the grateful driver's card. It read: "Joseph Moser, DDS, Hermosa Beach, California." "If you ever need anything," Moser told him, "don't hesitate to call." William had given the card to Peter's mother for safekeeping, and by the grace of God, she had brought it in her satchel! They showed the card to the American, and he promised to check it out.
He followed through, and surprisingly (or maybe not, if you know the ways of the Lord!), Dr. Moser was still in Hermosa Beach. Within a week the Schramms were sent to Munich, and then took a plane to New York City. On Christmas morning, they were taken to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, for processing, and a few weeks later took a train to Los Angeles, where they were met by Dr. Moser and his family.
Peter continues the story: "Sponsorship meant that they had to guarantee that we would not become a burden to the American people. (Moser) had to house and feed us for awhile. Mom and Dad both got jobs right away, Dad at the local newspaper lifting heavy things, and Mom cleaning houses. Soon we had a little beach shack to live in, and my parents were able to purchase their first restaurant with their savings and a bank-financed loan. The whole family went to work. We had to tear the place apart before we could open it. After it was opened, my sister and I washed dishes as Mom and Dad cooked and waited on tables."
About the time Peter went to high school the family moved to StudioCity and bought a bigger restaurant. Schramm's Hungarian Restaurant was located across the street from some of the movie studios. After graduating from Hollywood High in 1964, he enrolled at San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge) while continuing to work for his parents. By this time, Peter had become an avid reader, and was beginning to build his own library.
But he had not yet learned what he would later come to understand about American history and politics. Sadly, he notes, "even in the early '60s, (before 'political correctness' had been heard of), it was already common for teachers and professors to teach that America was an amazingly hypocritical place. All I needed to know about Abraham Lincoln, one teacher said, was that he was a racist."
Thankfully, he did not imbibe this poison, and through becoming involved in California Republican politics was eventually led to a doctoral program in government at ClaremontGraduateSchool in 1971. There, he "came to understand what Lincoln meant when he said that the ideas of the Declaration of Independence were the 'electric cord' that linked all Americans together, as though we were 'blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration.' This was what it meant to be an American."
It still is.
Schramm writes: "America became home to me, and these days I continue my life as a student of America. The difference is that now a university pays me to study, rather than my paying for the privilege. Here at a liberal arts college in central Ohio, I'm in the ironic position of teaching . . . Americans . . . how to think about their country. . ."
"When I teach them about American politics and American history, I start with a simple thing about their country and themselves. I tell them that they are the fortunate of the earth, among the blessed of all times and places. I tell them this is a thing that should be as obvious to them as it was to my father. And their blessing, their great good fortune, lies in the nation into which they were born. I tell them that their country, the United States of America, is not only the most powerful and the most prosperous country on earth, but the most free and the most just. Then I do my best to tell them how and why this is so. And I teach them about the principles from which those blessings of liberty flow. I invite them to consider whether they can have any greater honor than to pass undiminished to their children and grandchildren this great inheritance of freedom."
Amen, and amen.
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