Istvan & Family Medza

Story

The Medza family fled Hungary as refugees on the 21 November 1956, due to the Hungarian Revolution (Freedom Fight) which commenced on the 23 October 1956 against the terror puppet Stalinist Communist regime of Rakosi. We fled Hungary on a very frosty and dark night on the 21st November 1956 after the Red Army brutally re-occupied Hungary on 4 November 1956. Our parents correctly gauged that as the revolution had been brutally crushed and the traitorous Soviet puppet Kadar regime took office in 1956 (until the fall of totalitarian Communism in 1989), there was no hope of a decent future or freedom in Hungary for our family. Some 25,000 freedom fighters lost their lives to Soviet forces and the AVOS, the Hungarian secret police and some 200,000 Hungarian refugees fled the country.

With the help of relatives who lived in the border region, we crossed into Austria safely at dawn on the 22 November 1956. Our family consisted of our father Istvan (Stephen), our mother Maria, daughter Maria (aged 12) Istvan Attila (aged 8_) and Ernest Paul (aged 1). One could hear shooting in the distance and our constant fear was that we might come across marauding Soviet forces. This was a late and dangerous time to have left Hungary as the invading Soviet troops were patrolling the Hungarian/Austrian border and shooting refugees. We were penniless and our only possessions were the clothes on our back and a hope for a brighter and happier future in the West ? It was a very brave act of our parents to set forth with 3 children in tow into an uncertain future and a potentially very dangerous escape route. We felt sorry for and missed our extended family members left behind in Hungary. As we crossed the border into Austria in early dawn we were met by the Austrian Red Cross and many Good Samaritans waiting with hot drinks and food for the exhausted refugees. The help provided to many hundreds of thousands of Hungarian refugees is acknowledge with much gratitude. We were in Austria for about 3 weeks, housed in School halls etc, and then transferred by buses to a Refugees Camp in Italy called Ca\’ di Landino, (ex-2nd WW Army barracks) near Bologna. It was a very spartan place, with no privacy and restrictions on our movements outside of the camp. My sister Maria and I learned Italian quickly and we spoke it well on our arrival in Australia. Immigration Officers from the USA, Canada, Australia and some European countries selected refugees. Thankfully our parents selected Australia to be as far away as possible from European wars and ethnic tensions. With the help of the International Red Cross and an American Airline Company called the Flying Tigers, a DC 6 four engine propeller aircraft was contracted to fly out many hundreds of Hungarian refugees from Europe. The aircraft technology in the 1950\’s was not great and many people including our family were often air sick and the flight was bumpy and uncomfortable. Our journey from Naples, Italy, was quite an event, taking nearly 3 weeks. One of the engines had a mechanical failure over the Mediterranean Sea and we made an emergency landing in Beirut, Lebanon, and there we stayed one week until a replacement engine was delivered. Then by some further bad luck another engine had a mechanical failure and we made an emergency landing in Singapore, where we stayed another week until a new engine was delivered. We were finally very pleased to be in Australia and terra firma safely, landing in Melbourne on 16 April 1957.

All of us then had to adapt to learning to speak English. We were housed in Bonagilla, Victoria for 1week in ex-Army barracks again, without any privacy and a diet/food vastly different from what we were used to in Hungary. Our uncle who emigrated to Australia at the end of WW 2, kindly arranged for us to be accommodated on the Doyle family farm outside of Cohuna in Victoria. We were happy to leave Bonagilla. We left Cohuna and moved to Queanbeyan in late 1957, and to Canberra in 1961. Our parents worked conscientiously for decades to establish a promising and happy life for us all. In a country that was not used to foreigners in the 1950\’s, we were at times called ‘new Australians’ and viewed with suspicion by some people. We were at times called by derogatory names. We LOVE AUSTRALIA and it is our home and haven. We pay homage to this beautiful and wonderful country for accepting us, giving us peace, happiness and freedom.

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