American Dreams (this will make you count your blessings)

American Dreams

Separated in a flight from communism and reunited decades later, Tamás Pusztai and his mother are still taunted by fate

Sunday January 22, 2006 By JENNIFER WEISS

STAR-LEDGER STAFF

When Cathy Eff last held her son, he was a soft, fair-haired toddler and she was a young mother about to escape an oppressive Communist regime.

That was 49 years ago.

When she next held him, she was a 70-year-old woman who had endured stomach cancer and a hip replacement, and he was a middle-aged man with a bushy mustache and a wrinkled face.

"I'm not going to let you go," Eff said as she cried and nestled her head in the chest of her son, Tamás Pusztai, during their reunion at Newark Liberty International Airport in October.

But she may not have a choice. The U.S. government, which welcomed Eff and thousands of other Hungarians who fled after the failed revolution of 1956, is not as welcoming to her son and his family, who have spent three months in New Jersey on tourist visas.

While Eff and other Cold War refugees were welcomed for humanitarian reasons, that urgent rescue mission dissipated with the rise of democracy in Hungary. There is no special privilege granted to Hungarians today.

Pusztai, who has political freedom, wants economic freedom. He wants his children to have the American life he never had, but he is finding little hope within America's immigration system.

Because Pusztai and his family are among millions of people who would like to come to America, they must wait their turn, and according to State Department estimates, that could take years.

And so the months Pusztai and his family are spending in his sister's home in Hunterdon County have been bittersweet: joyous in reunion, but tempered by the reality that another separation is looming.

This is a story about a mother and son, reunited after a half-century, who may again be separated. It is a story of immigration and two American Dreams: one realized, one about to be denied because of shifting world politics.

But more than anything, it is a story about a man embraced by the family he had never known, and exposed to a lifestyle he had only dreamed about.

'IT'S ABOUT TIME' In giant, modern Newark Liberty International Airport, people hurried past monitors displaying arrivals and departures. Pusztai (POOZ-sty-ee) was among them, having just touched down after his first trip on an airplane.

In Hungary, he had grown up on a small vineyard in the town of Balatonalmádi. He now lives in an apartment in Kaposvár, a city of about 70,000.

Now, here he was, in one of the world's busiest airports just miles from New York, a city made international by commerce, communications and generations of immigrants. Millions of those immigrants — the Irish, the Jews and Italians of the last two centuries; the Hispanics and Asians of more recent decades — were people just like Pusztai, perhaps lacking in formal education, but ambitious and humble enough to do any work to get ahead.

Pusztai had experience in Hungary as a soldier, a mechanic, a driver and a stable hand. As a witness to history, he devoured books and newspapers, and listened intently to radio programs. He was also proficient with computers. Surely, someone in America could use a man like Pusztai.

He stood in the airport dressed in a dark leisure suit and patterned tie, somewhat overwhelmed and clearly out of place, like a black-and-white character lost in a Technicolor movie.

Most of the people who came to the airport to greet him, he had seen only in e-mail attachments.

His sister, Cathy Wilson, was there with her husband, David, and their three children. His oldest sister, Judy "Diana" Stock was also there, as was Lajos Ivan of Bound Brook, the architect of the reunion.

As the Americans handed their Hungarian relatives flowers, stuffed animals and brightly colored gift bags, tears spilled and people clutched each other.

"It's about time," Pusztai thought. Here, after all these years, was his family.

NO CHOICE BUT TO LEAVE Pusztai and his mother were separated for 49 years because of governments and politics and circumstances that became critical in October 1956.

Eff said she and her first husband, Barnabás Pusztai, were in Budapest on Oct. 23, waiting in line for an Italian film when they heard of unrest at a nearby radio station. The young couple hurried over.

A crowd of demonstrators had gathered in Bem Square to protest Communist rule. As the crowd rushed the headquarters of the radio station, the Hungarian Security Police, or AVH, began to shoot. It was the beginning of the Hungarian revolution.

Eff and her husband ran from the square. Though the scene was chaotic, Eff remembers she felt more relieved than afraid.

"It was about time somebody started something," she said. "It was unbearable the way the living conditions were."

As Hungarian citizens and soldiers resisted Soviet tanks and AVH guns in the days that followed, Eff at first was hopeful.

"For a couple of days there, I actually thought we won," Eff said. "It was a very good feeling. The Russians were going. The secret police that were left behind, we could have handled them. Then, the Russians came back into Budapest with fresh tanks and fresh troops. That's when I realized how hopeless it was."

She and her husband decided to leave the country.

Knowing escape would be dangerous, the couple placed their 2-year-old son, Tamás, in the care of Eff's parents. Though she was torn, Eff convinced herself her son would be safer that way.

"I still say that was the biggest mistake I made," she said through tears.

In early November 1956, the couple left Budapest. They walked at night and hid in forests during the day, stopping occasionally at farmhouses to ask if they could work for food.

After three weeks of walking and hiding, the couple crossed into Austria, but Eff wanted to keep going — to America.

"I can't find another country that's going to be as good as America is," Eff said. "Everyone in the world, if you ask them where they want to go, nine out of 10 are going to go to America."

And America wanted them. Like thousands of other Hungarian refugees, Eff and Barnabás Pusztai were bused to Munich, then flown by the U.S. military to McGuire Air Force Base. From there, they were housed at Camp Kilmer in Edison.

Kilmer was the first facility in the United States to take in refugees. August Molnar, founding president of the American Hungarian Foundation in New Brunswick, said 15,000 Hungarians were resettled through the camp at that time.

In all, about 200,000 people would leave Hungary during and shortly after the revolution. More than 47,000 would come to America, arriving by boat and plane to Kilmer and other hubs. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Congress set special quotas that allowed them to come, viewing them as people who longed to embrace democratic principles.

"There was a recognition that Hungary and the Hungarians had taken a stand that was America's stand also," Molnar said. Today, "there's no special treatment. You have to stand in line with all the other immigrants."

LOSING TOUCH Eff and Barnabás Pusztai made Philadelphia their first home in America. She worked at a sportswear factory, then at a diner. He worked for a company that made artificial limbs. They had a daughter, Judy.

At the White Tower Diner, where Eff was a waitress and a cook, she met a Philadelphia police officer named Bob Eff. Her marriage to Barnabás Pusztai fell apart and she and Bob Eff moved to Nevada, married and had two more daughters. All the while, she communicated by mail with her family back in Hungary.

Tamás Pusztai had been growing up in Balatonalmádi, in a small house that was his mother's childhood home.

His mother tried a number of times to arrange visas from him, but the Hungarian government repeatedly denied her request. Tamás Pusztai said local Communist officials threatened to send Geza Voros, his grandfather, to a gulag, or Soviet labor camp, if he helped his grandson leave the country.

"They brought my grandparents into a police station and questioned them harder than average," Pusztai said. "They told my grandfather, 'If you want to keep your work, make sure your grandchild gets it out of his head about leaving for the United States. If you can't raise him right, take him to a foster home.'

"That was the foundation of the beginning of my hatred for the Communist regime," he said.

Meanwhile, Eff did not keep Pusztai a secret from her three daughters born in America.

"I always knew he was there," said Cathy Wilson. "The letters were always translated for us to understand, and whenever she sent a letter we would draw a picture, or I would say, 'Tell him this,' and she would write it for me."

Mother and son lost touch in the 1970s, at about the time Pusztai was drafted into the Hungarian army to serve his compulsory two years. Pusztai said the Communists forbade soldiers from keeping contacts in the West.

In the meantime, his grandparents died and letters Eff sent to her son were returned to her unopened.

Over time, they lost touch. She wondered if he even still lived in Hungary. He wondered if she had died.

RETURNING A FAVOR Pusztai eventually found his mother through the Internet.

He belonged to an online forum for the Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet, Hungarian Nation. In February, he sent a message to another member, Lajos Ivan. He had noticed Ivan's listed location was New Jersey, the last place he knew Eff lived.

He sent an e-mail to Ivan explaining he wanted to find his mother.

Ivan was sympathetic. When he and his wife arrived in the United States in 1972 as political refugees, they had what he calls "three big zero" — no relatives, no friends and no language. A Hungarian-American co-worker at his first job helped shepherd him through the start of his new life.

"Now, I'm 60 years old and I can return that favor to someone," said Ivan, a pressman at The Star-Ledger.

Ivan eventually found Eff's phone number on an Internet search site, called her Clinton apartment and explained that a Hungarian named Tamás Pusztai was trying to find his mother.

Less than an hour later, mother and son were on the phone together, crying so hard they could barely speak.

A DIFFERENT WORLD An hour after they left the airport, Pusztai and his family — Gabriella Geiger, his common-law wife, and their three children, Kopánny, 10, Levente, 5, and Kinscö, 3 — were at the Wilson home in Clinton Township, just a few miles from Eff's apartment.

The children explored the big yellow house. They played with tiny trucks, plastic play sets and toys that talked. They play-cooked pretend food, flipped through books and pressed notes on a miniature keyboard. They met Kodiak, the family dog, and gazed into the Wilsons' large aquarium. Outside was a swingset, a treehouse and an above-ground pool.

The visit would be a big adjustment for Cathy and David Wilson, and their children Dale, 14, Robert, 10, and Marie, 3. To accommodate the Hungarians, the American children shared their bedrooms, and a storage room was converted into a bedroom for Pusztai and Geiger.

While the house felt like it shrank to half its size with the Hungarians moved in, it was still huge compared to Pusztai's apartment, which was about the size of the Wilsons' three-car garage.

"I feel almost embarrassed to have so much," Cathy Wilson said. "How could I have all this and he have so little?"

Back in Kaposvár, Pusztai lacked a full-time job and made money in spurts, as a driver and a mechanic. Geiger worked as a home health aide. The couple could not afford a car, and their place was so small the children had little space to play. Many foods, such as dairy products, were too expensive, and Pusztai bought most of his clothes secondhand at stores that sold them by the kilogram.

But the thing about Hungary that troubled them the most was their isolation. Geiger's mother died when she was 12, and her father passed away before Kopánny was born.

"It's just the two of us," Geiger said. "There's no support system, like we have over here."

WHIRLWIND VISIT That first evening, Pusztai sat on a couch with Eff, looking at old photographs and talking about the past. Eff touched his cheek with the back of her hand, looking overjoyed.

As he soaked up his family's love and attention, Pusztai saw for the first time how growing up in the United States might have been. He wanted to stay. Not so much for himself, but for his three children.

As the days passed, Kopánny, Levente, and Kinscö put on weight. They slurped drinkable yogurt, devoured bananas and helped the family drink two gallons of milk most days.

The Wilsons bought the Hungarians clothes and boots to replace the years-old, too-small things their relatives had brought. The children were thrilled by the American cartoon characters on their shirts and shoes. The boys were especially pleased with their colorful, comfortable new boxer shorts.

The Wilsons bought matching pajamas and dresses for Kinscö and Marie, the 3-year-old cousins who look like twins from behind. And there were many other similarities between members of the reunited family. Eff said young Robert's fingers looked just like Pusztai's and said Levente had the same rich, dark brown hair she had when she was young.

"We think the same way, we react to things the same way," she said of herself and Pusztai.

The family immersed itself in American culture. They watched "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" at a movie theater in Phillipsburg. The Hungarians were awed by the huge theater with its plush seats, roomy rows and booster chairs for children. They were overwhelmed at Wal-Mart, a store so big Geiger and Pusztai felt they could never see everything that was for sale.

On Halloween, the adults dressed the children in homemade costumes. Kopánny, Levente and Kinscö trick-or-treated as Gandolf, Spider-Man and Scooby-Doo.

On Thanksgiving, the family enjoyed a traditional turkey dinner.

As Christmas approached, the Wilsons brought the children to the Bridgewater Commons mall. Kopánny, Levente, Kinscö and Marie had their picture taken with Santa Claus.

They went to football games, where the whole family cheered for Dale, who played for North Hunterdon High School. They took the Circle Line to Liberty Island, where they stared up at the Statue of Liberty.

The boys were placed in local schools, where they tried to overcome the language barrier. There were misunderstandings, like the one on Levente's first day of kindergarten at Spruce Run School in Clinton Township. He had not been allowed to go to the bathroom, he told his mother and aunt. He had asked, he said through tears, but the teacher had not understood what he needed.

Both he and Kopánny had to figure out the Pledge of Allegiance. Kopánny, who had joined his cousin Robert's fifth-grade class at Patrick McGaheran School, recalled his confusion with a grin.

"It was interesting," he said. "I put my hand on my heart, too."

On tourist visas, Pusztai and Geiger were not allowed to work, so they chipped in around the house. Geiger prepared Hungarian meals and treats, from potato paprikash and beef goulash to sweet palacsintas and Hungarian cookies. Pusztai fixed Dale's computer when it broke, helped Eff run errands, did yard work and shoveled snow.

But as December turned into January, the realization that the Hungarians would soon have to leave set in.

Pusztai, Geiger and the children were scheduled to depart Feb. 22, and the Wilsons knew they could cancel the tickets and extend their trip until mid-April, at which point the Hungarians' six-month visas would expire. But as they consulted an immigration lawyer and the offices of several politicians, they learned the Hungarians' chances of staying beyond April were slim. BOUND BY LAW The United States opened its borders to Eff because the Hungarian revolt had been the first major threat to the Soviet Union's dominance, and all America cheered.

"When I came in 1956, it was a walk in the park," Eff recalled. "The government supplied the airplane. We stayed until somebody sponsored us and we got a job."

If Pusztai had come then, he would have been welcomed, too. But Eff had not brought him. It was mistake, it seems, that will never go away.

"It's going to kill me," Eff said of the prospect of being separated from her son again.

"I don't know why it's so hard, having the families together," she said. "I mean, there's nothing for them in Hungary."

For Cathy Wilson, the toughest thing is "knowing that I'm sending them back to be poor, to be hungry."

Immigration officials and experts have told Pusztai he has virtually no hope of being allowed to stay, even though his entire family is here.

As the unmarried child of an American citizen, Pusztai could return to the United States in four to five years, according to State Department estimates. A married person would face a wait of seven to eight years — and Pusztai married Geiger Friday evening in a ceremony at Clinton Presbyterian Church.

"There are millions of people in the world who are waiting for their turn to enter the United States, which is why it takes so long," said Bill Strassberger, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. "We all understand that people would like to come to the United States, but there are limits, by law."

Abby Bird, press secretary for Rep. Mike Ferguson (R-7th Dist.), who helped the Wilsons arrange the Hungarians' temporary visas, said there was little more the congressman could do.

"We look into any options and any information that can help sway a process, but again, we have to follow the rules and keep within the guidelines that the law has set," Bird said.

The Hungarians' only chance to speed the process is through the annual work visa — or green card — lottery, which would give them permanent immigrant status, the first step toward full citizenship. But millions apply and only 50,000 are granted, and just 20,000 of those are allotted to all Europeans.

Philip Skotte, the consul general in Budapest who issued the temporary visas for the family, said he had never seen a case like Pusztai's, but there was nothing more his office could do within the law.

"We can't do anything further here," Skotte said. "All we can do is what we did already."

LOST HOPE On her 71st birthday, Pusztai surprised Eff with a trip to the Jersey Shore, her favorite place. A chilly November wind blew as mother and son walked along the water, scanning the sand for unbroken seashells.

Cathy Eff had spent many summers at the Shore with her husband and the girls. She had thought of Pusztai often on those trips, especially as she gazed at the ocean. She had kept her feelings to herself, not wanting to upset her family.

On her birthday, as she stood beside her son, Eff finally shared what had been on her mind all those years.

"I used to take the kids out to the water, and I would think, over that water was my son, and when was I going to see him?" Eff recalled. "I could never answer that question, of course. It got to the point where I gave up hope."

If he must return to Hungary, Pusztai would consider himself betrayed by yet another government. He recalled how he and Geiger had lived in Austria for several years before Kopánny was born. They were still waiting for refugee status in 1989 when they lost their claim to political asylum because the Communist government had fallen and Hungary had become a democracy.

Now, he feels, America is turning its back on him.

"Because my whole family is living here .¤.¤. I have a right to live here," Pusztai said. "I have nobody in Hungary. .¤.¤. Because I lived for 50 years under these unjust conditions, I think I deserve that. .¤.¤. The government should give me the chance to pay taxes. It wasn't my fault that we couldn't get together."

October 2006 will mark the 50th anniversary of the revolution.

Fifty years will have passed since Eff left Pusztai behind.

They hope 50 years will have been enough to bring them back together.

Jennifer Weiss works in the Hunterdon County bureau. She may be reached at jweiss@starledger.com or (908) 782-8326.

I don't think I've posted anything in over a year on FR - been busy with a toddler at home now! Anyway, a friend of mine in NJ emailed this to me today and I felt compelled to share it on FR.

This woman in the article goes to her church and her granddaughter attends school with my friend's daughter. We agreed that this article made us count our blessings and especially thankful to be born in the US.

Heeeeez an EEEELEEEEEGUL AAAAALIEN!!!!!! THROW THE BUM O U T!!! HE'S PROBABLY OSAMA! /sarc

what gets me is that this man actually has skills and states that he WANTS to pay taxes - yet we have millions that flow over our southern border each year and have neither...

such a shame...

Clinton worked hard on on making sure immigrants from ex-commie nations could not come in but those from places where they tended to vote for RATS, when they got here, could. It's one of his many foul legacies.

ping

Let me be the first to say it: he can just fly to Mexico and walk across the border like everybody else!

This story is absolutely disgusting, when you think that just because an illegal alien happens to be on US soil when she gives birth to a baby, the baby and the entire family are then given automatic rights to stay in this country.

That is disgusting. Although, makes me think Tamas and his family should come back again to visit when his wife is expecting their next child and maybe she could "unexpectedly" go into labor on US soil? Would that actually work? Could they actually stay if Tamas' wife gave birth in the US? I don't know much about immigration law.

What a shame that a relatively skilled couple who wants nothing more than economic opportunity and a better life for their children is trying to come here LEGALLY and with the support of family who are US citizens - yet are not allowed. Yet, hundreds or thousands stream across the border illegally every day and we do nothing to stop them.

If we stopped the illegals, perhaps we could take on a lot more LEGAL immigrants who are willing to work hard for a better life.

You know what I think of this story! If the person in the story had been Mexican, the congressman would have moved heaven and earth to help him. Sickening.

gads

Clinton worked hard on on making sure immigrants from ex-commie nations could not come in but those from places where they tended to vote for RATS, when they got here, could. It's one of his many foul legacies.

What good is winning the presidency and both houses of Congress if we can't undo BillyJeff's foul legacies?

I know a Swiss marine engineer, designs big deisel engines for ships, he wants to emigrate to America and they told him he would never qualify to become a citizen.

It's bizarre, he's wealthy, successful, and would be a tremendous asset to this country, but because he has the wrong skin color he will never be allowed to live here.

Ed