Walking on Castle Hill

Map of Buda Castle Hill area, a "you are here" map
for tourists posted in various places.

Hungary is a little funny for me. That's funny as in strange, not "ha ha."

I grew up speaking Hungarian fluently in a pretty large Hungarian family and community that preserved Hungarian traditions. We ate Hungarian food, listened to Hungarian music, learned Hungarian csárdás and folk dancing, and attended Hungarian mass on Sundays — all within an Australian environment. But I have never lived in Hungary. It's a foreign country in addition to being deeply familiar.

The ambivalence first hit me in 1970 at age seventeen as I bicycled from Vienna and was crossing the Iron Curtain border into Hungary. The Hungarian border guard dressed in Soviet-style uniform with red communist stars spoke my family's language. As I bicycled in Hungary, everyone, all strangers, was speaking my family's language.

I again was in Hungary for a couple of weeks in 1979, so it had been thirty-eight years when Shari and I visited in September. Over those four decades, my Hungarian has slipped into the background of English speaking life in the U.S.A. I speak English with my siblings and use Hungarian, like the Spanish I learned at age thirteen, only in colorful snippets talking to myself or chatting with Nazar, our wonder-dog.

I was a little apprehensive going back to Hungary after such a long time. It turned out that my language, though a bit awkwardly simple and rough, worked just fine. I could even understand proper Hungarian quite well. See, I have never been educated in the Magyar language. Its syntax, vocabulary, and writing are beyond what I learned in my mother's kitchen and at Hungarian summer camps.

Almost every building on Castle Hill has a plaque with
its history. Oddly enough, the plaques were installed by
the Budapest city soviet and are dated,
of all years, 1956. This plaque states that the building
dates from the 15th Century and was remodeled
in its current form around 1800.

A degree of pride at being able to converse in Hungarian was accompanied by a familiarity with being at home in a place where I had never lived. As I wandered through the baroque streets of Buda's Castle Hill district and looked at young people, I would flatter myself that in some ways, my roots were deeper than theirs. Those roots are the stories and experiences of my ancestors, and they get deeply personal with my mother during the siege of Budapest.

In December of 1944, my mother knew the advancing Soviet troops would overwhelm the German (and tragic Hungarian accomplices) defenses and all her Hungarian paper currency would be worthless — whether replaced by Soviet currency or a dearth of anything to buy. So she spent whatever she could buying food, toys, Christmas decorations, and Christmas cookies. Dad was gone, having been ordered to the front lines somewhere in southern Hungary. Mum had to take care of two-year-old son Paul and eight-month-old daughter Irene. My mother, being the wife of an officer, got permission to take refuge in a make-shift bomb shelter in the Castle Hill district of Buda. It was the cellar of the house at no. 3 Dísz tér. That was where she, my two oldest siblings, my uncle Zoltán, and a small crowd sheltered for two months from Soviet artillery during the day and American bombing at night.

No. 3 Dísz tér

The Danube River, all of its bridges blown up by the Germans, and the hills of Buda were fiercely defended by the Germans for over three months. Their headquarters were in the Buda Palace on Castle Hill, about a thousand feet from Dísz tér. Little Irene contracted tuberculosis. Little Paul suffered from a dangerously high fever caused by tonsillitis and bronchitis. The others in that cellar thought the children were delirious when they asked their mother for Christmas cookies. Mum had them hidden and fed them when no one was watching. That food kept her kids and brother-in-law alive; as did fate. One American bomb crashed through roof and floors, lodging itself in an arch several feet above the cellar. The bomb was a dud. Had it exploded, many of those hiding in the cellar of no. 3 Dísz tér would have perished.

Some eight hundred thousand civilian residents hid for over three months as armies inflicted over four hundred thousand casualties on each other. There are many photographs of what Budapest looked like after the siege. It was devastated. Russians described the city as looking worse than Stalingrad after that four-month battle. The city suffered again during the 1956 uprising. On my previous visits in the 1970's, buildings everywhere were pock-marked with bullet-holes.

The ornate-roofed National Archives building by the old Vienna Gate.

It is all very intense stuff.

Strolling along the streets of today's Budapest, that wretched history seems remote, like the Tatar devastation in 1241 and the two and a half centuries of Ottoman-Habsburg warfare in Hungary. As if by magic, the bridges have been rebuilt, and the baroque-on-medieval buildings and neighborhoods of Castle Hill have been reconstructed, including no. 3 Dísz tér. The fashionable shopping street of Váci utca that my mother knew is thriving, as is the city generally.

I can imagine my grandfather in 1902 stationed in the Castle Hill Palace with the 32nd "Csibész" (Rascal) Regiment, avoiding imprisonment for sedition against the Austrian Habsburgs by feigning insanity. I can see the Magyar pride in Mathias Church and other buildings and monuments embellished or built for the 1896 commemoration of the one thousand anniversary of the founding of the Hungarian nation.

All these feelings and ghosts, national and family, haunted me as I walked and wandered the familiar yet foreign streets of Castle Hill.