In his dank Budapest prison cell in the mid-1950s, my father imagined he heard Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. Though no one in my family had ever set foot in the actual New World, just knowing it existed brought my father solace during his nearly two-year incarceration.
Locked up in Soviet-occupied Hungary’s notorious Fo Street fortress, my father was blessedly still unaware that his wife — my mother, a reporter for United Press International — occupied a nearby cell. Nor did he know that his two small children, myself and my older sister, were living with strangers paid to look after them by the American wire services, my parents’ employer. Their crime was reporting on the show trials and jailing of priests, nuns and dissidents that Stalinist satellites of the postwar era used to clamp down on dissent.
My parents would find it bitterly disappointing that American conservatives, including Donald Trump, have come to admire their small European homeland, with its habit of choosing the wrong side of history, and even to see it as a role model. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has branded Hungary an “illiberal democracy” as he systematically rolls back hard-won freedoms, reinvents its less than glorious past and cozies up to Russia, Hungary’s former occupying power and my parents’ jailer.
I recall a different Orban.
On June 1989, I stood with tens of thousands of Hungarians in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square during the reburial of the fallen leaders of the 1956 uprising against the Soviet-controlled government. From the podium, a bearded, skinny youth captured our attention with a fiery speech. “If we are sufficiently determined, we can force the ruling party to face free elections,” he shouted, urging negotiations for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. “If we are courageous enough, then and only then, can we fulfill the will of the revolution.” The 26-year-old speaker’s name was Viktor Orban.
The events of 1989, when several members of the Eastern Bloc were throwing off the Soviet yoke, were thrilling. Hungary was taking small steps toward democracy, something that I experienced very personally. At my wedding in 1995 in Budapest, my husband, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, announced in his toast, “In marrying Kati, I also welcome Hungary to the family of democracies.” Hungary’s president, Arpad Goncz, four years into his work to democratize the country, was also present.
For a time, Mr. Orban, no longer bearded or skinny, head of the youth party Fidesz, befriended Richard and me. He invited us to dinner and the opera, and we hosted him in our New York apartment at a return dinner. (As it happens, the financier and philanthropist George Soros — whom Mr. Orban has aggressively attacked in recent years — was also present on that occasion.)
But in 2002, defeated at the polls after a single term as prime minister, Mr. Orban made sure that he would not be defeated again. Re-elected in 2010, he proceeded to weaken much of Hungary’s nascent civil society — its independent judiciary and its independent media. In this way, he began turning the country into a one-party state.
By some views, Mr. Orban’s Hungary is a soft autocracy, since dissidents and reporters aren’t jailed; they are merely driven out of business and — in the case of thousands — out of the country. Mr. Trump has evidently been impressed by Mr. Orban’s skill at eroding democratic norms and ridding himself of pesky political opponents. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban. He’s fantastic,” Mr. Trump has gushed.
How is it that Mr. Trump’s open admiration for Mr. Orban was not enough to warn away more American voters? Beyond showering praise him, Mr. Trump has already ripped pages from Mr. Orban’s playbook: threatening to revoke the broadcast licenses of news channels he derides as “fake,” striving to bypass the Senate’s confirmation process and appointing lackeys to high positions. Expect much more along lines that Mr. Orban has followed as he’s turned Hungary from a fledgling democracy into one of the world’s new authoritarian regimes. Even as American journalists debate whether to take Mr. Trump seriously or literally, I recall Voltaire’s warning, “He who can persuade you to believe absurdities can persuade you to commit atrocities.”
Neither individuals nor nations escape history for long, and with Mr. Trump’s election, history threatens to barge into our American democratic sanctuary with a vengeance.
No American child has yet had to open her front door, as I did in 1955, to face three secret policemen, disguised in workers’ overalls, declaring, “Your mother called about the meter. Go get her.” I called out, “Mama!” returned to my room and my playmate, and did not see my mother for a year. There was no one to report my parents’ arrest to the world, since they were the last independent journalists, and now they were silent inmates.
As much as I miss my parents, these days I am almost relieved that they are not alive to see the current version of the country they considered the greatest on earth, the United States. They would now barely recognize it.
A chapter of my parents’ past opened in 2005, when, after their death, I got access to the files that the secret police had kept on my family during the years of Soviet domination (even the drawings I made as a 6-year-old merited a place in the Marton dossier). Imagine my pride when I found a document stating that under brutal interrogation my parents “did not compromise a single Hungarian citizen.” In his “confession,” which I also found in the files, my father had written how 10 years earlier, under the Nazis and their Hungarian allies, “we lost pretty much everything we owned, and I have absolutely no hope that in my lifetime I can rebuild again.” Most shockingly, I learned that in his despair my father attempted to commit suicide.
Even though they were victims of the two worst experiments on humankind, Nazism and the Communism, my parents did rebuild again, here in the New World.
I recall that America.
In Cold War Budapest, the first American I ever met was the man who showed up in his shiny black Buick, the Stars and Stripes waving on the fender, to visit me and my sister in our foster home on the outskirts of Budapest. He’d brought us unheard-of luxuries: oranges and American-style T-shirts and (bizarrely) frilly party dresses. His name was Christian Ravndal, and he was Washington’s envoy to Budapest, the face of America, the decent. It was a time when few Hungarians called on us. Fear is a potent weapon and as children of “enemies of the people” we were deemed toxic.
Today, I do not contemplate leaving the New World, which allowed us to restart our lives several decades ago. As my parents’ daughter, I will not flee into the silence of internal exile, but hold tight to my first glimpse of America: an offering of oranges for a little girl temporarily orphaned by an indecent state.
The post Why I’m Not Giving up on American Democracy appeared first on New York Times.
