The Land of My Father

I’m on a train to the Austrian border from Budapest, my father’s hometown. I really struggled to leave the city, I was only there for 2 days but I kind of fell in love with it. I spent yesterday languishing at the Gellert Thermal Baths.

When I was a child, my father still had money from his inheritance from his father tied up in Hungary, and so we spent some of it on a luxury hotel with a swimming pool (and thermal mineral baths and saunas)

I remember being scared of the Gellert pool as a child, it was too deep for me. I used to have nightmares about being pushed into and boiling like a lobster in the hot water. It was mixed up with the Roman baths in Bath, where my mother grew up. I also remember running down long hotel corridors, getting lost with my brother, in the beautiful Art Nouveaux hotel. Sadly the infinite choice of Airbnb spaces have forced the hotel to close, and it’s impressive edifice is set to become a crumbling reminder of a glorious past. I was still getting lost yesterday. It is a mad set up with loads of nooks and crannies, hidden steam rooms and showers, redwood panelling and the perennial reminder in signage, that when my father escaped from his homeland, he slammed the door and would not speak to us in Hungarian.

As I write this, on my eldest daughter’s 25th birthday, I am also reminded that my father was only 24 when he did the journey to Austria and freedom. He tried to leave aged 18 but was caught and imprisoned for a year. When he wanted to leave again immediately following his release, his parents begged him to stay and get an education first.

Leftr to right: Eva’s mother, my grandfather, Eva, my father, my grandmother and Eva’s father

And so he studied engineering, and met a girl at the Jewish sports club. Eva’s parents would not let her leave Hungary and so she and my father got married aged 22 and planned their escape, which would eventually happen in November 1956.

I found myself wondering during my morning Yoga session at a studio in Budapest yesterday if my resistance to leaving today was echoing something of my father and his first wife’s feelings about leaving in the knowledge that they might never return.

Hellinger said (referring to first wives):

“This is one of the laws to which I have seen no exception, she will be represented by a child of the second wife. One of the daughters, for instance, of the second wife will suddenly feel like the first wife. ”

There is another whole story about this which I will try to write about in another post some day…