How I spent my first Easter in our new home, country

By John Toth

The Bulletin

The year was 1968. It was Easter, and I was an altar boy at St. Stephen of Hungary Catholic Church in the upper east side of New York City. It was my first Easter in the U.S.A.

Our plane of migrants landed at JFK International Airport in October the previous year. It was the second time my mother and I started new lives. The first time was in Vienna Austria, to where we escaped from Hungary in March, 1966. My mother and I managed to leave that Soviet-bloc communist country, using fake papers and a pair of real train tickets.

We spent a year and a half in Vienna while waiting for a country to let us in, and in October 1967, we flew across the pond to start new lives in the U.S.A.

By the time my mother took that photo, we were well on our way to being Americanized. We shopped at A&P, had a nice-enough apartment, (which is much more than what we had back in Hungary), and I was eating and breathing comic books, sitcoms on TV and furiously learning English. By the time Easter rolled around, I was not yet proficient, but I knew enough to participate in school. I was learning my third language in two years.

It was the best of times and the worst of times. We didn’t have much money, but compared to the way we lived in Hungary, we felt like we lived here like kings. We were human social sponges, soaking in the American way of life, and we loved it.

My friends were altar boys, so I became one. My main mentor was Father John, an elderly priest who also escaped from Hungary and was one of the priests in the church. The church also had a school, which I started to attend a few days after we got here. That part was not my favorite, but after the transition I had to undergo in Vienna, this time it was a lot easier.

Father John and I became good friends. I visited him in the church offices almost every day after school. We worked on projects like making tickets to a Hungarian dinner event. We just took pieces of paper and made them into tickets. He was like a grandfather whom I never had. Both of my grandfathers died before I was born - one of pneumonia before WWII, and the other disappeared during WWII.

Father John is in the background in the upper left side of the photo. He was a gifted violinist, and when he came to visit us for lunch or dinner, he brought along his violin and played the folk songs I used to hear on Hungarian radio.

In the photo, I’m leading an Easter procession. I don’t know why they put me in the lead, but I think Father John had something to do with it. We went around the school and church and then back to the church to finish the mass.

I also served as an altar boy during masses, wedding ceremonies and funerals. I liked weddings more, though, because we got tips. We also got tips at funerals, but not as much as at weddings.

Being one of the altar boys gave me a chance to make more friends and further blend more into the community, where a lot of Hungarians lived. They helped us out right from the beginning, including helping to find an apartment for us when we first got here. It was a close-knit community, although the 1956-ers did pull rank sometimes over us new arrivals.

In 1956, when the Russians invaded Hungary and put down the revolution against the communists, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians escaped to the West while the borders were open.

My parents were planning to do it also, but the window of opportunity was only a few days, as my mother explained later. I was 9 months old then, which also complicated the situation, and my mother said she was sick at the time. She had to wait 10 more years for another  opportunity.

As I walked down the street, holding the cross, all that was behind us. It was Easter, and after services, my mother and a few friends were planning to make Easter dinner and exchange stories on how we all got here. The conversation usually progressed in that direction. I should have taken notes.

I think they made chicken paprikas, Father John’s favorite, and he brought his violin.

 john.bulletin@gmail.com