Like a Fish out of Water

Like a Fish out of Water

I was the fish.

My water was Hungary.

It wasn’t just “like” but real, first person.

It was 1975.

I was having the time of my life in high school. My junior year.

I was popular, busy, well-rounded, intelligent, educated, cultured, and quite pretty.

When my father came to visit, he announced that he was headed to Austria to visit his friend.

Of course, I wanted to tag along.

Austria appealed to me then, and I still miss it.

At the time, Hungary was communist.

It was a rare opportunity to travel to a Western country.

It was only possible every other year, with the sponsorship of a person who lived at your destination in the West.

My dad contacted his aunt in Vienna and requested an invite for me. It had to state that she was willing to cover all my expenses.

She agreed to write the invitational letter.

With our Western passports and my dad’s burgundy, Romanian-made Dacia car, we pulled out of our parking lot, from behind our building. We waved good-bye to my mother in the window of our 6th floor apartment, neither of us knowing what might happen, though my father understood that this trip could change everything.

I did not cry because, being equally unaware of the stakes, I still thought innocently that we were off on an adventurous, cool vacation. All my friends would envy me greatly.

Hungary was very small.

Within hours, we reached the Hungarian-Austrian borders.

For us, Eastern Europeans living in communism, borders were always scary.

We had seen and heard too many awful stories:

People were escorted out of their cars to hidden offices and interrogated. This happened just for going to visit their friends and relatives.

The default assumption about all of us was that we were hiding something, had committed a crime, opposed the government, or faced some other conjured-up accusation.

We had heard of open suitcases lying around on the asphalt, with all their contents scattered. This occurred after an enforced search of one’s belongings.

Not to mention car parts—unassembled—as a consequence of some eager border guard making sure you weren’t smuggling any contraband (Western music, porn, drugs, or items one had bought and did not want to pay outrageous customs on homeward bound).

I did not remember the exact details, but in retrospect, it seemed that miraculously we were not victimized. We just went through the routine passport examination.

Hungarian border guards were trained and mandated to be stern, mean, intimidating, and scary.

Compared to that, the Austrian side of the border was a cakewalk.

Sighing in huge relief, shortly after we entered beautiful, neat, inviting, and orderly little Austria, my dad pulled over—to calm our riled-up nerves—so I thought.

Instead, to my shock, he reached down to his crew socks and pulled out fat wads of Hungarian paper money (Forints).

While I was watching speechlessly, thinking my dad was so rich and I was in for a major, Western shopping spree, he began to enlighten my naïve and gullible mind.

He informed me that during the course of the following 30 days—officially permitted by the Hungarian government—he had different plans.

He had prepared for this at home by selling most of his furniture—thus the stacks of bills—in case he decided to defect and not return to Hungary.

I was floored.

Yet, at 17 years old, you can imagine, a teenager was mostly preoccupied by her boyfriend, friends, school, extracurricular activities, grades, parties, and fun. I was preoccupied by all that.

Also, growing up in communism, totally oblivious to politics, nothing bothered me. I had a great life.

During those fateful months, all I cared about was enjoying a Viennese Melange (coffee), sitting around at the Konditorei, Aida—for hours, like the Viennese.

We sat next to the Stephansdom—the gorgeous cathedral at the crossing of Kärntnerstrasse (the infamous walking street with the poshest shops—a kind of Rodeo Drive) and the Graben, which was the continuation of the luxury.

We visited beautiful, quaint villages at the feet of giant Alpine mountains. We stayed in adorable Bed and Breakfasts.

We rode in the above Eastern European made car – no snow tires or chains – among fantastic Western vehicles, fully equipped for the fierce snow – up to heights I have never been in some of the tallest mountains of Europe. No rail by these treacherous roads. I cried.

There was nothing eerie about this—until we arrived in adorable little Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

My dad dropped “the bomb.”

“Call your mother,” he said, “and tell her that I have no inclination to return to communist Hungary. You can make your mind up, independent of me, if you want to choose to go back or stay.”

I was bewildered.

Of course I wanted to stay in the lap of luxury among the friendly Austrians.

I had no sense of long-term consequences. Probably not even short-term.

Until one day, my dad informed me that the fun was over. We had to go to the Foreign Police in Vienna and ask for asylum (aka permission to stay in their country indefinitely, until we could gain immigration to one of the larger countries that was much more equipped and used to refugees, who—for one reason or another—fled from some unpleasant regime from all over the world).

They welcomed us and started to help us find a more permanent place to stay that we could call home, at least temporarily, during the immigration procedure(s).

Nobody in their right mind would have imagined in their worst nightmare that our new home away from home would be a small room in a wooden (former military) barrack in a small Austrian village.

This is where I morphed into a fish that wasn’t just “like” but truly was out of water for 10 months.

This was just the beginning of the 50 years that went by since then.

Welcome to the 2025 United States of America, where I have been residing for the last 40 years.

More or less, still feeling, at least 50% like a Fish out of water.