Refugee story

Some immigrants come here for something. Others come to get away from something.

In either case, they bring something.

Immigrants are good for America. We native born Americans create vitality and energy ourselves, of course, but immigrants bring an extra dollop of it. America profits from their entrepreneurial energy. I liken immigrants to fixing a stalled computer by pushing "reset" or re-starting it. For some reason a fresh start fixes whatever was wrong. Immigrants are more appreciative of America's opportunities. My observation at my farm is that they work harder than the rest of us. A lot harder. America is their land of opportunity.

For many it is also an escape from violence and tyranny. My wife's parents escaped from China, back when communist ideological discipline made life dangerous for my wife's father, a newspaper writer. He escaped, then the family followed. My wife came here as an eight-year-old. Geza Tatrallyay also escaped. He was seven.

Geza is a college classmate, although he graduated a year after me since he took a year off to work at Expo 70 in Japan. He writes from home in Vermont, where he spends half the year, or from San Francisco where he hangs out with his daughter and grandsons. He often visits Nairobi to see his son and two granddaughters.

He has an immigrant story. He is a refugee. 


Guest Post by Geza Tatrallyay

Geza Tatrallyay

Sadly, Pax Americana is no more. The world is returning to a previous era of military confrontation, and civilization as we know it is threatened by dictators who only care about personal aggrandizement and riches and are prepared to unleash immense suffering and death on whole populations. Putin is the prize example, but there are others, including one former hopeful one in this country who shall remain nameless.

Of course, I am speaking about Ukraine, but also about what might come after. My heart goes out to the more than a million refugees who left their homeland in the first week of this senseless invasion – the largest movement of people in the shortest time frame the world has ever seen – as well as to all the others. As a seven-year-old, I lived through this, when my family escaped from Stalinist Hungary during the 1956 Revolution: we were caught twice, the third time we were lucky. It was my mother who was the driving force (it is Women’s History Month after all). She would rather risk her and our lives than stay in a country where there was no freedom, and where she saw no opportunity to raise her children and live life in a dignified way. After a brief stay in Austria, we immigrated to Canada, where my parents eked out an existence and ensured happy and successful lives for their children, which is what nurtured their own happiness. They were pleased to see me become on Olympian, graduate from Harvard and as a Rhodes Scholar, from Oxford and LSE, then go on to a career in finance and eventually become an author. I captured this all in my memoir, For the Children—the title encapsulates in three words the refugee rationale. So, I understand what the Ukrainian people staying to fight and those leaving their country are going through.

As it happened, I was involved as a young adult in two other Cold War era escape or defection attempts. First, at Expo 70, the world’s fair in Osaka, Japan in 1970, where I worked in the Ontario Pavilion during a year off from my studies, I was approached by three Czechoslovak hostesses from their pavilion to help them defect to Canada. This is the stuff of my second memoir, The Expo Affair. And at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, where I represented Canada as an epée fencer, I helped a Romanian fencer friend defect to Canada and this story is told in The Fencers, my third memoir. 

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All three books paint heroic true tales of people trying to leave their country of birth, which were then governed by corrupt régimes that relied on terror to subjugate their people. The spying of neighbor upon neighbor is a facet of daily life in these dictatorial states. In all three of the memoirs, the secret police in the employ of the régime are the main bad guys and I work in much of the historical context. In The Fencers, we see first-hand the corrupting mentality these régimes create and nurture—which by the way was evidenced just recently at the Beijing Olympics. To survive, to maintain your lifestyle, to get ahead under a Putinesque dictatorship, Russian athletes—or those who want to do well—have to cheat, do everything just to stay on top, sacrifice all morality. And this explains why the Ukrainians are fighting tooth and nail to prevent the Russians from imposing their will on them again. They have already suffered tremendously under such previous Stalinist dictatorships and do not want this for their children. Rather fight to the death or leave everything behind and start afresh in a country that is still free and democratic.

Vladimir Putin though, unfortunately, will not back down. He is committed to owning Ukraine like his Soviet predecessors did and will destroy it and its people rather than agree to restore some semblance of peace. Even if it means the return to the Stone Ages for Russia. Which it will with the western countries’ necessary response and resolve.

And for western civilization. Because, as the sanctions we impose in support of the Ukrainian people destroy the Russian economy and the wealth of Putin and his cronies, he will at some point turn to a more drastic, perhaps even, nuclear solution. Unless the people around him stop him, but the chances for this are, at best, remote.

Mankind has been lucky to get this far, so let’s hope our fortune continues to hold. We seem to have dodged the pandemic, now we are battling Putin—if we survive the threat he poses, there is always climate change to ensure our demise. So, the future looks grim my friends.