Word: fenyvesi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Other experiences were similar. Charles Fenyvesi, a sophomore in Kirkland House, decided to escape after he had been caught and released by the Russians. "According to law, we should have been shot," Fenyvesi recalls, "and so we sat waiting for two hours to be either shot or deported...
Once across and into Austria, Fenyvesi and the other new refugees found helpful villagers who led them to the big camps that were forming to take care of the large influx. "A half hour after we crossed we started to court nice Austrian girls," Fenyvesi recalls, "and we felt like human beings again." a chance to read certain books I other-wise couldn't read, and it gave me a hope that I could live in this country. Besides, I felt that a middle-class boy should learn English...
...Austrian camps were an unfortunate introduction to the refugees' new life. One large one, at Eisenstadt, had been a Russian soldiers' barracks, and there were Russian signs all around the walls. "The first day there we erased them," Fenyvesi says. The camps were over-crowded, the food consisted of black coffee, American cheese, beans, and meat every day. The refugees did nothing at all for four days--"it was very depressing...
While in the camps they made their decisions of what they would no next. Fenyvesi and George Heimler, also a sophomore in Kirkland House, wanted to go to the United States because it offered the most opportunities for scholarships and college education...
They arrived here by plane and boat, on dark nights and on cold foggy mornings. "I always arrived everywhere at night," Fenyvesi remarks, while Heimler laments that "we coudn't even see the Statue of Liberty." Many of them were met by journalists and photographers. "My first impression of American," one refugee student relates, "was of American photographers and reporters. Their first act was to sit on the table or put their feet up. I thought this was a common American social custom...