Clara Arvai volunteers at the House of Hungary in Balboa Park, greeting people, offering Hungarian treats and discussing its history. She tells how the 1956 Hungarian Revolution began with courageous Budapest students demanding freedom and then overthrowing the communist regime, but how Russian tanks rolled through Budapest to crush the revolution.
Sometimes her eyes tear up as she talks. After all, Arvai, now 89, was there.
Following World War II, Hungary became a Soviet communist satellite. From 1948 to 1956, the Hungarian regime imprisoned, killed or sent to labor camps nearly 1 million Hungarians, more than 10 percent of the population.
“They controlled us by fear,” Arvai said. “The walls had ears. You couldn’t talk even in your own room. You could not trust anyone.”
By 1951, Arvai was 18 and a high school graduate living with her parents in Budapest where she was born and raised. She planned to attend Technical University of Budapest and follow her dream of becoming an engineer like her father.
Arvai was in love with Erno Kecskes. A month before they were to announce their engagement, however, Kecskes disappeared.
One night at 2 a.m. there was a bang on the front door. It was the secret police wanting to interrogate Arvai. “I was scared,” she said. “He wanted to know where I had been, what I did and whether I saw Erno.”
Two years later, Arvai learned that Kecskes had been arrested for attending an anti-communist meeting. He was sentenced to life in a coal mine labor camp.
When asked about a trial, Arvai replied, “The government didn’t give trials.”
Due to her association with Erno, Arvai was blacklisted and her ission to the university delayed four years.
By the time the revolution began, Arvai was attending the university. Classes were suspended, however, as Budapest’s streets were a war zone.
“They shot anyone in the street,” she recalled.
After the revolt was defeated in December, 1956, and university classes restarted, students disappeared. Arvai’s class of 80 students was reduced to 3.
In January 1957, Arvai, then 24, secretly and without her parents’ knowledge, fled Budapest with only the clothes she wore, a student card and birth certificate. She traveled by train to a town near the Austrian border. Hungary had closed the border, but she avoided authorities by hiking a trail over hills alone in the dark to reach Austria. Eventually, following street lights she found a church and Red Cross van that took her to a refugee camp in Vienna.
Arvai was accepted as a refugee and resettled in Montreal, where she lived with a family, learned English and attended McGill University, graduating in 1961 with a civil engineering degree. She worked her way through college as an engineering draftsman.
While in Montreal, she met an old friend, Leslie Arvai, who had been a fellow student in Budapest. They fell in love, were married in 1961 and moved to California. They remained married 56 years until his death in 2017.
In 1969, Arvai fulfilled a lifelong dream by becoming a licensed civil engineer.
She worked in Northern California as a county engineer deg many well-known public works projects, such as fishing piers, bridges and power plant structures. She rose to supervisor in 1978, overseeing as many as 35 professionals.
In 2005, Arvai and her husband moved in retirement to Santee, where they bought a home in which she still resides.
She has two living adult children, a bioengineer and an attorney, and two grandchildren.
Over the years, she has reconnected with her family in Hungary and exchanged visits.
Arvai, now a U.S. citizen, places a special value on freedom. “It was worth coming over,” she said. “I live in freedom. Over there, you had to the communist party to go somewhere.”
She and her husband created a book about their lives in Hungary and ed it down to their children and grandchildren. “We want them to understand the difference between communist regime and freedom.”
Arvai hopes to communicate that same understanding to visitors at the House of Hungary.
About this series
Jan Goldsmith is an Emeritus member of the U-T’s Community Advisory Board. He is an attorney and former law partner, judge, state legislator, San Diego city attorney and Poway mayor.
