Yesterday, in the midst of reading 'The Last Boy', a biography of baseball legend Mickey Mantle, I had just begun a chapter highlighting The Mick's 1956 season, in which he led the American League in almost every offensive category and won the first of three MVP awards.Later that morning, I made a trek across the Danube River with Garret - another American coaching here who I've become fast friends with since his arrival a couple weeks ago - to the House of Terror, a museum that illustrates the grim realities of the Nazi and Communist regimes during the 1940s and 50s. The museum is at the same location - 60 Andrássy út - where decades of torture and murder of Hungarians took place. During the 1940s, hundreds of Jews were herded to the building's basement, which is intact today and looks like something out of a 'Saw' movie and the location where inhumane acts took place.
Once the Nazis were forced out after WWII and the Soviets took control of Hungary as part of the Iron Curtain Empire that enveloped Eastern Europe, this reign of terror continued. Anyone suspected of opposing the Communist party was arrested and sent to the building, where they would be tortured, nearly starved and then given a rigged trial before being killed, their bodies dragged outside to be displayed in public as examples of what would happen should you oppose the communist regime.
Many of these Hungarians were imprisoned after the 1956 revolution, the epicenter of which took place right here in Budapest, which was still recovering from the destruction left behind by the second World War.
As I got on the tram to ride back home and pulled the book out of my backpack, what I had just witnessed really struck me. Here I was, reading a book about the poster boy of post-World War II America in the 50s, someone who was in the midst of becoming a hero of the Baby Boomer generation while putting together one of the greatest individual seasons in the history of our national pastime, playing in the biggest city in the world for the New York Yankees. What bigger symbol of the American way and the freedoms that we enjoy could there possibly be than that?
Meanwhile, half
way across the planet and just two weeks after Mantle's Yankees held off the Brooklyn Dodgers in a seven-game World Series, Hungary would begin a revolution against the Soviet oppression, a revolution they would lose when the Red Army rolled into the city to re-seize control in a show of force unseen since the end of WWII.Immediately, thousands of Hungarians who the Soviets deemed responsible for the uprising were captured, held and tortured - many at 60 Andrássy út – or shipped off to work camps with conditions that have been described as sometimes worse than the Nazi death camps. How’s this for perspective? One in every three families in Hungary lost a family member under these conditions during the Fascist and Communist eras.
Between my readings in ‘The Last Boy’ and my visit to the House of Terror, I had truly just witnessed two worlds that couldn’t be any further apart, brought together a half-century later in a way I never could have imagined.
Yesterday yielded yet another example of how thankful I am to be living in an area as rich with history as Eastern Europe, all the while putting into perspective how lucky Americans were and are in not having to go through what people in this country and others like it went through.