A full circle completed
After fleeing in 1956, historian Gabor Vermes is welcomed back to his native Hungary
Archived article from Oct 20, 2000
By Douglas Frank
When Gabor Vermes literally walked away from Communist Hungary in 1956, he never imagined that 44 years later he would be welcomed back to his homeland as a VIP to give a public lecture on one of the country’s greatest statesmen.
“Budapest looked like a ghost town in 1956, no hope, no future,” recalls Vermes, an associate professor of history on the Newark campus. “I was an only son, my father had died and my mother very bravely said, ‘Go.’”
So Vermes and a friend, along with some 200,000 of the country’s citizens, simply walked out of Hungary in the wake of the failure of the Hungarian Revolution against Soviet oppression.
Vermes remembers taking the first train west from Budapest. Then, with the help of a farmer at the border, he and others were able to walk through a cold and dark marsh to freedom in Austria.
He recalls going “from camp to camp to camp,” until he was allowed to go to the United States. With his undergraduate degree in geology, he was sent to Texas to work in the oil fields. But, because of his lack of English at the time, he was hired as a laborer. Looking for oil in Louisiana, New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah, he received a “wonderful introduction to this country.”
But, one day, as his English was improving, it occurred to him that he was in the wrong field. He had had to make his career choice in high school like all other young Hungarians under Soviet rule, and the decision was irrevocable. “In a free country, what I truly liked became possible,” he says.
While in Texas, he wandered into the history department at Rice University. A professor there told him how to apply to colleges and gave him history books to read. Eventually, he was accepted at Stanford, got his master’s degree in history in 1961 and finished his doctoral dissertation in 1966.
On Oct. 30, Vermes’ odyssey will come full circle when he returns to Hungary to give the keynote address at the University of Debrecen at a memorial conference on Istvan Tisza, a two-time premier of the country, who is remembered, notably, for being the only voice that resisted the outbreak of World War I.
Vermes is a leading expert on Tisza, having written his dissertation on the national figure, followed by a extensive biography that was translated into Hungarian and is now going into a second edition there.
His speech will be televised throughout the country, and the prime minister of Hungary and the president of the Academy of Sciences are expected to attend.
And while, as an American citizen, Vermes has been back to Hungary several times, this visit, welcoming him as a distinguished scholar, represents something of a crowning achievement. It is, for him, “an especially sweet reward.”
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