Seekers Often have no place to land

Eva #2

After finishing university, Eva became a journalist. Life continued to be stressful. Estranged from her family, Eva faced the developing chaotic political situation in Yugoslavia. She said to me in our interview:

“It was during 1975-1978, when I worked on the newspaper, that the Yugoslav government put pressure on Hungarians who lived there. As things became centralized, we all looked over our shoulders. At the paper, I was constantly asked what I was doing and what I was writing about. The newspaper was watched by the government, and the editors responded by questioning what they believed might be ethnic intentions on the part of reporters. More and more, they began to question my work. Paranoia was sweeping the country. Every day new accusations were made by one ethnic group against another. Rumors ran rampant. No one knew what to expect next.

“As a Hungarian, I had to be especially careful and correct about what I wrote. One day, I wrote an article about a local politician that made it to the front page. I was tired the night I wrote the article, and I misspelled the politician’s name. Others had checked the article and missed the error, but I was held responsible for the mistake. This was viewed as an act of political subversion. I was made to write a number of apologies that were published in the paper, sent to the politician and to others concerned about this mistake. It was a small thing, and looking back, I see it as stupid, but at the time it was considered serious by everyone at the paper. In this environment of paranoia, no one was on my side, and all I had done was misspell one name. This was terribly painful to me, because I had felt part of this community.

The editor-in-chief and the other reporters had been my friends, and suddenly I was an outsider. I was a respected reporter, but following this incident, the chief editor said that I could no longer write as a reporter for the newspaper. He said that I could go back to my town and send in articles about local events there, or go to the library and work in the Documentation Office on other peoples’ articles. This was my punishment for one misspelled word. It is hard to explain, but in that environment, I couldn’t speak up on my own behalf, because no one was willing to support me. I decided to stay on and work at the library on research, because I knew I had the right to stay, although living in this poisonous atmosphere was terrible. Colleagues who had placed me in this position felt guilty, and they dealt with their guilt by ignoring me and isolating me further. It was a horrible scene, but I needed to go through it. The only other choice was to return home to provide help in the care of my ill father, but that seemed like a hopeless choice, since my family, like my country, was slowly starting to fall apart.”

Eva told me that she had paid a high price for a small mistake when the editor stopped her writing for the newspaper. She said that it felt as if the editor had “broken the pencil” which held her capacity to write. Only recently has she considered taking up that pencil again. However, she is proud that she was strong enough to refuse to leave before she was ready. Her experience at the newspaper was an example of how circumstances outside her control could escalate quickly and lead to her being ostracized from a group with whom she believed that she had had close ties. She was left looking for a way out of her misery. She said:

“During this time, I met the man I married. He was studying medicine. When he finished his studies, he invited me to return with him to Berlin, where he had been offered a position. I looked at the situation and decided that, just as when I had left my small town there wasn’t anything for me where I was, and that I would have to go on with my life somewhere else.
“I left Yugoslavia in 1979. The day I left, I went by myself on a train after saying good-bye to my parents. They were miserable with my decision, but they knew that they couldn’t change my mind. Although I was proud of my strong will, and I acted as if the choices I made came to me easily, I was disturbed by going so far away, especially as my father’s physical condition had deteriorated.

“As I sat on the train going to Berlin I must admit I felt great relief, relief from pressure. I didn’t know what to expect, but I felt relief. When I got off the train, my husband-to-be Pedrag wasn’t there to meet me. He came an hour late, a bad sign from the beginning. I called his home number and he wasn’t there. I sat at the train station, wondering what to do, when he finally showed up.”

“Pedrag had been born in Belgrade and moved to Germany when he was seven. His family was very mixed. His father was half-Hungarian and half-Austrian. His mother was part Serbian and part Slovenian. Pedrag’s father had been married earlier to a Hungarian woman whom he had divorced when he had an affair with Pedrag’s mother, who was only fifteen years old at the time. Once they married they moved to Belgrade, and then to Stuttgart, where Pedrag grew up in middle-class family who focused their resources and attention on him.

“When Pedrag brought me, a Hungarian woman, to meet his family, his parents resented me from the start. From their point of view, my biggest sin was that I was Hungarian, just like Pedrag’s father’s first wife. Without knowing me, they assumed that I caused trouble. I thought they might be right in some way, perhaps because I had left my family; perhaps because I had lived with their son before marriage in violation of my rejected Catholic upbringing, or perhaps because I was still vulnerable as a result of what had happened to me in Yugoslavia. I believed their criticisms of me might not be wrong, and for a long time I didn’t speak up for myself.”

Alone, Eva lost her sense of herself. Without friends, a family, a social network of colleagues, or a country, she was vulnerable to the prejudices of her in-laws, who didn’t know her. The family never spoke of these criticisms directly to her. Instead, they spoke of them to Pedrag, who was under the influence of his family and didn’t stand up for Eva. He responded to their complaints by telling his parents that she was only in Germany for a six-month visit. When they married, he didn’t tell his parents of their marriage until after a year.
Eva continued, “Once they knew we were married, they started a more active campaign against me. They telephoned every Sunday and spoke to Pedrag for one hour. They refused to speak to me, and gave me the cold shoulder whenever they had the opportunity to see me in person. Every Sunday, they asked Pedrag when we would divorce.

“I tried very hard, but we just had no chance. We separated after only three years, but stayed married for eleven more. After we separated, we stayed together in the same house. It was a strange mixture of friendship and kinship. “I managed during that time by focusing on my work.

When struggling Eva puts her mind to what she can make work. Keep posted for the next episode of her story. Add a story of your own when you had no place to land.