By Bela “Bill” Suhayda
I’ve branded Charles Coddington a communist because he speaks, thinks, and writes things communists live by (see The Voice archives for proof). Charles supports confiscation of private property, nationalizing our banks, nationalizing airlines, nationalizing energy production and a host of other industries. He supports government control over corporations, control over you and our economy, including the means of production for products and services. These are all tenets of communism.
Labeling Charles a communist has caused him to blow a gasket! So he alludes to me being a Hungarian Nazi, a Greenshirt. He provides one solitary sentence I’ve written to this publication to support his words. This is the sentence: “We had to flee communist Hungary.” His assertion is that the men in my family were Greenshirt Nazi’s and the reason we escaped Hungary was not because of persecution and the 1956 Revolution, but because the communists in Hungary were executing Nazi’s.
I support the Jewish people of Israel. It is my opinion Coddington doesn’t, not even after Hamas massacred 1,200 Jews on October 7, 2023. Charles has declared the Israelis have no right to the land they inhabit. I declare: “The nation of Israel was founded as a result of a U.N. Partition in 1948.”
It was my mother’s stories of the Holocaust that shaped much of my concern for Israel and Jewish people everywhere. My mom grew up on a railroad station my grandfather managed. She was witness to Italian Jews in cattle cars being shipped north to Poland, on their way to the ovens of Auschwitz. She told us stories how she snuck food and water to these unfortunates who were dehydrated and starving.
Segway to 1914. Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated by the Serbs. World War One explodes. The Hungarians are losers in the war, forced to pay reparation to the victors. The price: Two thirds of Hungarian territory is distributed among neighboring countries. Germany loses territory as well, but not to the degree of the Hungarians. It was these brutal reparations dealt against Germany, Hungary, and the Central Powers that created World War Two. Hitler rose to power with his rhetorical appeal for the German people to “Get Our Land Back.” It was this motivation of the people, to win back what was taken from them that created World War Two. Hungarians gladly sided with Germans.
It’s 1944, and Hitler tells Regent Miklos Horthy of Hungary to send him all “his Jews.” Horthy refuses and wants out of the war. Hitlers response is to kidnap Horthy’s son and hold him hostage to insure Hungary stays in the war. Hitler deposes Horthy, then inserts Ferenc Szalasi, a fascist/Nazi, to run the country as Hitler orders.
It is 1945. My father is a fighter pilot in the Hungarian Airforce. He flies against the Russians on the Eastern Front. But the war is lost, so the decision is made for the flight squadron to travel to Germany and surrender to the Americans. Surrendering to the Russians meant executions. My dad’s older brother is captured by the Russians as they invade Hungary. He is imprisoned in a Gulag where he dies. It was because my dad’s flight squadron surrendered to the Americans in Germany that he survived the war. The Americans made lists of those who surrendered to them. The Russians are notified, no one on these lists can be imprisoned or executed as they return to Hungary. Had this not happened, I wouldn’t be here for Coddington to call me a Nazi. The puppet communist regime, put in place by Stalin, couldn’t execute my father so they took him out of the sky and put him in the coal mines for pay barely enough to keep his family alive. So when the Hungarian Revolution broke out in 1956, he chanced taking his family out of the country while evading snipers, border guards, and land mines. I was seven years old.