Agi Rubin - December 19, 1984
Reunion with Father
I'm gonna still go on with this, you were reunited with your father, I want to hear about that, did you go back to Munkacs?
Yes, yes I did. Uh, our station was Prague, Czechoslovakia and that was the gathering place in a school that they had particular places for people to sleep until they were, it was an exit kind of place, just to sleep over and go on. Everybody wanted to go back to their home town or elsewhere to look for people and as I arrived then, on the street across the street somebody says, where are you from? I said Munkacs, what's you name? I said Caughtagi, what are you doing here, your father is home? I said, oh come on, he is crazy, I'm not gonna be into any disappointment, I'm gonna go home and if I see it for myself, then I'll believe it. So I started up day-by-day, by train which was impossible to get on, could only hang on to a train, but to get on it, it was impossible, it was full of Russians soldiers and all the people that were searching for each other and they were traveling from city to city to look for each other so after ten days I was lucky enough to get on the train with the help of a Czechoslovakian man that transferred me to somebody else in Portion which is Brakuslava, from there to Budapest and in Budapest they again we had to sleep over to wait for the next train and they had the list of names that passed school, that's how people would communicate, so and so was here, I'm looking for so and so. So I'm looking at the list and I see a very short man reading from down up, you know instead from the top down he reads from the down up and I says, uh "are you looking for somebody?" this was a cousin of mine, and I recognized him, "I said are you looking for somebody?" he says, he turns, he says "I'm looking for you!" and he just nearly passed out. My father asked him he was going to Prague that he should look for me because they heard I existed somewhere and he was afraid to leave Munkacs in fear that I might come home so he was sending message, whoever was traveling he asked him to, so in turn he again helped me to get back to Munkacs and it was an unreal reunion. My father was very, it was very affectionate, what can I tell you, he didn't ask me where my mother is, where his son is, he didn't talk about things right off the bat, it was just the happiness of being together, nothing else existed at that time, this all came much later, and most of my family that did survive was there, my father came home in October, and he rented a huge house with two ladies who only cooked and fixed beds for the people that came home. That sometimes they stayed a day, a week, just to look for their people or they tried to get some of their belongings from their homes so it was a house just for that purpose, and my cousin was sitting in the window and she said, "you rotten kid, where were you so long? Everybody's home already," that was my reception coming back from camp, you rotten kid, they were upset with me (she laughs) because they heard I was somewhere, but they didn't believe. They thought I went somewhere and that was in August, and most people were home end of April, in May, but they wouldn't allow us, I mean these people that liberated us they really held us back until we were, well I contacted sickness while I was there and uh was there for three months, they said I was very fortunate had I been longer in camp, I would have come back positive TB, so it was in a starting stages which in later years started haunting me again, but thank God I'm here. If you should thank God. So that's why it took me so long to get back, and then it wasn't so simple as I said to find the train or transportation was almost impossible.
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