From Behind the Iron Curtain to the Belly of the Beast | Eva Muntean | Ignatius Insight | October 19, 2011
Editor's Note: This talk was presented on September 17, 2011, at the Indiana Catholic Women's Conference.
The title of my talk today is "From Behind the Iron Curtain to the Belly of the Beast." The title refers to my family's journey from Communist Hungary, where I was born, to San Francisco, where I now live.
Coming from a country where faith was persecuted, and a simple public prayer was dangerous, I'd like to take a few minutes to publicly thank Our Blessed Mother for allowing us to live in this great country. Please join me: "Hail Mary..."
As I said, my journey begins behind the Iron Curtain. I was born in a country that was ruled by a system of government called Communism. I am sure all of you are familiar with this system of government since America waged a cold war against the menace of Communism for a great deal of our lifetime. But not many of you know what it was like to be born in a Communist country and why people risked their lives and the lives of their children to escape.
So let me start at the beginning of my life. My parents were both educated by the state to be engineers. For my father that was the perfect career choice. Working with diesel engines was his passion. My mother hated engineering. She was forced into the career because the state needed engineers. They worked six days a week from sunrise to sunset, sometimes longer. Their combined income barely put food on the table.
I was their first child. The State gave my mother a twelve weeks maternity leave, and then she was forced to hand me over to a state-run daycare.
A year later my sister was born. My mother had all kinds of medical complications with her birth and nearly died. My parents were too poor to bribe the nurses and doctors to go beyond the mandatory care so my mother burned with fever, near delirium, yet no one offered her even a glass of water. My father, of course, was at work. My grandmother came to the hospital, found her daughter near death, and raised a loud protest, which finally forced the doctors to treat her. So much for socialized medicine. After twelve weeks my sister joined me in the daycare.
Sometimes we were allowed to go spend a few days with my father's parents, who had a little house with a small patch of land where my grandmother grew grapes and raised rabbits. She would go without food so she could buy such luxury items as a piece of cloth to sew my sister and me a skirt, or a little cocoa to make us chocolate milk on Sunday mornings.
Thanks for posting this. I am excited to read about her story.
Eva is such a great person who does a tremendous amount of good ... and so few outside the SF bay area know who she is.
Posted by: William | Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 06:44 AM