Towards the tower resolutely
Two women, a teenager girl Katalin Mester, and her mother were left by their smuggler in the night of November 26, 1956 in the border zone. They decided to leave Hungary after the 1956 revolution, following the example of some of their friends and acquaintances. They wanted to go to the United States where Katalin's father was living. He, as a former cavalry officer, had chosen the emigration to avoid being pestered by the political police. So the two women remained alone on the edge of the wood. They were looking at a distant church tower illuminated in the night, which according to their guide was in Austrian territory. They took their bottle of rum, they drank a bit and they began to walk in the direction of the light. They knew that they had to keep going in that direction, because veering off the path to the right or to the left meant remained in Hungary. "I was just walking and walking and suddenly I noticed that my mother didn’t come after me. I looked back, I noticed her struggling with something on the ground. I rushed back to her. She was caught on barbed wire. She didn’t dare to call me. She thought that there was somebody who had caught her by her back, " she recalled. So Katalin freed her mother. It was a relief for them, they understood that they had arrived at the border. They were in the so-called "nobody’s land". After a while they heard some water gurgling. There was a brook nearby, which they hadn't expected. Katalin and her mother climbed down the steep bank in the dark and lowered their bags carefully. "Then, helping each other not to sink, we succeeded in crossing the river. We took our bottle of rum, we sat down for a bit. Then to our great alarm we lost sight of our aim. The region was full of hills. We lost hope.” They continued to walk, they couldn’t do much but to go on. They roused a nest, the birds were alarmed and flew away with great noise. "All of a sudden we smelled dung nearby,” she recalled. It was obvious that a village was close. They considered it a miracle and they proceeded in the direction of the odor. At first they noticed a street lamp, then the houses of the village, they looked around and saw a sign that said "Deutschkreuz." At that, they sat down and cried.