"Behind the Iron Curtain"

After Munich, the next stop on our itinerary was to have been Vienna where, with the help of the U.S. Embassy, we were to get our Hungarian entry visas. But there had been a delay so we made a slight detour to Hamburg, ostensibly to preview a touring circus that we would later catch up with in Denmark. But equally important, was to see the city itself.

Like Munich, Hamburg had suffered major damage to both the city and its port from Allied bombing raids, but less than twenty years later there was little evidence of it. The city had been completely rebuilt but with fewer modern-style buildings than in Munich (at least in 1964), its skyline dotted with more church spires than skyscrapers. Perhaps surprisingly, Hamburg is a city of parks and canals, more canals in fact than Venice and Amsterdam combined.

And no visit to Hamburg would be complete without a trip to the notorious Reeperbahn, "die sundige Meile" (the sinful mile), the epicenter of Hamburg's night life and red-light district. The streets were lined with night clubs, sex shops, strip bars and brothels. But the short, gated street that made the most vivid impression was the HerbertStrasse, where prostitutes created window displays that left little to the imagination. Two years earlier, in 1962, The Beatles, who were already a phenomenon in Europe and soon would be in America, had famously played and partied in the clubs of the Reeperbahn.

Then it was on to Vienna, Austria where the weather had turned cold and snowy. Although briefly besieged by the Russians in 1945, the city had suffered virtually no damage and looked much like it had in the 19th Century. Perhaps the most beautiful city we had visited so far, known for its magnificent opera houses, theaters, museums and statuary, Vienna was difficult to fully appreciate due to the relentlessly nasty weather. Stuck there for several days while waiting for our visas, I did something there I had not done in Munich or Hamburg, I went 'clubbing' with our camera crew (a fateful decision as it turned out).

Our entry visas for Hungary finally approved, we boarded the Russian-built equivalent of a DC-3 and flew to Budapest in a snowstorm. It was a miserable roller-coaster of a flight and it was still snowing heavily as we landed at the airport outside the city. After the modern Vienna Airport, this airport was cold, drab and felt like a 30-year step back in time. Customs inspection amounted to the contents of our suitcases being dumped upside-down onto a table and examined. Armed guards were at every door and escorted us to a bus that would take us into the city.

Snow was still falling as we rode into Budapest at about 3 AM. Although visibility was obscured by the falling snow, we were struck by how dark the city seemed, the only illumination from amber street lamps that cast otherworldly shadows against the old building facades. As our bus approached a broad plaza in front of our hotel and the bridge across the Danube that separates 'Buda' from 'Pest', we were surprised to see dozens of dark figures out in the snow, old women wearing black coats and shawls, sweeping the snow with brooms as it fell.

The Grand Hotel Gellert looked across the Danube from the 'Buda' side of the river with a fine view of the parliament building on the opposite bank, adorned with a huge red star in case anyone might forget who was really in charge. In 1964, all eastern-block hotels called themselves 'Grand', but the Gellert had clearly seen better days.

Primarily used for housing visiting dignitaries and businessmen, only the front portion of the hotel could accommodate guests. The once-famous swimming pool and Turkish baths were closed, the terraced gardens gone to seed, the two wings of the hotel that extended up the hillside sealed with brick. The rooms were threadbare and dreary, "old world charm, old world plumbing", with microphones hidden in the light fixtures.

In daylight, Budapest was not only old, it was crumbling. Apart from a new sports stadium in which our 'escorts' in fedoras and long leather coats said they took great pride, there had been virtually no new construction in decades and few attempts even at maintenance. Many of the buildings on the 'Pest' side of the river had netting strung along their sides to catch falling masonry.

Although the standard of living in Hungary had become grim, especially after the 1956 revolution, the people of Budapest were warm, passionate about everything and very curious about the visiting Americans. We would sometimes get drawn into debates about American decadence by young students, then later asked if we could help them acquire blue jeans. Some would insist that all the truly great music had been written by Europeans, then ask if we had ever met Elvis Presley.

Our schedule called for us to videotape both the state circus and ice show, each in its permanent building, neither of which looked designed for entertainment. The circus had a limited summertime tent-show tour schedule, the ice show could not afford to tour at all. Both buildings were in a concrete 'blockhouse' style that looked more forbidding than inviting. But in each case, the audiences were enthusiastic and the performers as good as any we'd seen. But the productions were skimpy by western standards and we were shocked to discover that the performers lacked some of the most basic types of costume and makeup.

Two performers I remember most vividly were Gorgi Botond and her beautiful eighteen year-old daughter, Tunde. Gorgi was the star skater of the Hungarian State Ice Revue yet could not obtain fish-net stockings or theatrical makeup, even on the black market. They actually ground their own makeup from chalk, candle wax and dried glue. I promised Gorgi that, when I got back to the west, I would send her stockings and makeup. I sent them from West Berlin about six weeks later but never knew if she'd received them.

However any romantic possibilities with the beautiful Tunde had been preempted by my wild night in Vienna catching up with me. A few months shy of my twentieth birthday, I was not very sexually experienced. A girl I'd met in a bar in Vienna I thought might teach me a few things, and she certainly had. But she had also given me 'the clap' (gonorrhea). It was about ten days before the symptoms had started and a few more before I knew they would not go away by themselves. Anywhere in the west, this could have been quickly and easily treated. But in Budapest, in 1964, obtaining penicillin was, to say the least, problematic.

After considerable negotiations (and no small amount of embarrassment), it was agreed that I could be treated by a Hungarian doctor who was on-call at the American Legation (there was no U.S. Embassy) and had access to their small supply of penicillin. But it would not be quite that simple. Cardinal Jozef Mindzenty *, a hero of the Catholic Church for his anti-Communist stands, had been holed up inside since the 1956 revolution and Hungarian secret police were on round-the-clock duty outside should he attempt to escape. So in the middle of the night, I had to run this gauntlet of very suspicious security men just to get inside.

Then there was another problem. The Hungarian doctor didn't speak a word of English or German and the only person available to translate was his twelve year-old daughter who spoke a little German. So in my crude high school German I had to make this shy, embarrassed girl understand my problem. It was pure slapstick. The girl would go out, my pants would go down, the doctor would examine me and call the girl back in. My pants would go up, the doctor would question the girl, the girl and I would stumble through Q & A in fractured German, the girl would go out, my pants would go down... and it went on like this for some time until I finally got a very large needle stuck in my butt.

I was sore for a week and promised myself that I would not have any more 'adventures' for the rest of the trip. It didn't quite work out that way.



*Cardinal Mindzenty suffered 23 years of persecution by the Communists. He was sentenced to life in prison and tortured following a 1949 'show trial'. Freed during the 1956 revolution, he lived inside the American Legation for fifteen years.


NEXT: "Behind the Iron Curtain II"