Library of Congress Interview with Stephen F. Dachi The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History ProjectInformation Series STEPHEN F. DACHI Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: May 30, 1997 Copyright 2001 ADST Q: Today is May 30, 1997. This is an interview with Stephen F. Dachi. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. To begin at the beginning, could you tell me when and where you werborn and something about your family? DACHI: I was born in 1933 in Hungary. My father was a dentist. My mother was a physician. They both died when I was three years old in 1936, before the war. My grandparents “inherited me.” They happened to live in Romania. So, I went there just before the Germans marched into Austria, which is my first memory of arriving in Timisoara to live with my grandparents. Then I spent World War II there with them trying to survive. After the war, in 1948, an uncle and aunt who had gone to Canada before the war brought me out there. Q: During the war, what went on then in Romania, particularly as a Hungarian? There was a massive change of borders and everything else at that time. Did you get caught in that? Interview with Stephen F. Dachi http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000263 Library of Congress DACHI: Very definitely, both that and the Holocaust. It has always been hell for Hungarians living in Romania. Kids would curse and harass us if they overheard us speaking Hungarian in the street. They used to throw stones at me when I came out of the house to walk to school. Romanian teachers would make us stand in front of the class, ask impossible questions and taunt, ridicule or slap us around in front of classmates. There was nothing terribly subtle about any of it. Our landlord in the three-unit house we lived in had a heavily reinforced bomb shelter in the basement, but during the nightly air raids we were not allowed in there and had to seek shelter in a crudely dug ditch covered with plywood in the back yard instead. I was not Jewish, but there were lots of non-Jewish people getting caught up in the holocaust too. First of all, German troops came through there periodically on the way east and would randomly round up people who would disappear and never be heard from again. My grandparents were so worried about it that, even though they had a young grandchild, they had a cyanide capsule on their night table every night. They told me that they would be glad to raise me, but they were not going to allow themselves to be taken away alive. They were ready to take that capsule if that dreaded knock on the door came in the middle of the night. So, those were some of the factors that made life perilous. Then, of course, there was the war itself. The allies were bombing the Ploesti oil fields in Romania a few hundred miles to the east of us and we were on the flight path.. Also, there were a lot of overflights to airdrop supplies to Tito, who was head of the Yugoslav Partisans. So, one of my most vivid memories from the war is having to get up almost every night in the middle of the night when the sirens blew and running down into that shelter in the backyard, even though those were just overflights. We weren't actually bombed until later. Our house finally was hit by a bomb in 1944, so we lived sort of a gypsy life for a while after that. Then the so-called Soviet liberators arrived. In 1944, I was 11 years old. At that time Romania had already been taken over by the Soviet troops, but the German army Interview with Stephen F. Dachi http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000263 Library of Congress still held all of Hungary and the decisive siege of Budapest hadn't taken place yet. My grandparents had acquired a Romanian passport, but I was still a Hungarian citizen. Q: What were your grandparents' profession? DACHI: My grandfather had a printing shop. My grandmother was bustaking care of the house and raising me. Sometime in early 1944, a Russian soldier came to the house one day and announced that he was taking me away because I was ostensibly an enemy alien. I remember him telling my grandmother to give me a heavy coat because I was going away somewhere where it was cold. She wouldn't give me a coat because she thought the soldier wouldn't take me if I didn't have a coat. Wrong. I was taken to a police station with a bunch of other people who had been rounded up, many of whom I knew. As we huddled there on the floor a German bombing raid began, and we found ourselves in the epicenter of it. Bombs were dropping literally all around us. The walls were crumbling. Everybody was hiding under a table or someplace. I was only 11 years old. I saw the grillwork on a window bend apart from the pressure of a bomb blast. Being too young to way the risks, I decided to try and escape. So, I climbed out the window and ran down the street. Craters were opening up all around me as more bombs kept falling. Somehow, I managed to reach a synagogue where I was taken in and sheltered by a rabbi. While the Germans were there, a lot of Romanians protected Jews. So, many Jews were now anxious to pay back the favor. The rabbi hid me out for a few days. No one I saw in that police station ever was seen alive again. Afterwards, I went back home swearing that they would never find me or take me again. We always had an escape path charted out in case a soldier came through the front door again. But none ever did. Even now, more than fifty years later, when I go to a restaurant I sit with my back against the wall facing the door, subconsciously I suppose ready to make an escape through the kitchen if the need arose. So, there were lots of dangerous and deadly moments. Interview with Stephen F. Dachi http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000263 Library of Congress Q: You were in Romania in 1948. Did you run afoul of the Soviets aall again? How was school at that point? DACHI: Well, from the end of the war until about 1947, roughly two years, not unlike some other East European countries, there was sort of a not fully Soviet dominated transitional regime. King Michael, for example, was still briefly there on his throne. A socialist politician by the name of Petru Groza became Prime Minister, heading what was called a communist-front regime. Shortly thereafter, the Soviets took over total control and the two top communist, Moscow-installed puppet leaders were Ana Pauker and Ion Luca. I remember having to go from school with all my schoolmates as a little Red Pioneer and march in parades chanting slogans for communism and carrying portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. About that time, my uncle and aunt got us immigrant visas to Canada. We spent nine or ten months going through the process of having to pay all the bribes and getting all the papers so we could get out. Luckily, there were still enough bureaucrats left over from the old days so you could do that. You had to have a certificate attesting from some local authority that you were without any visible means of support. You had to prove that you had no assets at all in order to qualify for a passport. An inspector came to the house. He looked around and saw our furniture and said, “That's nice furniture.” We said, “Well, consider that a gift.” He said, “Oh, thank you very much.” He proceeded to identify everything else we had by way of possessions. Then, he said, “Considering that as a gift, you really don't have anything, so you qualify for an exit permit.” My grandfather had saved dollar bills under the mattress through the war. We managed to keep those out of sight. So, we just had these dollar bills. As long as they lasted, we were going to be okay. As we ran out of them, there was nothing left. We couldn't get out and travel together because my grandmother had a Romanian passport and mine was Hungarian. (My grandfather died of natural causes the year before). The lengthy and complicated processes to obtain exit visas were different for the Interview with Stephen F. Dachi http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000263 Library of Congress two nationalities, and the timing of the two could not be coordinated. And, once you got that coveted exit visa, you only had about two-three weeks to get out before it expired. So, I traveled alone to Canada. My grandmother couldn't get her papers in order at the same time. Our case was further complicated by the fact that there was no Canadian Embassy in Romania. We had to present ourselves in Rome to receive the immigrant visa and that required another cumbersome process of obtaining an Italian transit visa in Bucharest during that narrow window while the exit visa was valid. To make matters even harder, there was only an occasional ship leaving Romania via the Black Sea, there were no airline flights and going by train would have required another couple of transit visas, an impossible task in the time available.