 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Born in the Transylvanian town of Szekelyhid, 16 miles from the Hungarian border, an area lost to Romania in 1920, Ilona Erdei is looked upon with contempt by the ever-increasing population of Romanians who take the best jobs, best homes and highest incomes and government positions. With a father made invalid by WWII injuries and seven year’s slave labor in Stalin’s gulag, Ilona is forced to work in the fields from age eight in order to help her family make ends meet. She escapes their poverty through voracious reading, especially a Hungarian translation of “Sister Carrie” by Theodore Dreiser. Moving to Chicago, like the protagonist, becomes her life-long dream. By the age of seventeen, she takes the first step toward freedom by dropping out of school and getting a packing job at a chemical plant at the nearest large city, Nagyvarad. Then her father dies from his war wounds and cancer that had left him and her mother sleeping in a bed soaked with her father’s own blood the last months of his life. After burying him in the church graveyard, Ilona convinces the director of the chemical plant to hire her on as fulltime employee by showing her hands peeled raw by the caustic chemicals used in aspirin preparation. She is promoted to the toxicology department.
After making the final move from home to the big town of Nagyvarad, she earns money to feed and clothe her mother, brother and baby, and at night earns her high school diploma. While in night school she meets a boy who becomes her first love and during his later compulsory military service will become her fiancé. When he’s discharged though, he breaks the engagement.
| Author:
Ilona Erdei-Bonatiu Co-author: Frederick “Cork” Graham (www.corkgraham.com); author of the fall 2004 best-selling memoir “The Bamboo Chest: An Adventure in Healing the Trauma of War” (www.bamboochest.com) and upcoming sequel “Aspire to Alaska: A Voyage Through Darkness Into Light’ (www.corkincombat.com; www.aspiretoalaska.com). |
Ilona seeks solace in a man of mystery, who says he works for Ceausescu’s Securitate, and who asks her to marry him on their third date. Though there is no deep love, he offers her something priceless to one persecuted because of her Hungarian last name: Ilona gets the Romanian last name of Bonatiu. In a year their daughter, Ottilia (Tia) is born. But, the better life as part of a Romanian’s household, is short-lived: Learning of his unrepentant philandering, Ilona confronts him and so opens an onslaught of physical and psychological abuse that only ends with divorce.
On her own, supporting a six-year-old daughter through low wages and national breadlines, Ilona is told that she will have to go to Chernobyl, the site of a nuclear accident. She is then told to stand down, but to do toxicology tests locally. The tests are terrifying, and in contrast to the lies delivered in Ceausescu’s state addresses. She must get her daughter and herself out of Romania before they die from starvation, radiation or political execution!
Every two years, Romanians of Hungarian descent are permitted a visa to visit family in Hungary—Ilona gets it only after the security official extorts sex from her. Arriving at her uncle and aunts’ home on the visa, she forges a visa for travel to Vienna. She travels to Budapest under a cloud of guilt—she couldn’t share the secret of escape with her mother, and Tia thinks they’re on their annual beach trip to the Black Sea.
The forgery works, but Ilona needs to pay in Western currency. No one in Hungary or Romania is allowed to have anything other than local currency. Only after hours of pleading in the station and on the streets of Budapest does a Romanian angel, living in the West, come to her rescue and pays for Ilona and Tia’s train tickets.
Another angel, in the form of a young and friendly guard on the train stamps her visa and says, “bon voyage,” with a knowing wink—by 1986 Hungary is publicly outraged at the ethnic persecution of Hungarians in Romania. Tia and Ilona pass into Austria, enter the refugee camp and receive asylum in America. Ilona and Tia finally, after new economic challenges, make it to Chicago, where Ilona thrives in the medical and real estate fields; and becomes a motivational speaker.
