Chapter 01: A Family Escapes to Colombia

Chapter 01: A Family Escapes to Colombia

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Description

In this chapter Dr. Hortobagyi describes his childhood Hungary after WW II: the Hortobagyi family was interred in a concentration camp and Dr. Hortobagyi’s father sentenced to three years of hard labor for political differences with the government. (Dr. Hortobagyi explains that he was assigned to work for a townsman collecting manure for fertilizer.) When Josef Stalin died in 1953, the family was granted amnesty and released, and Dr. Hortobagyi next explains how in 1954 the family escaped to Colombia, first walking across the Hungarian border to Austria and settling in a refugee camp, then traveling to Genoa, Italy where the family was able to secure passage to South America as refugees from Genoa. They arrived in Colombia on May 10th, 1957, where Dr. Hortobagyi’s father opened a business in Bogota.

Identifier

HortobagyiGN_01_20121130_C01

Publication Date

11-30-2012

Publisher

The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

The Interview Subject's Story - Personal Background Personal Background Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Disciplines

History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History

Transcript

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

I am Tacey Ann Rosolowski, and I am interviewing Dr. Gabriel Hortobagyi at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. This interview is being conducted for the Making Cancer History Voices Oral History Project run by the Historical Resources Center at MD Anderson. Dr. Hortobagyi came to MD Anderson as a fellow in 1974 and formally joined the faculty in 1976. For many years he served as the founding chair of the Department of Breast Medical Oncology. He recently stepped down from that role and is now a professor in that department and also holds the Nellie B. Connelly Chair in Breast Cancer. He also heads the Breast Cancer Research Program. Am I correct about those current titles? Thank you. This interview is taking place in Dr. Hortobagyi’s office in the Breast Medical Oncology Department in the Cancer Prevention Building on the main campus of MD Anderson. This is the first of two planned interview sessions, and today is November 30, 2012. The time is 12:50. So thank you, Dr. Hortobagyi, for devoting your time to this project. I appreciate it.

Gabriel Hortobagyi, MD:

My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me to join this.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Well it is really a pleasure. I really enjoyed doing background research for this particular interview, and I feel like I already have learned a lot about breast cancer, which I didn’t know very much about before. So, I am going to be asking you a lot of questions about a lot of different areas of your research, of course, and your role of building up the important institutional program in breast medical oncology. But I wanted to start with some personal questions about your own background. So, I wanted to ask you to please tell me where and when you were born and where you were raised.

Gabriel Hortobagyi, MD:

Very well. So, I was born shortly after the end of World War II in the summer of 1946 in a little town in Hungary called Szarvas, which is in the southeastern part of Hungary. Budapest, where my parents had lived, had been severely bombed by the Russians and the allies, so my parents took refuge with my paternal grandmother in this smaller community. I was born there but didn’t stay there very long. And then I spent my first ten years in Hungary. Of those I spent about three years in an internal exile camp or a concentration camp because my family was on the wrong side of politics during the communist era. And then in 1956 my family—my entire family—took advantage of the Hungarian revolution, and we had escaped. We lived in Vienna for about six months until we arranged our destination, and a part of my family—including myself—we immigrated to Colombia in South America.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Can I ask you about that experience in the concentration camp? I was really moved to read that as part of your background. What do you recall about that? How did it affect you as a young person?

Gabriel Hortobagyi, MD:

The human mind has incredible protective devices, so I have probably blocked many of my memories of my early years. I am always amazed that my wife, for instance, who has a somewhat similar background but not quite—she seems to remember stuff from when she was two and three years old. I don’t. I have no memories from that very early stage of my life. In fact, probably my earliest memory is when I was about four years old. And as you know, some of this becomes a question of do I know what I think I know because I have heard so much of my family talk about it? Or do I really remember it myself? But one night—let’s say three or four in the morning there is a knock on the door, and it is the secret police. And they tell us that we’ve got thirty minutes to pack one bag and that we are going. Where are we going? That is none of your business. We are going. Get ready. So, they load us in a truck. The truck goes to the train station. Nobody tells you anything. Any attempt at conversation is either disregarded or punished, and then they load us in these cattle wagons. Three or four hours later, the train stops in the middle of nowhere in this tiny little town in the middle of the Hungarian plains, and they unload us. They distribute us into little groups, and then we are walked into this little town, which at that time must have had maybe 300 or 400 inhabitants or so. And then we were assigned to the home of one of the townspeople. In one room we slept—the five of us—my parents and my two sisters and I. And then I started to remember some things. Because my father was destined for hard work, he was picked up every morning around four by a truck and—with several other adult men—was taken to an area where a railroad track was being built. His task was to take a sledgehammer and break rocks and make the rocks into gravel or something like that.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

What was your father’s original profession?

Gabriel Hortobagyi, MD:

My father was a military officer, and his college education—he was an economist. And so he did that for—the railroad building—for about three years until they let us go. My mother and my two older sisters were picked up a little bit later, and they were taken to a place where they would make—fifty years ago instead of this elaborate scaffolding that new buildings have they built—at least in Hungary—they built these curtain-type things out of cane or bamboo or reed to prevent debris from falling on passersby. So that was their job. They would split cane or a reed of some sort and tie it into these things. And I was assigned to a townsperson whose job was to collect cow and horse manure and distribute it to the fields. So, he would pick me up on his ox-driven or ox-pulled cart, and I would ride shotgun with him and learn his exquisite vocabulary as he enticed the animals to pull harder and harder. So, in that little town I started my grade school about a year or two later. And then I don’t remember too much. We were not beaten, we were not tortured, but it was pretty miserable living anyway. And then when Stalin died in March of 1953, there was a general amnesty and they let us out with some conditions about what we could and could not do. So that is about my recollection of this. Obviously, there are no photographs of that era. I know that periodically the secret police would sort of barge in looking for shortwave radios or American dollars or other signs of espionage or where would we do that. So that’s how it happened.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

And so what year did you leave Hungary and go to Colombia?

Gabriel Hortobagyi, MD:

The Hungarian Revolution started on October 23, 1956. We left Hungary on December 6, 1956, under the cover of night. And by then the Russians had invaded Russia—Hungary again. It was pretty dicey. So, we walked across the border to Austria and eventually were settled in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Vienna.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Who helped you arrange that? I mean how did that happen?

Gabriel Hortobagyi, MD:

Well, the last couple of years in Hungary, my mother worked for the state import/export agency, so she had a special permission to ride to the border area because during the Iron Curtain years an average citizen was not allowed to get within—I don’t know—fifty or 100 kilometers of the border—of the external border of the country unless they had a document that stated they lived in that area or that they had special permission from the government. So, my mother had that permission. So, when it became clear that things were going to be really bad and there would be a blood bath, one evening we just picked up whatever fit in our pockets—a few critical documents and whatever valuables we had—and got on a train to as close to the border as we could. And then we got off and found someone who we bribed with some jewelry, and he walked us during the night through the border. It was—that’s how it happened.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

And going to Colombia—when did you make that trip?

Gabriel Hortobagyi, MD:

We stayed in Vienna for about six months, and during that time my dad met the Colombian ambassador. He was offered a job in the military school in Colombia, so he accepted, and we got granted refugee status and boarded a ship in Genoa in Italy. And then we arrived in Colombia on May 10, 1957. It was sort of ironic because by the time my dad was offered the job, Colombia was under a military dictatorship. And of course, the military school and all the military had a big budget and whatnot. The day we arrived to Colombia the dictatorship fell, so my father was unemployed (laughs) before we even debarked.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

(laughing) Your parents must have been so sick of history.

Gabriel Hortobagyi, MD:

Yes. Yes. But we did well. Colombia at that time was a sleepy but very nice, very polite country. There was no drug problem. There was no insecurity. There was no major crime. So within a couple of years, we were back on our feet. Both my parents were very hard workers, and they just rolled their sleeves up and started to work. Soon we had our own home, and my dad opened a business or two, and I finished my high school there and eventually medical school.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Uh-hunh (affirmative). And this is was in Bogota?

Gabriel Hortobagyi, MD:

This was in Bogota—all in Bogota.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Uh-hunh (affirmative) ..

Gabriel Hortobagyi, MD:

Yeah.

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Chapter 01: A Family Escapes to Colombia

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