In the aftermath of the Second World War, thousands of Hungarians fled the onslaught of the Red Army. Some were swept away to the farthest corners of the globe. Alongside the story of István Vajda leading into the Peruvian Jungle, the story of a refugee girl, Emőke Schöffer, is illustrative of the fate of Hungarian emigrants, and in this particular case, the Hungarians of Lima.
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Fleeing the War
The life of Emőke Schöffer started as a refugee at birth. Her family fled the then-Hungarian city of Nagyvárad (today Oradea, Romania) in the early autumn of 1944 when the tanks of the Soviet army rolled through the passes of the Southern Carpathians and into the Hungarian Plains in the opening moves of their offensive against Hungary. Emőke’s parents were fleeing west, just like many other Hungarians, with Emőke still in her mother’s womb, about to be born. They endured the relentless air attacks on Hungarian cities, with her father even being separated from his wife for a short time in the confusion amidst the fleeing masses.
Fortunately, both parents headed to their agreed common destination, Kőszeg, and both went to the local Sacred Heart of Jesus church to pray for the reunification of the family—and they did so at the same time, thus the family was miraculously reunited. And their second daughter, Emőke was born on the following day.
The family remained briefly in the town which was kept clear of Soviet soldiers until the spring of 1945. Emőke still recalls fondly that she was born and baptized in Kőszeg, and since she has re-visited the church, now standing well-renovated in the inner part of the small Hungarian city.
On Holy Thursday, 1945, however, the storm was approaching again. By that time, the Margaret Line fortifications defending the Northwestern Transdanubia region had been routed by the Soviet Army during their Vienna Offensive. Emőke only got to know later that her parents were fleeing on foot from Kőszeg through the Austrian border on Holy Thursday, March 30. ‘The Soviets massacred the columns of refugees passing through the roads from the air,’ she recalls, ‘but my parents took to the forest … and when fighter planes roared over us, they would freeze again and again, covering my mouth so I wouldn’t cry and thus give away our position to the Soviets advancing on the ground.’
From Austria to South America
The family managed to cross the Austrian border together, and the horrors of war suddenly seemed to dissipate, when they met the advancing American forces, with an experience quite illustrative of the last weeks of the Second World War. ‘My mother always told me, the Americans are such a strange people,’ she relates. ‘On the Hungarian side of the border, they machinegunned and bombed people on the roads. And in Austria, they would help you and give shelter, food and chocolate…’
With this sudden change of heart by the winners, the war ended, and the Schöffers could plan their new life far away from their homeland. The family first took refuge in Italy, one of the closest places to remain free from Communist rule. They remained for several years there, and the little Emőke had her first memories of the 1947 Christmas celebrations in Northern Italy. A lot of Hungarian and other Central European refugees continued to South America, where the less-developed republics eagerly awaited European arrivals rich in knowledge or financial capital. These immigrants were especially highly skilled: the first to flee was the elite of former Axis and non-Axis countries occupied by the Red Army without distinction, from Estonia through Allied Czechoslovakia and Poland to Croatia, one of the last Axis allies.
The Schöffer family originally planned to return to Hungary, but they received worse and worse news. One of their relatives was beaten to death by Soviet soldiers; another died in the Soviets’ Gulag prison camps in Siberia—it was clear that Communist-ruled Hungary was not a hospitable place anymore. As a country with a temperate climate and a sizable Hungarian immigrant community, the Schöffer family initially targeted Argentina alongside many other refugees. However, in the 1940s, polio, a feared neurological disease, still ran unopposed in non-developed and developed countries alike. In 1948, when the Schöffer family continued their emigration, there was a heavy polio wave in Argentina. And the Schöffers had two little daughters, Márta and the still very small Emőke.
In the end, they set out for Lima, Peru, a land relatively unknown to Hungarian emigrants. While, primarily through the well-documented missions of members of the Jesuitic order, Hungarians had already reached Peru during the 17th–18th centuries, there was never a substantial number of them living in Lima. In the aftermath of the Second World War, this changed slightly, as the pressure to leave Europe was strong, but only a handful of countries would accept refugees. Peru eased immigration restrictions in March 1947, and consequently, the Hungarians could start to arrive.
A New Life in Peru
The newcomers brought with them memories of Old Hungary, along with the longing to retain their identity and culture and present themselves in the new world. Lima was always a hub of multiculturality, born as the ‘City of Kings,’ a colonial centre to serve as a home of rulers who controlled the peasant masses of the Andean mountains conquered by the Spanish in the 1530s, integrated into the Viceroyalty of Peru during colonial times, then, without major changes to the societal system, becoming the Republic of Peru. The society of Lima, until recent times, remained an enclave of a world very much oriented towards the Western—or, from that perspective, Northern Atlantic—sphere, with mostly European population and an openness to cultural exchanges with Europe and North America. The Hungarians found an open atmosphere for their community and culture. The cultural exchanges served both as a method of integration and retaining of identity. Two spaces defined the inner cultural world of Hungarians in the early years in Lima: the church and the Sunday community lunch. The church was a small chapel in the Old Town of Lima, in the Chapel of the Virgin of the Miracles, and the regular Sunday lunch of the Hungarians took place in one of the restaurants owned by a Hungarian businessman, most likely in the restaurant of Ignác Lampl called Budapest, in the Old Town as well, close to the chapel.
There was space for children to nurture the cultural traditions of their parents through cultural events and communal functions, playing music, and wearing traditional Hungarian folk clothes. The spectacle of a very European but, at the same time, quite new and exotic costume interested the wider society, ultimately allowing the Hungarian community to show itself as a part of the wider multi-cultural Lima. Emőke—or Emi, as she was soon known in Lima, to ease the pronunciation for Spanish speakers—was a small girl then, at the end of the 1940s and the start of the 1950s, but she was quite skilled in dancing, and she played the piano beautifully, too. The family was hit hard when her father died in 1954, quite young, from a disease he contracted in the mountains, Huaraz, where the family shortly lived.
From Dancing the Csárdás to the Beauty Pageant
Still, the Schöffers worked hard, and soon distinguished themselves in their community. Emőke’s mother was an elementary school teacher by profession, and she managed to do her exams for Spanish-language teaching really quickly, too, all the while working as a piano teacher. Both mother and daughter were distinguished members of a local school, and soon built a close friendship with the director of the school. She was a high official in Peruvian education, and she organized tours of cultural programmes for the different departamentos (provinces) of Peru. Emi and her mother were of great help to her in these programmes, coming from a culture such far away from Peru, but at the same time so interesting and very ‘European’. Thus, she became a frequent performer on stage; most of the performances were a kind of ‘multicultural show’ presenting the different traditional costumes of the world via parading ‘living dolls.’ Emi became the ‘Hungarian Doll,’ appearing alongside many other nationalities. ‘One of our key performances was together with my mother,’ she related. ‘I would be carried to the stage in a box as a doll in Hungarian folk clothes, and then, while my mother was playing the piano, I would step out of my box, and dance the Csárdás’.
Her talent in performance extended to her young adult years, too. Her mother worked hard to get by, and the girls progressed through education with flying colours. Emi’s talent for performance, through all the hardships, remained, and she became an active member of women’s associations at San Marcos University, the oldest European-style higher education institution in the Americas.
She became one of the most successful students, and also the centre of social activity, rising to the top of Peruvian university society when she won the all-Peru University beauty pageant in 1962.
Life as an Adult Weathering All Storms
Of course, Peru was not free of travails either. The country, riddled with societal tensions, erupted into a semi-collectivist experiment of General Velasco in 1968, with accompanying economic problems, capital flight, and poverty. Still, Emőke managed to live a happy life, marrying a Peruvian police officer, Julio Arriarán in 1968. There were even harder times coming, however. In 1980, just as the military regimes left power, a Maoist insurgency led by the ‘Shining Path’ terrorist group enveloped the country. Emőke had to stand the crisis as a young mother, while her husband was a high-ranking police officer, thus member of a group frequently targeted by terrorists. By the end of the period of terrorism, the storms and totalitarian regimes passed over Hungary, with the free country embracing all of its citizens who fled before the crises of the homeland. Emőke was among the group of Hungarians meeting Árpád Göncz, the Hungarian President, on his visit to Lima in 1999.
She is still an active and notable member of the small Hungarian community in Lima, a regular visitor to the Embassy’s cultural events, founding member of the old-new Hungarian Circle of Peru, and even teaches the youngest generation how to bake Hungarian doughnuts on special occasions. Her three sons followed the high-flying achievements of their parents, all choosing naval service. One of her sons, Alex was the first Peruvian navy officer to fly to the Antarctica with a helicopter.
Emi personally took her granddaughters back to Hungary to visit the country where their grandmother and great-grandparents were born, including the church at Kőszeg where little Emőke was baptized, born in a time of peril back in 1944.
Her story from the flight from Hungary as a small baby and an accidental move to Peru to her stage performances in multicultural Lima and her endurance through local crises illustrate the destiny of a unique group of Central Europeans finding refuge and a new community far from Hungary.
