Photo By Eric Pilgrim | A tearful Anna (Szlovak) Billings (left) is told of her father’s death by Maria...... read more read more
FORT KNOX, Ky. — As they stepped off a train at Elizabethtown, Kentucky in 1957, a new reality settled over four Hungarian refugees: yet another train had taken them on yet another journey.
This latest 8,000-mile trip, however, delivered them to a new life of freedom and hope rather than almost certain death over a decade before and the almost constant threats that followed after.
Hungarians by birth, the four sought to become Americans by choice. One of them who stepped off the train that day was Mihaly Hovorka, 47, a moment captured by Inside the Turret Jan. 18 of that year. Waiting for him, his 45-year-old wife Maria, their son Otto and Otto’s newlywed wife Suzanne, was a surprising and welcome acquaintance: Anna Szlovak Billings.
Anna and her family knew the Hovorkas in Budapest before World War II. They remembered her playing as a little girl in the street. They also remembered her family during the war.
When the Germans rolled in to seize control of the city in 1944, they had captured 22-year-old Anna, along with 320 others, and sent them by train to a concentration camp in Bavaria, Germany. After a year of imprisonment and a daring escape, avoiding capture along the Hungarian frontier for two months, Anna was eventually liberated by American Soldiers and traveled to the United States sometime after the war.
She settled into Pittsburgh briefly, where she became the bride of an Army Soldier who had been involved in her liberation — Sgt. 1st Class Kenneth Billings.
After the war, Hovorka became a freedom fighter in his native country as the Russian army invaded to seize control of Hungary in the name of USSR. A baker since he was 21, Hovorka put down the bread and picked up a pistol and machine gun, according to the Inside the Turret article. When the Russian tanks rolled toward the city Dec. 6, 1956 to take it, the Hovorkas fled to Austria.
Years later, Anna contacted her mother, who told her she had no news about her father’s whereabouts. When Billings and Anna moved to Fort Knox, she began work as a translator for Hungarian refugees who would soon be arriving to the area.
“If I can help Hungarians today,” she said in a Dec. 14, 1956 Inside the Turret article, “I want to.”
At the train station in E-Town a month later, Anna introduced herself to the first arriving refugees: the Hovorkas. Within minutes, Anna found herself elated to actually know them, only to then receive some heart-wrenching news — her father had been killed by the Russians in 1953.
After their reunion, Hovorka again became a baker as he and his family settled into the area. Two months after their reunion, Anna found herself traveling back to Germany: freely this time, with her husband, who was being assigned to 11th Armored Cavalry.
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(Editor’s Note: This is the first of a series of articles during Days of Remembrance focusing on the lives of Soldiers and Families affected by the Holocaust.)
| Date Taken: | 04.05.2021 |
| Date Posted: | 04.05.2021 13:59 |
| Story ID: | 393048 |
| Location: | FORT KNOX, KENTUCKY, US |
| Web Views: | 56 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Beyond the Shoah — 1: Remembering Fort Knox Soldiers, Families affected by the Holocaust, by Eric Pilgrim, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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