In late 1975, shortly after returning from my first brief trip to Hungary, I was contacted by a writer working on a history of first-generation immigrants in the twentieth century.

She asked whether I would tell my story.

The idea was to preserve it as an oral history, presented largely in my own words.

I agreed.

In January 1976, she came to our home in Weston, Massachusetts.

We sat together.

We had several drinks.

We talked.

I kept waiting for the formal interview to begin.

Eventually I asked when we were actually going to start.

She informed me that she had been recording me the entire evening.

I did not particularly appreciate that.

And I told her so.

But I went along with it.

In retrospect, the story probably came out differently because I had not been given an opportunity to plan it.

I had not organized everything beforehand.

I had not carefully selected my words.

I simply talked.

Perhaps that gave the account a certain honesty.

At the time, less than twenty years had passed since George and I made our escape.

The memories were still close.

Then another thirty years passed.

On October 23, 2006, fifty years after the Hungarian Revolt, I found myself thinking about those events again after reading Charles Gati's book, Failed Illusions.

Charles had done an extraordinary job collecting, analyzing and presenting the history.

I respected the book enormously.

But I cannot say that I enjoyed reading it.

I did not.

It brought too much back.

The years leading up to November 1956 had been the age of our youth.

Szaby.

George.

Charles.

Me.

We had good times.

We also lived through some very difficult times.

Our friendships, our card games and our ordinary lives probably helped us block out some of the terrible things happening around us.

Reading the history fifty years later brought those memories back into focus.

Perhaps I had spent many years deliberately looking forward rather than backward.

I have always preferred thinking about the future, particularly when the past was unpleasant.

What surprised me was that Charles, George and I had rarely discussed in detail exactly what had happened to each of us during those days.

George and I naturally shared the story of our escape because we experienced it together.

Only much later, when I began returning to Hungary, did Szaby and I spend considerable time talking about those events.

Time changes memory.

It changes perspective.

But it does not necessarily change the importance of what happened.

The Hungarian Revolt of 1956 failed.

Yet saying that the revolt failed does not mean it accomplished nothing.

It showed the world that the people of Eastern Europe did not simply accept the system imposed upon them.

Its effects extended far beyond Hungary and arguably became part of the much longer process that eventually led toward the fall of the Soviet empire.

But after fifty years, what interested me even more were the personal consequences.

When I thought back to November 1956, I sometimes found it remarkable how much of the rest of my life depended on a decision made by a twenty-three-year-old man.

I was in love with a woman I had to leave behind.

I was only four months away from completing my university degree.

My father had died.

My mother was alone.

My family wanted me to stay.

I did not know where I would live.

I did not know how I would support myself.

I barely spoke English.

I did not know whether I would ever return to Hungary.

There was no carefully prepared plan for what came next.

There was only one decision.

Leave.

Then another decision.

Try again.

Jump from the truck.

Keep walking.

Run.

At twenty-three, I could not possibly understand how much those decisions would determine everything that followed.

But looking back fifty years later, I remained convinced that leaving Hungary was the best decision I ever made.

George and I benefited immediately.

We survived.

We were free.

We built new lives.

But with the perspective of many years, I came to believe that George and I were not really the greatest beneficiaries of the decisions we made in 1956.

Our children were.

They inherited possibilities that might never have existed had we stayed.

And perhaps that is the part of the story that matters most.

History is usually written in terms of governments, revolutions, armies and borders.

Those things matter.

I saw tanks in Budapest.

I heard crowds demand that the red star be removed.

I watched a revolution rise and collapse.

I was captured trying to escape my own country.

I jumped from a moving truck.

I stood before a border guard holding a machine gun.

I ran five miles through the snow with an Express train coming behind me.

Those things became part of history.

But when you live through history, it does not feel like history.

It feels like Tuesday evening.

It feels like worrying about your mother.

It feels like leaving the woman you love.

It feels like packing a bathing suit when you have no idea where you are going.

It feels like carrying a deck of cards because those cards still belong to the person you were yesterday.

And then one morning you discover that yesterday's life is gone.

All you can do is choose what comes next.

I chose to leave.

I chose to keep going.

And everything that followed began there.