There was a general strike, which meant transportation was extremely limited.

George and I started out carrying our suitcases.

We also carried four bottles of Hungarian apricot brandy each.

That may sound like an unusual thing to bring while escaping a country, but it was actually very practical.

Apricot brandy could persuade people.

And we were going to need help.

We managed to stop a military truck traveling in the direction we wanted to go. We waved one of the bottles of brandy, and the men agreed to take us.

That got us approximately halfway to the Austrian border.

At some point we obtained blank permits and put our names on them because there were restrictions on how far west people were allowed to travel.

Eventually we reached Gyor, a city roughly halfway between Budapest and Vienna.

We spent the night there.

The following morning, we hired a taxi to take us farther toward the border.

The taxi brought us to a canal.

Now we had another problem.

We had to cross it.

There was a bridge nearby, but Russians were guarding it.

Going during the night presented one kind of danger because we believed they might simply shoot. During daylight, we thought the worst that would happen was that we would be captured.

That was the kind of reasoning we were doing.

Not particularly sophisticated military planning.

Just two young men trying to decide which bad possibility was less bad than the other.

We decided to build a raft.

We found a farmer and purchased nails and whatever materials we thought might help.

We knew that Czechoslovakia was somewhere to our right.

Austria was to our left.

Then an older man appeared and asked to join us.

We agreed.

The problem was that our raft could barely carry one person.

So we tied scarves together to form a kind of rope. One person would cross while the others held the scarf rope. Then the raft could be pulled back for the next person.

The older man tried.

He fell into the freezing water and began yelling.

At that point, for the first time in my life, I got drunk.

Then we were captured.