May 7, 2010
Mother's Day
A day for remembering a ‘wonderful model of faith’
Hajnalka Klieman and her mother Agota Szabo share a special moment in 2006. In this issue of the Message, Hajnalka shares stories about her late mother who lived through the siege of Budapest and the Hungarian Revolution. “I miss her terribly, but this will be such a nice way to honor her on Mother’s Day,” she said. Hajnalka, her husband Lee and their four children are parishioners at St. John the Baptist Church in Newburgh. Click for a larger version.
By MARY ANN HUGHES (Message staff writer)
This Mother’s Day, as Hajnalka Klieman is surrounded by her four beautiful children Joseph, Thomas, Peter and Erzsebet, she will be filled with sweet memories of her mother, Agota Szabo.
Her mother has been gone now for over three years, but the memories are crystal clear.
Hajnalka started hearing the stories of her mother’s life when she was a little girl growing up in Warsaw, Ind. She, her husband Lee, and their four children are parishioners at St. John the Baptist Church in Newburgh.
Agota was born in 1938 in Budapest, Hungary, and lived through the difficult World War II years there. “Her family hid in the basement of her apartment building during the siege, also hiding a Jewish friend in the process.”
Food was sparse, and “when someone was able to procure some lentils they were meticulously counted out so each person could have a few to eat.”
After the siege, the International Red Cross provided breakfast for the school children, and Agota told her daughter of taking a bowl and spoon to school to receive a ladleful of cold, lumpy oatmeal. “She ate it, grateful for the calories,” Hajnalka said, “but to the day she died, my mom never ate oatmeal again.”
In November of 1956, immediately after the Hungarian Revolution, Agota, her future husband, Denes, and two others took a train to the Austrian border. They didn’t have the proper documents, so they jumped off the train into the snow to escape detection. At the border, they walked single file through a minefield and then crawled under a barbed wire fence into safety in Austria.
“The University of Illinois welcomed them and other refugees,” so they took a boat across the ocean to their new home in the United States. They didn’t speak any English, and the first words they learned were “yes, sir” and “no, sir” as they swabbed the decks of the ocean liner for pocket change.
They successfully settled into life in America, and eventually their family grew to 10 children. Hajnalka is their youngest.
As Hajnalka remembers her mother, she remembers a woman of great faith. “God was at the center. She came from a place of sacrifice and redemption and suffering,” and many times “she offered things up for the souls in purgatory.”
“Her Catholicism defined who she was in every way,” Hajnalka said. “A daily Communicant herself, Mom took us to daily Mass in the summers when we were out of school.” Each child had his or her own rosary, “and we prayed the Rosary every night after dinner.”
The mother of 10 taught her children her faith by her example, her daughter remembers. “She never passed a homeless person without giving some money, eye contact and a warm ’God bless you.’
“After a janitor at our church lost his job, mom supported his wife’s medications for years, sometimes sending me to the drugstore with an envelope of cash for the pharmacist.”
Even when her father was a graduate student “and they literally searched the couch cushions for coins to buy milk and bread, Mom still gave to the church.”
After her mother died “letters and remembrances poured in from all over the world.”
As a young girl, Hajnalka took her mother’s deep faith “for granted.”
“I didn’t realize her faith was special until I went to college.” That’s when Hajnalka met students who were searching for what she already had. “I realized they didn’t have the rosary, the deep faith. I had what they were looking for.”
Over the decades Hajnalka says her mother “held on to her faith always. If anything, it got stronger — which continues to amaze me.
She left a legacy of faith and unconditional love, says her daughter. She is often asked what it was like to grow up in a family of 10 children. “How did she make us feel special? I never felt like one of 10. It was family, and I always felt like one of the family — which is a credit to her.”
Hajnalka believes “God blessed me abundantly” with a mother who was a “wonderful model of faith.”
Of this wonderful woman, Hajnalka says, “I still miss my mother and I always will.”