Oct 21, 2026

Communist Hungary made an honest life impossible, and Holocaust survivor Robert Ratonyi explains why you had to cheat, lie, and steal just to survive it. In his second conversation with Jenny Beth Martin, he picks up where the first left off: Stalin's three broken promises at Yalta, the salami tactics that turned a lost 1945 election into total communist control by 1948, five-year plans that were never met, meal tickets without meat, a graduation suit his mother paid for with alcohol stolen from the factory, and a bar mitzvah held behind pulled shades so the neighbors would not hear. He describes the secret police on every streetcar, six compulsory years of Russian, Voice of America with the volume down, and an aunt imprisoned for years over a smuggler's phone number. Then comes October 23, 1956, when he was an 18-year-old freshman in the student march that gave Hungary a few weeks of freedom, and the December night he crossed a frozen field and a swamp into Austria with 200 forints in his pocket, carrying a stranger's six-year-old daughter on his back to pay his way. Jenny Beth reads him the Democratic Socialists of America's promise of a life without capitalism, and he answers it. Robert Ratonyi is an engineer, a former investment banker, the author of From Darkness into Light: My Journey Through Nazism, Fascism, and Communism to Freedom, and a longtime speaker for the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust. Learn more at teapartypatriots.org and jennybethshow.com.

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