{"id":1655,"date":"2007-08-12T21:59:46","date_gmt":"2007-08-12T21:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/12\/the-50s-the-com\/"},"modified":"2016-06-19T13:27:44","modified_gmt":"2016-06-19T20:27:44","slug":"the-50s-the-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/12\/the-50s-the-com\/","title":{"rendered":"The 50s, TV, The Company and The Hungarian Uprising"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Characters_nemeth1\"<\/a>I was ten in 1956, when the people of Hungary rose <\/a>up to end the Russian occupation.\u00a0 It was a rout – and they remained under Communist domination until the fall of the Berlin Wall.<\/a>\u00a0 It’s difficult to explain now just how scary it was to hear of these heroic people crushed in the streets, and, for a child, difficult to place.\u00a0 Could it happen to me?\u00a0 To my family?\u00a0 How did the Russians get there?\u00a0 Why did they care what people did in Hungary?<\/p>\n

A couple of years later a local church group sponsored a Hungarian family’s move to the US and their son, our age and pretty good at speaking English, came to dinner at the home of my friend Lois and spoke to a group of us – maybe it was our Girl Scout troop; maybe just a bunch of girlfriends – I’m not sure.\u00a0 He was dramatic and dignified and so happy to be there.\u00a0 Listening to him and the stories of those he’d left behind was a haunting experience – especially in the mind of a romantic politicized 13 year old mad for JFK.<\/a><\/p>\n

I hadn’t thought about any of this in years, but this summer TNT brings us The Company <\/a>– a history of the CIA — and of the Hungarian tragedy of 1956.\u00a0 From the perspective of 50 years it’s still so sad, even through the gauze of TV melodrama – and the freedom and prosperity of Hungary today doesn’t mitigate much.<\/p>\n

I’ve kept my eye on what happened in the East since then.\u00a0 We took our kids through Czechoslovakia and East Germany while they were still behind the Iron Curtain.\u00a0 We couldn’t get the boys dry socks after a heavy rain because, as the storekeeper told us “we don’t have socks today.”\u00a0 We gave all our Bruce Springsteen tapes to our guide; each one would have cost him a month’s pay on the black market.<\/p>\n

\"Pottsdam_2\"<\/a>
\nI’ve even been to Pottsdam. That photo on the left is the bridge where spies were exchanged during the days of the Cold War.\u00a0 So it’s not like I don’t know what happened historically.\u00a0 Once in a while though the recreation of reality, even with Hollywood gloss, slams me back where I was for a little while.<\/p>\n

That’s all – I’ve been sitting here trying to think of a real <\/em>ending for this – and I can’t — no massive summary available.\u00a0 Good night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was ten in 1956, when the people of Hungary rose up to end the Russian occupation.\u00a0 It was a rout – and they remained under Communist domination until the fall of the Berlin Wall.\u00a0 It’s difficult to explain now just how scary it was to hear of these heroic people crushed in the streets, … Continue reading The 50s, TV, The Company and The Hungarian Uprising<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,4,27,28,7,9,97,78],"tags":[230,2160,2161,2162,107,81,308,2163,2166,3884,2159,2158,365,2167,2168,262,2164,2165],"class_list":["post-1655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aging","category-baby-boom","category-current-affairs","category-film","category-life","category-politics","category-television","category-travel","tag-1950s","tag-2160","tag-1989-fall-of-the-wall","tag-50s","tag-baby-boom-2","tag-berlin","tag-berlin-wall","tag-cia","tag-cold-are","tag-culture-book","tag-hungarian-uprising","tag-hungary","tag-memories","tag-pottsdam","tag-refugees","tag-television-2","tag-the-company","tag-tnt"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-qH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1655"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4565,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1655\/revisions\/4565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}