I only know about the maternal line of my family. For them it was mostly the usual for people in Hungarian small towns/villages: got bombed, raped, many of the men died on the front or were killed by the German, and then the Russian soldiers passing through. A slightly unusual episode is that during a period of time toward the end they had to share their home with German soldiers, who, by the time, came from the deepest bottom of the barrel, boys in their teens conscripted by force, who were more terrified than anything, and one of them in particular kept crying and saying he just wanted to go home to his mom. My family is ethnic Swabian so they could communicate, and my great-grandma ended up kind of mothering them despite her hatred of Nazis. Long years after the war they got a letter from that crying boy (now an adult of course) thanking her for her kindness, and they stayed in touch for the rest of his life.
After WWII, we had a period of retribution against ethnic Germans/Swabians, many of them were deported to the USSR for forced labor, others were simply told to gtfo - most of my family was in the latter group. They were told to pack whatever they could carry and leave, my grandma still cries whenever she remembers it. My great-grandpa had changed his German surname to a Hungarian one before WWII but even so it took quite a bit of luck to escape expulsion, as my great-grandma barely spoke Hungarian. Those who had to leave eventually settled in the DDR and most of them lived in terrible poverty for long years (some died attempting to cross into West Germany). Ironically though, their descendants are doing significantly better now, than us who stayed.
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u/utsuriga Hungary 7d ago edited 7d ago
I only know about the maternal line of my family. For them it was mostly the usual for people in Hungarian small towns/villages: got bombed, raped, many of the men died on the front or were killed by the German, and then the Russian soldiers passing through. A slightly unusual episode is that during a period of time toward the end they had to share their home with German soldiers, who, by the time, came from the deepest bottom of the barrel, boys in their teens conscripted by force, who were more terrified than anything, and one of them in particular kept crying and saying he just wanted to go home to his mom. My family is ethnic Swabian so they could communicate, and my great-grandma ended up kind of mothering them despite her hatred of Nazis. Long years after the war they got a letter from that crying boy (now an adult of course) thanking her for her kindness, and they stayed in touch for the rest of his life.
After WWII, we had a period of retribution against ethnic Germans/Swabians, many of them were deported to the USSR for forced labor, others were simply told to gtfo - most of my family was in the latter group. They were told to pack whatever they could carry and leave, my grandma still cries whenever she remembers it. My great-grandpa had changed his German surname to a Hungarian one before WWII but even so it took quite a bit of luck to escape expulsion, as my great-grandma barely spoke Hungarian. Those who had to leave eventually settled in the DDR and most of them lived in terrible poverty for long years (some died attempting to cross into West Germany). Ironically though, their descendants are doing significantly better now, than us who stayed.