08-15-2016, 07:03 PM
I'm counting the fact that I slept until 2 as a major victory. I actually felt refreshed as I ate breakfast in the dining room. Oddly, on Sunday, I had eaten right when they had opened and then gone on the hunt for an ATM to solve my cash flow problem. I came back later and found HK eating his breakfast. He was very pleased with himself that he had gotten to breakfast that morning first. I quickly dissuaded him of that notion.
The process of moving the bags from my room to the car is going much too smoothly. And Sandor, our driver, is always prompt. It's almost like we know what we are doing. The ride to the House of sport only took a minute so again, we were early.
Which was good, since the security guard at the gate wouldn't let us in. I didn't have a number for our contact, only her name and floor number. I had emailed her the license plate of the vehicle but I guess that information hadn't trickled down to the garage shack. Mr. Security Guard wanted us to wait another half hour on the street until people showed up for work.
As Sandor backed the car out, he spotted a car with Fencing, in Hungarian, printed on the side. The guy in that car talked to the guard and somehow straightened things out for us. To the guards misgivings, he let us into the parking lot for the building.
We took the elevator up to the third floor to meet Eve Keresztes, who had agreed to give us a room for the interview. Originally it was going to be in the Aladar Gerevich sports hall, but I felt that might be too big for our purposes,so she found us a place in her building.
Sort of. The first place she offered was out in the hall, where everyone was walking by. The second place was down in the lobby, a worse choice than the hallway. Finally, she opened up a conference room for us to use. HK and I only had to move four tables to make it usable.
Monday's interview was with Lidia Domolky Sakovics. She was a foil fencer on the team that defected in 1956. We had interviewed her brother back in Boston and were now going to get her perspective on Piller and the defection. The odd part was that she went back to Hungary only a year after the defection.
Xenia was with us for this round, since Lidia requested a translator. She showed up on time and everything. Although she did need a coffee immediately. We were still setting up so she hustled down to the coffee shop in the lobby.
Now, I had prepped Lidia that these interviews can take some time. But I guess that message never sunk in. Or maybe it didn't matter how long the interview ran, she didn't want any part of it. From the second she sat in the chair, she wanted it to be over, for whatever reason.
The way we've been doing the interviews is by asking a lot of questions about the persons background. That seems pretty standard. Plus, we've been trying to get various perspectives about what it was like to be in Hungary during the uprising, so we had a lot of questions about that. Look, we have a lot of questions. We have a lot of things we don't know. We came to you to get those answers. That is how interviews work. Lidia worked as a journalist. She should know that.
We were deep into the Hungarian uprising discussion when she balked. She wanted to know when we were going to talk about Piller, ostensibly the reason she was there. She paled when we told her we had four pages of questions and we were on page one.
Nothing was to be done but to go to the questions about Piller. And what did she have to say about Piller? Not much. Piller wasn't her coach. She was a foil fencer. She was young when she was around him.
Actually, I'm not sure how full her answers were. Lidia answered in Hungarian. Xenia did a partial translation to speed things up . Later on, Xenia was going to fully write out Lidia's answers. On top of having a hostile witness, the process went slowly. Although, I think Lidia could have done the interview in English. Several times she started to answer in English, realized she was speaking English, and then switched to Hungarian.
After that, we started throwing huge chunks of the interview out. Every couple of minutes, Lidia mentioned that she had to get home to cook lunch for her grandchildren. I'm marking this whole experience down as poor.
A bit defeated, we lugged all the equipment down to the car after putting the conference room back the way we found it. Xenia did point out to us the building had bad vibes and was making her feel claustrophobic. Ah, Xenia.
Sandor was a bit late getting back to us. He had gone to get a bite to eat thinking we would be a lot longer at the interview. Traffic was horrendous along his route back to us. I gave Xenia the list of calls locally to make for upcoming interviews. She also said she would look for some sand bags for us, despite not really knowing what sandbags were.
We had a ton of time to kill before our afternoon meeting at the Museum of Military History with Dr. Sallay Gergely. All that time was eaten up by traffic on the short journey between the House of Sports and the Hotel Nemzeti. It took five minutes in the morning to get there. It took almost a half hour to get back.
I thought we would have about an hour at the hotel. It turned into a ten minute turn around. I was trying to get Sandor done early to make up for the time yesterday, but the traffic over into Buda, killed that, too.
We had twenty minutes before our meeting so we ate lunch at a nearby cafe. I had more Goulash.
Dr. Sallay was a stark contrast to the morning interview. He couldn't have been more helpful. After a short meeting with the deputy director of the museum, Colonel Atilla Ban, who basically wanted us not to fuck with the museums collection, but couched it very politely, Sallay took us to his conference room where he had all the artifacts laid out.
Here is a small example of how gracious or thoughtful was Dr. Sallay. Knowing I was going to photograph medals, I wanted to get a piece of fabric to put behind the medals. I hadn't had time to go to a fabric store so I ended up bringing a dark t-shirt along as a backing.
When we walked into the room, I noticed among the medals and trophies, three bolts of cloth. Dr. Sallay had brought them thinking it would be nice to use behind the medals. Not one, but three bolts. He wanted to make sure I had choices.
It took me about two hours to photograph Piller's medals, trophies, and paintings. While I photographed, HK scanned all the files relating to Piller in the museum's collection. Again, thoughtful Sallay, had placed all the previous scans the museum had done on a thumb drive and given them to us. He also gave us digitized copies of all the pictures in the museum collection of Piller. HK was astounded by all the different pictures of Piller he had never seen before.
My hand cramped while I took pictures of all the medals. The medals had come into the collection via Jeno Hamori. Hamori had gotten them from Mrs.Piller. Mrs. Piller wanted to make a swap of the medals with the Hungarian government for a comfortable apartment in Budapest. When that didn't happen, she just dumped them in Hamori's lap.
Most of the military documents were found rotting at a flea market.
It was a bad morning, saved by a good afternoon.
At the hotel, I offloaded and charged batteries. I went out and tried to find an unlocked phone to replace the broken one. There were plenty of ones down in the underground, but the one I found didn't work with my Sim card.
After several attempts, I was able to get money out of the ATM. It took me several tries because I was trying to figure out how many Hungarian Forints equalled my daily cash withdrawal limit. For the curious, it was 80000.
We ate dinner at Il Terzo Cerchio. It was closer to the river, so it was better than the previous nights meal. We probably could have stopped eating after the anti-pasta plate of meats and cheese. But we didn't know how big and filling it was going to be when I ordered it.
HK and I discussed our plans for the upcoming week as we usually do during meals. Although, we don't have any solid dates beyond Wednesday's interview with Dr. Sakaly, we do have a lot of potential interviews. Dr. Sallay confirmed the military will let him speak. And so will Dr. Kovacs, who is the head of the Museum of Military History. They just don't know when. Maday and Mohos are still floating out there. Along with maybe four others. I still have to film some exteriors of Budapest. We are planning to go to Eger and see the house Piller grew up in. And we have to strong arm the Hungarian Film Archive for their collection.
It comes down to this: We have a lot to do in the next 11 days. None of it is planned.
The process of moving the bags from my room to the car is going much too smoothly. And Sandor, our driver, is always prompt. It's almost like we know what we are doing. The ride to the House of sport only took a minute so again, we were early.
Which was good, since the security guard at the gate wouldn't let us in. I didn't have a number for our contact, only her name and floor number. I had emailed her the license plate of the vehicle but I guess that information hadn't trickled down to the garage shack. Mr. Security Guard wanted us to wait another half hour on the street until people showed up for work.
As Sandor backed the car out, he spotted a car with Fencing, in Hungarian, printed on the side. The guy in that car talked to the guard and somehow straightened things out for us. To the guards misgivings, he let us into the parking lot for the building.
We took the elevator up to the third floor to meet Eve Keresztes, who had agreed to give us a room for the interview. Originally it was going to be in the Aladar Gerevich sports hall, but I felt that might be too big for our purposes,so she found us a place in her building.
Sort of. The first place she offered was out in the hall, where everyone was walking by. The second place was down in the lobby, a worse choice than the hallway. Finally, she opened up a conference room for us to use. HK and I only had to move four tables to make it usable.
Monday's interview was with Lidia Domolky Sakovics. She was a foil fencer on the team that defected in 1956. We had interviewed her brother back in Boston and were now going to get her perspective on Piller and the defection. The odd part was that she went back to Hungary only a year after the defection.
Xenia was with us for this round, since Lidia requested a translator. She showed up on time and everything. Although she did need a coffee immediately. We were still setting up so she hustled down to the coffee shop in the lobby.
Now, I had prepped Lidia that these interviews can take some time. But I guess that message never sunk in. Or maybe it didn't matter how long the interview ran, she didn't want any part of it. From the second she sat in the chair, she wanted it to be over, for whatever reason.
The way we've been doing the interviews is by asking a lot of questions about the persons background. That seems pretty standard. Plus, we've been trying to get various perspectives about what it was like to be in Hungary during the uprising, so we had a lot of questions about that. Look, we have a lot of questions. We have a lot of things we don't know. We came to you to get those answers. That is how interviews work. Lidia worked as a journalist. She should know that.
We were deep into the Hungarian uprising discussion when she balked. She wanted to know when we were going to talk about Piller, ostensibly the reason she was there. She paled when we told her we had four pages of questions and we were on page one.
Nothing was to be done but to go to the questions about Piller. And what did she have to say about Piller? Not much. Piller wasn't her coach. She was a foil fencer. She was young when she was around him.
Actually, I'm not sure how full her answers were. Lidia answered in Hungarian. Xenia did a partial translation to speed things up . Later on, Xenia was going to fully write out Lidia's answers. On top of having a hostile witness, the process went slowly. Although, I think Lidia could have done the interview in English. Several times she started to answer in English, realized she was speaking English, and then switched to Hungarian.
After that, we started throwing huge chunks of the interview out. Every couple of minutes, Lidia mentioned that she had to get home to cook lunch for her grandchildren. I'm marking this whole experience down as poor.
A bit defeated, we lugged all the equipment down to the car after putting the conference room back the way we found it. Xenia did point out to us the building had bad vibes and was making her feel claustrophobic. Ah, Xenia.
Sandor was a bit late getting back to us. He had gone to get a bite to eat thinking we would be a lot longer at the interview. Traffic was horrendous along his route back to us. I gave Xenia the list of calls locally to make for upcoming interviews. She also said she would look for some sand bags for us, despite not really knowing what sandbags were.
We had a ton of time to kill before our afternoon meeting at the Museum of Military History with Dr. Sallay Gergely. All that time was eaten up by traffic on the short journey between the House of Sports and the Hotel Nemzeti. It took five minutes in the morning to get there. It took almost a half hour to get back.
I thought we would have about an hour at the hotel. It turned into a ten minute turn around. I was trying to get Sandor done early to make up for the time yesterday, but the traffic over into Buda, killed that, too.
We had twenty minutes before our meeting so we ate lunch at a nearby cafe. I had more Goulash.
Dr. Sallay was a stark contrast to the morning interview. He couldn't have been more helpful. After a short meeting with the deputy director of the museum, Colonel Atilla Ban, who basically wanted us not to fuck with the museums collection, but couched it very politely, Sallay took us to his conference room where he had all the artifacts laid out.
Here is a small example of how gracious or thoughtful was Dr. Sallay. Knowing I was going to photograph medals, I wanted to get a piece of fabric to put behind the medals. I hadn't had time to go to a fabric store so I ended up bringing a dark t-shirt along as a backing.
When we walked into the room, I noticed among the medals and trophies, three bolts of cloth. Dr. Sallay had brought them thinking it would be nice to use behind the medals. Not one, but three bolts. He wanted to make sure I had choices.
It took me about two hours to photograph Piller's medals, trophies, and paintings. While I photographed, HK scanned all the files relating to Piller in the museum's collection. Again, thoughtful Sallay, had placed all the previous scans the museum had done on a thumb drive and given them to us. He also gave us digitized copies of all the pictures in the museum collection of Piller. HK was astounded by all the different pictures of Piller he had never seen before.
My hand cramped while I took pictures of all the medals. The medals had come into the collection via Jeno Hamori. Hamori had gotten them from Mrs.Piller. Mrs. Piller wanted to make a swap of the medals with the Hungarian government for a comfortable apartment in Budapest. When that didn't happen, she just dumped them in Hamori's lap.
Most of the military documents were found rotting at a flea market.
It was a bad morning, saved by a good afternoon.
At the hotel, I offloaded and charged batteries. I went out and tried to find an unlocked phone to replace the broken one. There were plenty of ones down in the underground, but the one I found didn't work with my Sim card.
After several attempts, I was able to get money out of the ATM. It took me several tries because I was trying to figure out how many Hungarian Forints equalled my daily cash withdrawal limit. For the curious, it was 80000.
We ate dinner at Il Terzo Cerchio. It was closer to the river, so it was better than the previous nights meal. We probably could have stopped eating after the anti-pasta plate of meats and cheese. But we didn't know how big and filling it was going to be when I ordered it.
HK and I discussed our plans for the upcoming week as we usually do during meals. Although, we don't have any solid dates beyond Wednesday's interview with Dr. Sakaly, we do have a lot of potential interviews. Dr. Sallay confirmed the military will let him speak. And so will Dr. Kovacs, who is the head of the Museum of Military History. They just don't know when. Maday and Mohos are still floating out there. Along with maybe four others. I still have to film some exteriors of Budapest. We are planning to go to Eger and see the house Piller grew up in. And we have to strong arm the Hungarian Film Archive for their collection.
It comes down to this: We have a lot to do in the next 11 days. None of it is planned.
As a matter of fact, my anger does keep me warm