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Subject: [HUNGARY-L] A washingtonpost.com article from: jjarfas@ezaccess.net
Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2003 10:51:30 -0400 (EDT)

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if you think you have a hard time finding relatives, read this:

Joe
Equinunk, PA - USA



Unknown and Alone in Mexico

By Mary Jordan

MEXICO CITY -- A small crowd gathered as Bela Vegso started handing out fistfuls of dollars.

"I want to buy a boat to go to Hungary," Vegso called out in English as he stood on a pier at the port of Veracruz on May 27, staring at the Atlantic Ocean, giving away his savings to passersby.

Alejandro Mendoza, an immigration officer who saw the older man, recalled that he gently urged him to put his money away. Then the quest began to discover who he was.

His story is a sad tale of dreams lost to mental illness, an improbable 2,400-mile odyssey and bureaucratic indifference that left a confused man lost and alone in a foreign land. Only at the end did his distraught and perplexed family learn that Vegso had at last been found.

At first, Mendoza had few clues as to the man's identity. Before him sat a gentle man with gray hair, deep brown eyes and soft white skin. He was obviously disoriented. His only possessions were a Sears Craftsman toolbox filled with money and a suitcase containing a razor, five neatly folded pairs of pants and five shirts.

He said he was from Connecticut. But he had no recent identification on him, just an expired 1960 Hungarian passport stating that he was born in 1937 in Bokony, a farming village. He also had a decades-old student identification card that said he was from the United States.

"He spoke American English. I was pretty sure he was from the U.S.," said Mendoza, who offered the man a cot to rest on overnight in the immigration office. "He didn't say much. He never slept one minute. He refused to eat. There was no expression on his face."

The next day, Mendoza drove Vegso in a government van 250 miles west to Mexico City. In the capital, Mendoza thought, the U.S. and Hungarian embassies should be able to figure out where Vegso had family and how he got to Veracruz, 600 miles south of the U.S. border. For nearly five hours the two strangers sat in silence as the Mexican countryside passed by. Vegso smoked one Marlboro after another.

But in Mexico City, the mystery deepened, as Vegso was placed in an immigration detention center, labeled "nationality unknown."

Bureaucracies are often unkind, and Vegso now was in an overloaded system ill-equipped to help him. But he made nothing easy. He told no one the main facts of his life, if he even remembered them: that he had fled Soviet oppression in Hungary, or that he was a sculptor who had lived in the United States for 40 years.

He just sat for days staring at the wall.

Two days after Vegso was found on the pier, a U.S. consular officer checked to see if the man had a U.S. passport or naturalization papers, but turned up nothing. In fact, Vegso told U.S. officials that he was not American, according to Paul Schultz, head of American Citizens Services at the embassy here.

"So that was pretty much the end of our role," Schultz said.

U.S. officials, in one of the busiest U.S. consular sections in the world, closed the file on Vegso.

Hungarian officials also interviewed Vegso, but they confirmed that he had left their country 47 years earlier, so they did not claim him. Vegso sat for seven weeks in a Mexican detention center, a man without a country.

Marta Villarreal, a lawyer from Sin Fronteras, a private group that aids migrants, visited and said Vegso slept on a concrete slab with no mattress in a locked room with five other men. "He had done nothing wrong," she said. "He shouldn't have been in a cell."

The second time Villarreal saw Vegso, he was in worse shape.

"He was shaking," she said. "I was so upset."

She said it seemed to her, by the way he spoke English and because he told her he was from Connecticut, that he was either American or had lived in the United States for a long time. She tried unsuccessfully to get the U.S. Embassy to re-open his case.

She and other lawyers here said the U.S. Embassy, swamped with work, does not spend the time needed on the many difficult cases like Vegso's. As a result, she said, she often sees U.S. citizens languishing in detention for months before the embassy helps them. With nobody claiming Vegso, Mexican immigration officials moved him to another section of the center where he had more privacy.

Mendoza, the immigration official who first helped Vegso in Veracruz, said he had special empathy for the man: "Five years ago I was a wetback and jailed in Colorado for three months," Mendoza said. "I know what people suffer when they are out of their country. This case was particularly sad. He was old and alone. It could happen to any of us."

Zsuzsanna Madach, the consul at the Hungarian Embassy, visited Vegso twice and spoke to him in Hungarian. "But he couldn't tell me anything about his past," she said. She said she told Mexican officials that a Hungarian record search showed that Vegso had been a U.S. citizen since the early 1960s.

Meanwhile, Gabriela Morales, another lawyer with Sin Fronteras, was worried that Vegso would spent the rest of his life alone in Mexico. "What if he had family looking for him?" she said.

After The Washington Post asked to interview Vegso, he was moved to a psychiatric hospital in the south of Mexico City in late July. There, he had a sparse, single room on the tiled sixth floor of a huge public hospital. A guard sat near the elevators and mesh wire covered the windows. The hospital would not permit any photographs to be taken.

In an interview, Vegso, surrounded by three doctors, seemed to understand every question in English but said very little. He immediately offered that he had lived in Connecticut and had come to Mexico by train and bus.

He was asked why he came.

"To visit," he replied. He sat with hands between his legs, his hair newly cut, a gray woolen sweater pulled over his blue hospital garb.

He said he was a sculptor. His house, he said, "was taken away."

He said he had never been married and had no children.

What country would you like to go to? he was asked.

His eyes seemed to focus intently and he replied softly, "I don't know."

After talking to Vegso, The Post checked Connecticut phone directories for the name Vegso. There were several listings, so a reporter called the Bridgeport police.

"Is a man by the name of Bela Vegso missing?"

After a few taps of a computer, the female police officer on the phone said, "Yes."

The Post then called the telephone number listed on the missing persons report, setting off a series of phone calls that led to Zoltan Vegso, Bela's older brother.

"They found Bela! They found Bela!" said the brother, 72, speaking by telephone from West Haven, Conn. "I thought he had been killed." He said Bela, 66, had walked out of Marionette Manor, a 10-bed group home in New Haven on May 14 and did not return. Connecticut and New York police had been alerted that he was missing.

Roberta Getlein, the home's administrator, and Victor Dibuccio, a counselor, said they had known Bela Vegso for 15 years, had made scores of calls and had faxed pictures of him to police. In the process, they said they grew increasingly upset at bureaucracy and laws that seemed to make the search for Bela harder.

Getlein said when she asked a Connecticut police detective if he had checked nearby hospitals, the officer cited privacy laws and told her, "I can't tell you even if I do find him in a hospital."

Dibuccio said he received similar responses from homeless shelters. " 'Maybe he doesn't want to be found.' That is what they said! Now, what kind of crap is that?" said Dibuccio. He said Vegso was sick and needed medicine. "We have strange laws in our country when they end up hurting people," he said.

Officials at the U.S. Embassy also cited privacy laws and said that, in many cases, a newspaper reporter has more leeway than government officials to contact possible relatives of missing people. Before government officials can try to reach family members, they need the person's authorization or a doctor's statement declaring the person unfit to make that decision, one official said.

In a case such as Vegso's, where it was likely that he was impaired, U.S. officials said they could waive those requirements.

But Schultz, the consular officer, said Vegso never told U.S. officials he was from Connecticut and didn't cooperate, so "we had no place to start."

Last week, distraught because he feared his brother was dead, Zoltan Vegso went to collect his brother's clothes, books and photos. He said he believed he would never see Bela again.

Zoltan said he and Bela had grown up on a farm in Hungary, where their family grew cabbage, potatoes and beans. The brothers were among 200,000 Hungarians who fled for the United States after the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev crushed an anti-communist revolt in 1956, killing an estimated 20,000 people in the process. They left behind their parents and a sister who have since died. Bela was 19 and Zoltan was 25.

"We had no choice but to go," Zoltan said.

Bela quickly learned English and won a scholarship to study engineering. But soon he tired of science and turned to art, spending the money he earned working in a New Jersey chemical plant on tuition for a prestigious art school, Real Academia de Bellas Artes, in Madrid, according to his family members and the student identification card Vegso carries.

"He had big dreams," said his brother. "He had an artistic mind."

His sister-in-law, Helen Vegso, said Bela "wanted to be Michelangelo."

Bela worked on sculptures and oil paintings. "He would start to paint and then he would get sick and could not finish," Zoltan said.

The two brothers met regularly. Zoltan also has become frail and lives in an assisted living facility. Nonetheless, he would take two buses to visit his younger brother a few miles away at Marionette Manor.

Getlein said Bela reminded her of Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Nash depicted in the recent book and film, "A Beautiful Mind."

She said he had paranoid schizophrenia. "He was very smart," she said. He read constantly, particularly geography books. He was free to come and go, and once in a while he went to New York City on the train, always returning. Recently, she said, she noticed he had been studying Spanish.

Getlein said Vegso left with a "considerable amount" of money. He had been receiving Social Security checks for 15 years, and she said she believed he had that money with him when he left. All his money appears to be gone.

He spent at least some of it on his 13-day journey from Connecticut to Veracruz. It is unclear what route he took, but Amtrak runs trains from New Haven to Grand Central Station in New York City and from there to Chicago. From Chicago, trains run south to a few locations on the Mexican border, from where Vegso could have taken a bus hundreds of miles south to Veracruz.

So far, Vegso has been unable to describe his journey.

The U.S. Embassy reopened Vegso's case last week in light of the new information generated in the case. Some days later, a search of paper records in a warehouse of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services in Hartford, Conn. confirmed that Vegso had been a U.S. citizen since 1963. Consular officials said Vegso's name had not come up in the initial search because computerized immigration records only go back to 1973.

U.S. officials also noted that Vegso did not have a U.S. passport, which would have made it easier to verify his nationality.

Vegso's family and his former caretakers are now working with embassy officials on a way to get Vegso home. "Please tell Bela, 'Come home as soon as possible,' " said his brother. "I miss him."

Researcher Bart Beeson contributed to this report.






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