How Europe’s Other Half Lives

BUDAPEST — IT was mortifying to see refugees hurling themselves on the tracks at a Hungarian railway station — as they did last week when a train they thought was carrying them to Austria was stopped by the police in Hungary to take them to a detention camp. The migrants’ despair was because they didn’t want to be stuck here — in the country where we Hungarians are destined to live our shabby little lives.

I have often felt like throwing myself on the tracks at a country railway station — just thinking about being Hungarian. And many of my compatriots have, out of sheer melancholy, successfully executed this act as a train arrived.

These people walking all the way from Syria, however, are definitely not suicidal. They are hungry for life. Only, they don’t believe they can find that life here.

Eastern Europe is not the all-inclusive luxury hotel that many in the other half of the Continent enjoy; we’re more at the low-budget, self-catering end of the market. But it’s not that bad, either. It provides some aspects of a European lifestyle; sometimes it seems deeply provincial, sometimes quite refined.