AP News, January 12th, 2008
"Moment of truth," Charles Tasnadi said to himself, peering out the window of Air Force One as it landed here Tuesday (July 11, 1989).
Thirty-eight years after he fled his homeland, crawling through minefields and struggling through heavy snow, Tasnadi came home to Hungary with President Bush.
He had left as a 25-year-old man, fleeing a communist dictatorship. He came back as a 64-year-old naturalized American, an Associated Press photographer covering the first visit by a U.S. president to Tasnadi's homeland.
"If I won $1 million, I wouldn't feel better," Tasnadi said on the two- hour flight from Warsaw.
When Air Force One landed, Tasnadi hurried off the plane and jumped down the last two steps to the ground. He threw his hands above his head, clenched fists in victory.
He repeated the gesture as he trotted across the tarmac to be in place to photograph Bush. "Welcome home, Charlie," his colleagues told him.
As he focused his camera on Bush, Tasnadi's hands shook.
His story was well known to Bush, and the president summoned the photographer to a forward cabin on Air Force One to offer his congratulations during the flight.
Tasnadi said Bush had told him that "he was very happy that I was here. He said it was most fitting and proper that I return this way."
The photographer's return was a poignant contrast to the way he had left.
Tasnadi, a championship skier, and his sweetheart, Maria, now his wife, joined a group of six other adults and two children in making their escape from Hungary during the first heavy snowfall of the 1950-51 winter.
He concocted a story about heading for the slopes, telling the truth only to his mother who, by design, would report him missing two days later.
In the freezing cold, the group made its way across the border to Austria. On the final, nightlong leg across the border, Tasnadi carried one of the young children on his back.
Once in Austria, the group struggled to elude Soviet guards in the 50-mile Soviet zone of that nation, and made it to Salzburg several days later.
It was a harrowing trip. The other child, carried by another man, had to be knocked unconscious to keep it from crying and alerting the guards.
"And it was so miserably cold," Tasnadi said. "Twice I fell through the ice up to my chest. I couldn't even feel it."
Unexpectedly on Tuesday, Tasnadi said he was not overwhelmed with emotion when he came back, covering Bush in a downpour at a welcoming ceremony in Lajos Kossuth Square before a monument to the Hungarian hero who fought the Hapsburgs.
"I never covered any presidential act in such a rain outside," Tasnadi said. "I was so overwhelmed with the work and to cover the president that it didn't hit me so deeply as I expected."
"The weather messed up the whole arrival ceremony so there were no national anthems" — the playing of which Tasnadi had feared would overwhelm him. "I just looked at this place and thought, my God, this is the place where as a small boy, I was standing as honor guard" as a Boy Scout during civic ceremonies.
Tasnadi said he was surprised by the huge turnout of Hungarians, despite the bad weather, to greet Bush.
"It shows how the Hungarian people feel about the United States and this president. This impressed me very deeply."
