EPISODE 14
October 6, 2021
Originally from New York City, Berne Weiss moved from California to Central Europe following the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. An activist, Berne is also a Quaker, working for peace and social justice. Now in her late 70s, her stories of coming of age during the cultural revolution of the ’60s, and eventually relocating to Hungary, where she lived and worked through the country’s transition from communism to a ‘sort of democracy’ are a fascinating reflection on a slice of history that echoes something of the complex times in which we’re living today.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Louise: Welcome to Women Who WaIk. I’m Louise Ross, writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I’ll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women who’ve made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom – reminding us that women can do extraordinary things. You can find a transcript, with pictures, to each episode, and my books on my website, LouiseRoss.com.
[00:00:48] Hello listeners. Welcome to Episode 14 of Women Who Walk. My guest today is Berne Weiss. Berne is originally from New York City, where she came of age during the cultural revolution of the ’60s. In 1963, she dropped out of her junior year of college pregnant and at 20, she was married with a baby. She returned to college and graduated in 1968. By which time, she was living in a communal household, demonstrating as a peace activist, while working for a medical committee for human rights. She trained as a mental health professional at Philadelphia State Hospital, known as the “insane asylum.”
[00:01:33] In the early ’70s, she had a second child and moved to San Francisco with her communal household. Several years later, her marriage ended. In 1979 she earned a Master’s in Clinical Psychology, followed by an MS in Organizational Psychology. In the late ’80s, Berne was a community organizer at the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, working for peace and social justice in the United States and around the world.
[00:02:07] Following the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in late 1989, she traveled to Central Europe: Budapest, Prague, Gdansk, Krakow. And in ’93, she spent a year in Budapest interviewing people about how their lives had changed as a result of the transition from 41 years of communist rule, asking the question, ‘What does freedom mean?’
[00:02:34] Her book, Freedom: Narratives of Change in Hungary and Estonia was co-authored with a colleague and published in 1994. A couple of years later, she made a permanent move to Budapest. Over the following two decades, she worked at the CEU or Central European University, as a therapist. As Hungary became more radically right wing and threatened the academic independence of the university, CEU moved to Vienna at which time Berne decided to retire, moving to Portugal in 2019.
[00:03:14] I’m delighted to welcome Berne to the podcast. And as many listeners will appreciate, now in her late ’70s, Berne is not adept with technology so in order to make it easy for her, we sat face-to-face in my kitchen with my laptop and one microphone to record this interview. Afterward, I discovered a slide static-like noise in the recording and realized that Berne’s hearing aid omits an electronic sound wave, which my microphone picked up. All the attempts to soften the sound distorted our voices. So this version of the recorded interview is the original, which means in places you will hear Berne’s hearing aid doing its thing. Sorry about this listeners, but hang in there till the end of our 30-minute conversation, as Berne’s story offers insight into a fascinating slice of American and Central European history.
[00:04:22] Louise: Welcome Berne. Thank you for being available to talk with me.
[00:04:25] Berne: Thanks for inviting me.
[00:04:27] Louise: I’ve got a question about your name. What’s the origin of Berne?
[00:04:31] Berne: I was named for Bernard who was called Bern, and so my mother feminized it by adding the E at the end.
[00:04:40] Louise: Okay, thanks for sharing that. So, listeners are aware from my introduction that you moved here to Portugal a couple of years ago from Budapest in Hungary. Can you describe how your old neighborhood in Budapest differs from your neighborhood here in Portugal?
[00:04:57] Berne: Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, the ocean is one of the reasons I decided to move here. Budapest is the old Austria-Hungarian and the architecture is nouveau art and heavy, stone buildings. Quite beautiful, but still with signs of the wars. The Second World War and the ’56 revolution. You can still see bullet holes in buildings, which is really strange. At the beginning I thought, does it mean that people don’t see these anymore? Are they blind to this, or are they purposely left in order to keep alive the pains of the past? In some ways it’s a really beautiful city, but it really has deteriorated over years. It was quite destroyed during World War II. It was bombed by the allies and the axis. And there’s a lot of leftover grief about that.
[00:06:03] The Danube river runs through; separates Buda from Pest. But it doesn’t match up with the ocean. The things here, like the foliage and the flowers that bloom all year round, reminds me more of my home in Northern California. And Budapest tends to be quite grey in the winter. Also Portuguese people smile and Hungarian people don’t smile, at least not as a natural ordinary kind of thing. So people are very glum. It’s really a delight to see people’s faces here.
Budapest, Hungary, 2019, with the Danube separating Buda from Pest. Photo by Louise Ross
[00:06:45] Louise: You do see a lot of joy on people’s faces here and I think it has something to do with the perpetually blue sky and the beautiful ocean and the climate. There are lot of things to love about Portugal. And Budapest is beautiful, I have visited. I wasn’t aware of the bullet holes and so that was really interesting commentary .
[00:07:05] Berne: Well, it’s not all over the cities in certain neighborhoods, the Seventh District and some places have actually put these odd metal balls where the bullet holes were are still, which is very strange. Why memorialize bullet holes? I can see a lot of things about Hungary, but I’ll try not to.
[00:07:29] Louise: Well, let’s move on and we may return to that topic with some of the questions coming up. So your activism in the ’60s, in the US, it evoked for me, images of the feminist movement and the social and political activism of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. Did these iconic women and their politics have an influence on you as a young woman coming of age?
[00:07:54] Berne: Indeed.
[00:07:56] Louise: They did, uh ah …
[00:07:57] Berne: Yeah, that was really the language of my late 20s and 30s. My aha moment was when I thought, why is making our bed my job? And that was what opened it all up for me. I was part of a women’s group. We told our stories and supported one another, and those connections are really strong.
[00:08:25] Louise: When you said “our bed,” I’m assuming you mean you were married at that point?
[00:08:30] Berne: Yes.
[00:08:31] Louise: And that one of the messages you received from your mother was that that was part of your role to maintain the home and make the bed. And, no …
[00:08:41] Berne: No, my mother was a lawyer.
[00:08:44] Louise: Oh, okay.
[00:08:44] Berne: She was one of three women who graduated from her law school.
[00:08:48] Louise: Wow.
[00:08:49] Berne: Yeah. So my picture was a woman could, and maybe even should, have a career. She could do that because her mother, my grandmother, was at home and, took care of me, my brother and the house. And so that’s what made it possible for my mother to do that. And so I guess I expected that I would also have some sort of a career.
[00:09:16] Louise: Your mum, was she of the generation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg?
[00:09:19] Berne: Definitely the same generation. She was not ambitious. Basically she did family law. In the last, maybe 20 years of her career, she was doing divorces, custody, and property settlements for affluent people. She was very successful at that. She did lectures on cross-examination and somebody that knew her referred to her once as a ‘hired gun’.
[00:09:52] Louise: Oh, wow, okay. But very early on, it seems that you were drawn to an alternate lifestyle living in a, you said a commune and I thought it was a communal house, but it was a commune and working on behalf of peace and social justice and studying psychology. Why do you think that you were drawn in this direction, versus say a more conventional life of a one-family home, a stable marriage, two kids, two incomes?
[00:10:21] Berne: Well, for a while, I worked in San Jose and during my lunch hours, I would walk around the neighborhood and see these houses with lawns and driveways and I would think, why didn’t my life come to this? I don’t know exactly what the turning points were, but it definitely has fit me. I think my social activism came from my family. I guess I was what was referred to back in those days as a ‘red diaper baby’. That’s because my parents were lefties. And so that’s what I inherited the sense of somehow being responsible for the state of the world. My mother teaching me not to ever cross a picket line, she learned that from her father, and I seem to have actually passed it onto my children as well. You know that the people who are striking are looking to have a better life for their children. And so that was how I learned about union organizing.
[00:11:30] Louise: So ‘red-diaper baby’ that, is that a reference to communism?
[00:11:33] Berne: Yes, which was not spoken of in public at the time. That was the McCarthy era, the late ’40s and the early-mid ’50s.
[00:11:43] Louise: And then in the late ’80s, you became very involved in the American Friends Service Committee. A religious society of sorts that eventually became the Quaker organization. But I believe your heritage is Jewish. Was there a reason or reasons that caused you to associate with a, um, service oriented religious group rather than your Jewish roots?
[00:12:07] Berne: Well, I’m Jewish. I think of it is as much my identity as my gender. And so it’s important to me, but my spiritual path and my spiritual home is with Quakers. There’s no priest or Rabbi to tell you what to believe. The worship service is in silence and there’s a strong emphasis on one’s responsibility for the wellbeing of the world.
[00:12:35] Your life speaks for you is how it’s considered. And so religion is not just a matter of being within a certain set of four walls once a week, but it’s very much how you live your life, how you spend your energy and your time. It started out as a Protestant group, but like I’m a Jewish Quaker, there are Buddhist Quakers. There are pagan Quakers. There are Catholic Quakers. So it’s a lot of hybrids. It has to do with my relationship to the world.
[00:13:14] Louise: Not your relationship to God, but your relationship to the larger community.
[00:13:17] Berne: Thank you. That’s a good, a good description.
[00:13:21] Louise: And then you travel to Central Europe after the Velvet Revolution and the transition from a 4- decade long communist government to something of a democracy. So why? Did you have Czech friends or was it due to your involvement with the Quaker organization?
[00:13:37] Berne: It was really about my social activism and seeing that people in Central Europe, were going to be rebuilding society from the ground up and how were they even going to decide who owns the land? That was so dramatic for me. And they were doing this without a war, that was also very dramatic.
[00:14:04] Having not been an experienced traveler at all, I in the spring of 1990, which was right in the midst of it, I decided I wanted to go and see it which I did. I visited Budapest and Prague and Gdansk and Krakow and felt so at home in Budapest and in Prague, it was really surprising to me. I really just felt a great affinity for both of those cities and met people who I felt close to. Some of those people are still in my very much in my life.
[00:14:45] I visited Budapest while there was still Russian soldiers there. And I was in Prague when Vaclav Havel was running for president. It was really quite remarkable. And the stores were still not well-stocked. I could really see what some of the hardships were that people were dealing with or had been dealing with.
[00:15:10] And this sense of excitement that people felt like life was changing. The problem was they’d been watching Dallas on television and expected that that’s what life would look like in a capitalist system. They were set up for some serious disappointments. The general feeling was that anything that the government said was going to be a lie? And so when I made some reference to homeless people, they were astounded. There’s no such thing as homeless people in the west. They were dealing with more nuanced truths. And that’s difficult and even the sense that the responsibility one has in your capitalist system is totally different from what it was under communism. Under communism, they said, we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
[00:16:10] Louise: It was really extreme from the life that you were coming from in California?
[00:16:15] Berne: Yes. Yes. But it was so new and it was like watching a birth.
[00:16:23] Louise: Do you think that it reflected something of your ‘coming of age,’ during the cultural revolution of the ’60s? Do you think that there was some similarity to the energy in Budapest and Hungary that you experienced as a young woman?
[00:16:37] Berne: Yes. And on my first trip, I brought a lot of literature that reflected community, the way community could function in the US. You don’t see it so much now, but in the ’60s there was a strong feeling of people taking charge of their lives. And so that’s what I expected to see in Central Europe. And I guess I saw something of that when I was first there. It hasn’t evolved the way I thought. Hoped. Imagined.
[00:17:12] Louise: All right, well, we’ll get there too. And then 4 years later you returned. You were there for a year, and then you went back to the US, and then 4 years later, you returned to gather interviews for, for a book that you and a colleague wrote titled Freedom, which I mentioned in the introduction. Can you tell us a bit about this experience?
[00:17:37] Berne: Based on my education and interest in psychology, I really was interested to know how these changes were felt on an individual level. How had people’s lives changed? That’s, that’s what I wanted the interviews to be about. I would start with that question. How has your life changed? And Hungarians would invariably answer with what do you know about our history? And so I learned a lot of Hungarian history and that people would generally start with the Turkish invasion, I think it was like 1580.
[00:18:16] Louise: The Ottoman invasion.
[00:18:18] Berne: Yes. Yes, yes.
[00:18:20] Right. I’m aware that Americans tend to not have a deep appreciation of history. My, my sense of history basically goes back to the depression. Even though I wasn’t alive then that was part of the family conversation. It was almost as though all of these centuries were part of the Hungarian conversation. I thought that was very meaningful. After a while, I began to feel as though there’s not much focus on future. It’s a lot of focus on past and a lot of hardship in the past, which also really, really colors the Hungarian personality. I’m nervous about attributing such a characterization to a particular country, but that’s how it felt.
[00:19:17] Louise: That focus on the past, was it something that was part of your family conversation, the Jewish diaspora and the suffering of the Jewish people?
[00:19:29] Berne: Well, my grandparents were all refugees so that was, that was part of the background, but they almost never spoke about the old country. I went with the Central European University students to Lviv, which was Lvov and when my grandmother was there, it was Lemberg and it was Poland. And then it was the Soviet Union. And now it is Ukraine. If my grandmother had lived in the same house her whole life, her nationality would have changed, which is really curious to me, especially since I knew almost nothing about the old country time. They really did start anew in the US.
[00:20:21] Louise: And so hearing about the old country time through the Hungarians that you interviewed, do you think that was filling a gap in your family story?
[00:20:31] Berne: Not really, I guess because the Hungarian history was so Hungarian. I mean really deep. There’s even the term deep Hungarian, which refers to a kind of a nationalism and even a bias and a sense of self pity. Hungarians have a really very rich history and a very strong intellectual and learned, kind of history.
[00:21:05] Louise: Was it writing this book, the people you met and interviewed the thing compelled you to pack up your life in the US and emigrate to hungry, or was it something else?
[00:21:17] Berne: Well, after the year that I spent doing interviews, which was definitely one of the most remarkable years in my life, I went back to the US. Life was just not the same anymore. And I dreamt about Budapest a lot, a lot, three, four nights a week. I just felt like I wanted to see how this was going to evolve. Also, I had trouble getting a job and the job that I finally got was not interesting. A friend of mine said to me one evening, if you don’t like your life, change it.
[00:21:55] I thought, hmm, I’ll move to Budapest and If I wake up thinking this tomorrow morning, I’m going to take it seriously. Sure enough, the next morning I woke up feeling good, just good. I actually ended up walking almost the whole way across San Francisco to visit a friend, who was an older wiser person, and said to her, Marg, I’m thinking about moving to Budapest. And she said, I was wondering when you would do that. So that’s how it happened.
[00:22:29] Louise: It was a huge move though to go from the life that you’d created for yourself in the US. Do you mind telling us what age you were?
[00:22:39] Berne: I guess I was 49. I celebrated my 50th birthday in Budapest. I was not a kid. My friends, I think could understand it. I think my family were like, there she goes again, what is with this woman?
[00:22:55] Louise: Did you organize a job before you went?
[00:22:59] Berne: No, I didn’t organize a job, but in that year that I had spent, I met a lot of people. And so I felt like there was so much happening. I would find something if nothing else, teaching English. Hungary was in the process of applying to the EU and each ministry in Hungary had to answer a lot of questions and the answers needed to be an English. And they were basically written by Hungarians who were not necessarily completely fluent. And so they wanted a native English speaker to review each of these. One of them was measurements, weights, and measures, something I really was not familiar with, but it paid really, really well.
[00:23:50] So for the first, maybe six or eight months, life was good in terms of my income. Also among the people who I had met in my first trip, one couple had become very good friends. Ana and I, when we met, felt like this was a relationship we were picking up from before. So we thought we might’ve been sisters in a previous life. It was that kind of sense of involvement and connection that made it feel like I wasn’t just jumping off the edge and into an abyss.
[00:24:31] Over the years, I worked for various non-profits. For a long while, I was teaching at both an American school with a campus there, the McDaniel College, and also Hungarian schools, in the communications departments. One of the courses that I actually made up was civic communication, which was basically citizen activism. This suited my natural interests. You know, basically people who had no involvement with the political process at all, and felt that politicians were a dishonest, contemptible bunch of folks and I was talking to them about the fact that you are paying these people. They are your employees. It would be good if you would pay attention to what they’re doing. So this was my contribution.
[00:25:31] Louise: It ended up being a personal mission of sorts.
[00:25:35] Berne: I really expected to learn more than to be providing something. It had been more than 200 years since Americans asked the basic questions about how do we organize our society. And what about the society reflects the basic values? So I expected to be hearing that conversation in Hungary and hear about how people were using their values to design how they wanted to live.
[00:26:11] Louise: And then things began to change politically in Hungary while you were there. Can you talk a bit about your life in Budapest toward the end of your time there and what did change politically to such a degree that then you decided to make another country move?
[00:26:29] Berne: The politics really moved seriously to the right, in the last seven or eight years that I was there. I had the most wonderful job I’ve had in life. I was working as a therapist at the Central European University, which is a graduate professional school. And what has happened is that the Hungarian government was forcing CEU out. By about 2018, the university was going to be moving to Vienna and that was not a move I was planning on making. And so that’s when I decided to retire. I don’t know exactly how to say it, but there was a mean and nasty quality. I mean, the way Hungary responded in 2015 to the refugees was just despicable.
[00:27:25] Louise: The refugees from?
[00:27:27] Berne: They were actually from a lot of places. Afghanistan. From Iraq. From Ukraine. From Romania. From Africa. People were then and are still, and will continue to be looking to move north and west. And Hungary is right in the center of that move. Most of those people were not planning on coming to Hungary. This was not what they had in mind. And the way Hungary reacted to them was really very distressing.
[00:28:02] I ended up doing some volunteer work in the refugee camps. Before I actually visited a refugee camp, I thought at that point that most of the refugees would be coming from Yugoslavia, from Bosnia Herzegovia, and was totally surprised to find people from Bangladesh and from Africa. I was quite amazed and I heard some of the stories. You can hear those stories today very, very clearly. It was a very difficult surprise. And there’s just ways in which those kinds of attitudes I feel become toxic. That’s, that’s how it felt. Hungary has a history of antisemitism. And I felt that reviving, or not so much reviving as being uncovered. I just didn’t want to be there anymore.
[00:29:01] Louise: Understandably. And you mentioned African refugees, and I just want to reflect that you’ve come full circle as you’re planning on living in a communal household here in Portugal with several generations of a, sort of a multicultural surrogate family and two, three members of that surrogate family are from Sierra Leone?
[00:29:24] Berne: One from Sierra Leone, James. And Sarah is from Uganda and Sarah had a baby, not with James, and she was adopted by a Hungarian man, which gave her Hungarian citizenship which is very, very convenient. Anyway, I met James in one of the refugee camps with an amazing story. He had been kidnapped into one of the malitas and escaped and ended up stowing away on a ship and doesn’t know exactly how long he was on the ship. And it came to land, they knew not where, thought that it might be Italy. I think from the way it evolved that it was probably, Croatia and he, and I guess it was two other men, they walked north, mostly at night, and eventually came upon a bunch of white men and figured white men speak English.
[00:30:33] Well, these white men spoke Hungarian and they were the border guards. And so boy, this little crew ended up in a refugee camp. And that’s, that’s where I met James. Basically, I was volunteering with a group that were doing therapy with refugees. But they were having a very hard time getting refugees to talk to white people. James was really the only person who spoke to me and it just intense. He really wanted to get a job so that he could support himself so that he could be out of the refugee camp. And I knew a man who was managing the organic farm for an agricultural university.
[00:31:26] I put James in touch with him and he hired James and James ended up working there for about eight years. And also ended up training volunteers who came to visit the farm and knows a lot now about organic farming. But during that time, he also decided that refugees and migrants needed to learn how to resolve conflicts in a better way than making war on each other.
[00:31:57] So he wrote a letter, which he showed to me. It was a good letter, but it was a letter to the world. So I asked him, what, what do you want? And as we talked, it seemed like it would be a good idea to see if there could be training in nonviolent communication. This is my anti-war stance back again. And so we found a woman who did non-violent communication training and was willing to do it pro bono.
[00:32:30] It was about maybe a dozen men, all men, and this woman doing the training and people were really happy about it. James managed to get the director of the refugee camp to allow the group to use a room at the camp. And the people who were in the training said there were so many other things that were in fact more pressing for them, like for example, job skills.
[00:33:02] James had taken a computer course and was really impressed by it and thought it would be great if people could learn computer skills. So the question was, does he do this under the auspices of an already existing NGO or start a new NGO? And the decision finally was start a new NGO.
[00:33:28] We got our first computers from the American embassy and then more from the Canadian, um, Norwegian. So that’s how Migrants’ Help of Hungary Association got started. Now, one way to see what, what has evolved is that in the last couple of years, it was not a good idea to have migrant in the name of an NGO. So it’s Next Step. And what’s really good about it is that it doesn’t need to be all refugees. It can also include Hungarians who want the training, which means that there’s a better basis for integrating, which is a good thing. Um, and in that time, James really was able to build community. And so there’s Muslims and Africans and Hungarians, people from different backgrounds, all taking these courses together, and it has created a great learning experience the whole way around.
Berne and James at a presentation on MigHelp – renamed Next Step
[00:34:38] Louise: And it’s the idea that James will bring Next Step to Portugal?
[00:34:43] Berne: Well, I’m hoping, so James is still dealing with Hungarian paperwork. He is a stateless person. He has not only no passport, but no birth certificate. It’s been a huge struggle for him to get status. He’s on the brink of that, any moment. Hungary doesn’t want these people to be there, but then when they’re there, they won’t let them leave.
[00:35:10] Louise: Well, I do hope that James and Sarah and Sarah’s little girl make it to Portugal and your communal household sets up and thrives. You’ll have another member a Czech friend .
[00:35:23] Berne: The first person I met when I visited Prague. Some of these relationships have really gone on and for me that’s really wonderful.
[00:35:31] Louise: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a wonderful story. And your book,
[00:35:35] Berne: It’s Freedom: Narratives of Change in Hungary and Estonian. My colleague had spent time doing interviews in Estonia. And there’s quite a contrast between the two countries.
[00:35:47] Louise: If listeners would like to read it, where can I find it?
[00:35:50] Berne: Amazon.
[00:35:51] Louise: Amazon, yes. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Berne, this has been a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate you participating in the Women Who Walk podcast.
[00:36:00] Berne: Thank you very much.
[00:36:02] Louise: Thank you for listening today. And so you don’t miss future episodes with more impressive, intrepid women do subscribe on your favorite podcast provider or on my YouTube channel, Women Who Walk Podcast. And if you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review Women Who Walk on either Apple Podcasts or Podchaser I’ve linked to them both in the transcript of this episode, on my website, LouiseRoss.com.