Hungary: Reluctant Refuge for Homeless : Many of the East Bloc’s Wandering Poor Have Landed in Budapest. But the Nation Has Its Own Economic Victims.

With a few dollars begged from an old acquaintance and a half-baked plan for reaching the West, Ilona Petrescu huddled with her two children on a sooty platform of Keleti station to await the late-night train to southern Hungary.

Keleti, a catch basin for East European drifters, had been her home off and on for months. But spurred on by Budapest’s waning hospitality for foreign homeless and fear of deportation back to Romania, Petrescu and her family had decided to change course.

“My son is ill. He is almost blind,” said Petrescu, showing 4-year-old Dan’s scarred eyes, accidentally splashed with a caustic solution by incompetent nurses in their native city of Cluj. “There is a hospital in Switzerland where I’m sure they can cure him. We want to go there, but now we can’t get through Austria because we haven’t got 500 schillings (about $50) to cross the border.”

Petrescu and her husband, Gheorghe, fled Romania in late summer with Dan and 6-year-old Ana Maria and a long-nurtured dream of escaping a lifetime of poverty and deprivation.

The plan was to travel to Switzerland, but the Romanians didn’t know they needed visas to get beyond Hungary. As a hedge against poverty-stricken asylum seekers who have flooded Austrian camps over the past year, Vienna now requires Romanian travelers to show they have the wherewithal to move on.

The Petrescus are one of thousands of wandering families bottled up in Hungary in hopes of eventually emigrating to what they see as the promised land of the West. Now, with their travel plans uncertain, they survive on bread earned by begging, sharing grimy blankets with alcoholics and paroled convicts, and trying to stay one step ahead of immigration officials who can set their westward journey back by weeks.

So many of Eastern Europe’s wandering poor have been sheltering at Budapest’s three main train stations that railroad workers have gone on strike to protest the squalor and occasional robbery or assault.

Authorities estimate there are as many as 40,000 homeless living in Hungary, the majority of them foreigners fleeing economic chaos in Romania, Bulgaria and the Soviet Union. Most are in Budapest, a city of 2.5 million.

But as inflation climbs and jobs disappear, Hungarian victims of capitalist revolution are emerging to join them, creating a new class of poor that could grow to hundreds of thousands as failing factories are forced to close. In the past few months alone, the problem has become much more visible, just as it has recently in many American cities.

“It’s bound to get a lot worse before it gets better,” predicts Salvation Army Maj. Victor Doughty, who this month reopened the Christian charity’s Budapest services after a 41-year absence dictated by the Communists.

The Hungarian Red Cross and the Maltese Aid Society also have shored up their volunteer operations, and Budapest’s new liberal city government has designated aid for the homeless as its No. 1 priority this winter. The national Ministry for Health and Welfare has allotted $500,000 to a newly created Crisis Resolution Task Force charged with setting up soup kitchens and emergency shelters.

Although those efforts are applauded by humanitarians, they are likely to fall short of needs as unemployment rises throughout Eastern Europe, driving more residents of the region abroad in search of jobs.

Like the Petrescus, many of the wanderers see Hungary as their best immediate hope--a way station of relative prosperity at which they can wait for their chance to move on.

But Budapest’s emergence as the regional poorhouse has angered many Hungarian workers, who fear they have too little wealth to share.

Budapest on the cusp of winter seems an inhospitable refuge, blatantly discriminatory toward Gypsies and Romanians and resentful of foreign workers posing competition for jobs and homes.

Still, subsidized food, fuel and housing hold out a slim chance of a better life than elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and unemployment remains well below 5%.

Hungary has proudly touted its open borders, taking a bow for giving passage to East German refugees a year ago, which helped lead to the fall of hard-line Communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe.

But neighboring Czechoslovakia and Austria have invoked new visa restrictions in recent months, forcing the migrants to hole up in Hungary to rethink their sojourns to the West.

Hungarian police have made a few attempts at a crackdown on foreigners living illegally in Hungary. But little can be done to get rid of those who have been in the country for less than two months.

“There is a possibility that while we are lifting visa requirements in one direction, we may have to impose them in another,” says Foreign Minister Geza Jeszenszky, referring to Hungary’s recent decision to let in Americans and West Europeans visa-free.

Soviet officials have promised to issue passports to their citizens soon, which European countries expect to set off a major wave of what is known as “economic migration.”

“We certainly have to make a distinction between economic and political emigration,” Jeszenszky said. “We are not obliged to accept economic refugees.”

The Hungarian homeless crowding Keleti and other haunts of the indigent are predominantly ex-prisoners and longtime jobless whose very existence was denied during the Communist era.

“When the former regime was in power, they didn’t have this problem because they carted them all away,” says Doughty of the Salvation Army. “There were no vagrants on the street because they put them in prison.”

A nationwide amnesty for minor offenders was declared by the new government last spring, which has turned thousands of unemployed ex-convicts onto the streets along with migrating poor.

“This government made a very big mistake in giving amnesty to so many prisoners,” says Mary Borsos, a Red Cross volunteer ladling out noodles and a pinkish sauce at a soup kitchen on Dobozi Street, near Keleti. “The difficulties weren’t so noticeable in summer, when they could sleep outside. But now they are trying to move in with families and pensioners, and they just don’t mix.”

The Dobozi shelter was euphemistically referred to as a workers’ dormitory during the 40 years of Communist rule, although the enterprise it was tied to long ago ceased to exist. The cell-like rooms are unheated by day, and rain dripping from the cracked roof puddles on oilcloth coverlets over the rusting iron cots.

Similar slums are being closed elsewhere in the city, as properties belonging to defunct factories are sold to investors for conversion to commercial use. That has aggravated the problem of homelessness and made those still squatting in such shelters fearful of being turned out.

“I have no place else to go,” says Ferenc Kovacs, a 56-year-old disabled stonemason, noisily scraping the last drops of soupy chowder from a dented metal pan in the Dobozi kitchen. He was evicted from his family apartment after a divorce 12 years ago, and he has neither a job nor relatives who will take him in.

New shelters with heated rooms and clean linens have been opened this fall to take in nearly 1,500 transients. But hard-core homeless like Kovacs know they wouldn’t be able to stay for long.

Foreigners trying to evade immigration authorities also are fearful of a respite in the warm lodgings, unsure if they will be turned in and sent back home.

Vagrants have likewise refused to take shelter at a converted army barracks in the eastern suburb of Ujpest, where showers are the price of entrance and drinking on the premises is forbidden.

The refusals to move to charity quarters has further eroded public sympathy for the homeless.

Lajos Novak, a machine-shop worker at Keleti, or “eastern,” train station, says he is fed up with official hand-wringing over how to deal with the unruly indigents.

“They should be working. Most of them are young and strong,” Novak says, gesturing derisively toward grubby youths slumped over their bundles, making pillows out of giant loaves of bread. “The railroad offered some of them jobs and space in a workers’ dormitory, but they refused to take it. The police should come in here and arrest them.”

Foreign homeless are seldom offered jobs, as employment bureaucracy built up during the socialist era requires a permanent address before a worker can be legally hired.

That dims the prospects for families like the Petrescus, driving them from one cold refuge to the next, searching for odd jobs and the slimmest of reasons to cling to hope of ever reaching the West.