A Christmas Miracle
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A Christmas miracle worth retelling occurred in Soviet-occupied Hungary almost 70 years ago.
The extraordinary event took place shortly after Soviet tanks had crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, dashing the hopes of patriots to free themselves from the shackles of Communism.
Hungarians of all ages – even school-aged children – took bravely to the streets of Budapest from Oct. 23 to Nov. 4 to defend their freedom. Thousands were killed or wounded; nearly a quarter million chose to flee the country rather than live under Soviet rule.
It was the darkest time.
"[The Hungarian revolutionaries] preferred a hero's grave to a seat on the oppressor's council. To give up their chains, intellectuals gave up their studies, shopkeepers their livelihoods, mothers their homes – and even when they saw the odds were hopeless, they did not feel theirs to be a 'lost cause.'" – then-Sen. John F. Kennedy in 1957
The Communists lost no time recouping control of the country, doing their best to ridicule belief in God.
The persecution played out in sinister ways, especially in schools, where Soviet teachers were stationed to propagandize students and stamp out the Catholic faith.
In one Hungarian village, as the story goes, a militant atheist instructor overseeing a classroom of mostly Catholic students carried out her mission in an especially malicious manner.
The teacher was known for bullying and brainwashing, making her classroom "a little hell," as a report described it.
Among her students was a devout 10-year-old girl named Angela, who was known to receive Holy Communion daily. The priest who administered the Eucharist to Angela cautioned her by saying that if her teacher knew, she would single her out for persecution.
But Angela persisted, saying, "Jesus was in pain when people spat on Him, and that hasn't happened to me yet."
Shortly before Christmas in 1956 (and just after the defeat in Budapest), the teacher hatched what she thought would be a sure-fire plot to quash the children's belief in Jesus, what she called the "ancestral superstitions infesting the classroom."
The teacher targeted Angela to be the butt of her perverse pedagogical experiment, asking the child in a deceptively sweet voice:
"My child, when your parents call you, what do you say?"
"I'm coming," answered the girl in a modest voice.
"Good," said the teacher. "And what happens when your parents call the chimney sweep?"
"He comes, too," said Angela.
"Good job, my child! The chimney sweep comes because he exists. You come, because you exist. But suppose your parents call your grandmother who died, will she come?"
"No, I don't think so," Angela said.
"Correct, again! What if they call Bluebeard? Or Red Riding Hood? Or Donkey Skin? You like fairy tales. What will happen?"
"No one will come, because these are fairy tales," was the reply.
"All right, all right," the teacher said triumphantly to Angela. "It seems that today you are truly learning."
Addressing the class, the teacher said, "So you see, my children, that the living, those who do exist, answer. On the other hand, those who do not exist or do not live do not answer. It's clear, isn't it?"
The teacher carried on with "the lesson" by asking Angela to step outside the classroom.
Then she had the whole class call to her in unison: "Angela, come in!" Angela entered.
"But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea." – Matthew 18:6
Explaining her point, the teacher said, "When you call someone who exists, he comes.
When you call someone who does not exist, he does not come and cannot come. Angela is flesh and blood; she lives, she hears. When you call her, she comes."
Launching into what she thought would be her coup de grâce, the teacher asked the children, "Now suppose you call the Infant Jesus, in whom you seem to believe. ... do you think He would hear you?"
At first there was silence, but then some voices were heard: "Yes, we do."
Turning to Angela still standing at the front of the class, the teacher asked, "And what about you?"
The trap now dawning on the faithful girl, she answered assuredly, "Yes! I believe that Jesus hears me!"
The teacher, ready for such a reply, now played her final card. She turned to the class, saying: "If the Child Jesus exists, He will hear and answer your call."
So she bade them to cry loudly at the top of their lungs, "Come, Child Jesus! Come."
This command was met with silence. Feeling flush with what she assumed was her "gotcha" moment, the teacher exclaimed, "That's my point, that's my proof! You dare not call Him, because you know very well that He will not come because He does not exist."
The students sat dumbfounded, some betraying the doubt that was beginning to creep into their young minds.
Angela, it was said, had remained standing by the door looking "pale as death." The teacher, by contrast, stood tall and triumphant at the seeming success of her lesson.
Suddenly, a wind seemed to gust through the room as Angela rushed to the front of the class. Addressing her schoolmates, she rallied, "Let's all call Jesus together!"
Rising to their feet the students called out in unison, "Come, Infant Jesus. Come!" Their "hearts" were "swollen with immense hope," as a re-telling said, while they repeated, "Come, Infant Jesus! Come," "Come Infant Jesus! Come!"
Some children later said they didn't expect anything extraordinary to happen, but still they shouted as though their cries could "knock down the walls" of the evil materialistic system come over their country.
But something extraordinary did happen.
The classroom door opened slowly and silently. According to the students, "All daylight fled to the door. This light grew and grew, then became a globe of fire."
The globe opened, the children said, and within it they saw "a child, a beautiful child, the likes of which we had never seen before."
"His Presence was immensely sweet – so we were not afraid. He was dressed in white and looked like a little sun," they said. "Then, after some time, He disappeared into the spinning globe of light, and the door closed by itself."
How long the vision lasted, the children later could not agree. But their hearts all overflowed with joy at what they had seen.
As for Angela, she appeared as though she had snapped out of a Heavenly dream, simply saying, "You see, He exists."
The ultimate fate of the key players of the story is not known. What happened to Angela or how she and her classmates fared thereafter in Soviet Hungary is not known. The priest who administered Holy Communion to Angela is reported to have fled to the United States. The ill-intentioned teacher was said to have been converted by the event and subsequently sent by Soviet authorities to a re-education camp.
"Even in the darkest moments, light exists if you have the faith to see it." – Dean Koontz, Catholic author
The children spread the good news of what they had seen to anyone who would listen. The priest to whom the children shared their experiences of the extraordinary event, in turn, relayed the story to Maria Winowska, a Polish writer (and friend of Pope St. John Paul II), who recorded them in the French Catholic journal, Ecclesia, in 1958.
Translations of Winowska's retelling have appeared in the Michael journal (2022), as well as various YouTube channels.
Faithful Hungarians inside and outside their 1000-year-old Christian nation still retell the story, especially at Christmas time, as this Hungarian writer is herself doing today.
Dr. Barbara Toth has a doctorate in rhetoric and composition from Bowling Green State University. She has taught high school in Poland and Oman and at universities in the US, China and Saudi Arabia. Her work in setting up a writing center at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahmen University, an all-women's university in Riyadh, has been cited in American journals. Toth has published academic and non-academic articles and poems internationally.