At the SS United States memorial gathering in Destin, I had the chance to interview 86-year-old Cathy Ladanyi Vajtay. She told me about her family’s midnight escape from wartime Hungary, the ship that carried her to America, and where she saw God’s hand along the way.
By Jennifer Rae Vliet, News Editor of The Plain Truth
I was getting ready to leave the watch party at Destin Harbor when a couple I’d interviewed earlier waved me back to their table. They had come to Florida on vacation and decided to spend part of Veterans Day watching the SS United States make her final descent. Now they had someone they wanted me to meet.
The woman at their table, they told me, had been on the ship.
I’d arrived around ten that morning and spoken with about twenty people. Some wanted to witness a piece of history. A few men from Atlanta were there to fish and wondered what the new reef might bring in the coming years to these waters. I’d spent much of the day asking people why they came and just as I was about to go, I met a woman who had flown on her own plane from New Jersey to Florida to say goodbye to the ship that brought her to America.
Her name was Cathy Ladanyi Vajtay. She is 86 years old…and this is her story. I sincerely couldn’t write fast enough!
Two hours to pack
Cathy was four, going on five, when the war caught up with her family in Budapest. It was 1944. Nazi Germany had occupied Hungary in March, and by late in the year the Soviet army was closing in on the capital.
Her father, Dr. Frederick F. Ladanyi, was a director at the Magyar Nemzeti Bank, the National Bank of Hungary, according to Cathy. Its headquarters stood on Liberty Square in Budapest. As Cathy remembered the story, the bank had charged her father with helping get its gold reserves out of the country to Austria before they could fall into Soviet hands.
Her family had two hours to pack what they could into crates. Cathy remembered the account of a train they boarded in the middle of the night. There were instructions passed by word of mouth, cash they needed to make the journey, and people her parents had no choice but to trust along the way to escape. She was young enough to be told what to carry and old enough to remember that they had to leave. “It was like a movie…undercover happenings and all…”.
The bank’s gold went west, eventually reaching Spital am Pyhrn, a village in the Austrian Alps. About 33 metric tons reached Austria, along with banknotes, documents, and other valuables. Cathy’s family also escaped to Austria. Her mother Katherine’s obituary records the family’s flight as Soviet forces advanced, and the Hungarian Money Museum documents the evacuation of the gold. Katherine Ladanyi’s obituary · The Hungarian Money Museum’s account of the Gold Train.
Where Cathy saw the Hand of God
When Cathy spoke about what happened to the gold, she kept coming back to the Americans with twinkle of hope in her eye. She saw their part in the story as a divine appointment as God had used them, she told me.
American authorities took custody of the reserves at the end of the war and returned them to Hungary. By then, the country’s old currency, the pengő, had been devastated by hyperinflation. Hungary introduced the forint on August 1, 1946, and an American train brought the gold back to Budapest five days later. The return of the reserves helped support the new currency as Hungary tried to restore financial stability. All of this she spoke of in great detail as her family kept the details alive and documented.
Cathy remembered her parents as having a part in that period of monetary change. The records establish when Hungary changed its money and how the gold came home. I’ve yet to find a record that tells us exactly what her parents did. What I could hear plainly at that table was what the events meant to her. Eight decades later, she still spoke with gratitude about the Americans who kept the gold safe and brought it home.
The Girl on the Grand staircase | “I wonder if the Grand Staircase is still in the ship as it is being sunk” – Cathy
The Ladanyis reached Britain in 1948. Cathy called her father’s chance to work there almost miraculous. She remembered that his employer arranged a transfer at a time when, as she understood it, jobs for foreigners were hard to come by. Her mother worked as a doctor’s assistant, the family lived in basement quarters, and Cathy went to boarding school. England was home for about five years. Katherine Ladanyi’s obituary.
Then, in 1953, the family sailed from Southampton for New York aboard the beloved SS United States. Cathy was twelve.
She showed me a photograph of herself on deck and many photos from her mother’s photo album. She recalled one photo being of family and friends who were saying goodbye to them at 6am that morning just before they set sail. Her mother’s album was extensive. Cathy herself is the keeper of this amazing album and further stated that her mom even kept the deck plan and paperwork identifying the family’s accommodations, details preserved from the voyage itself. As she went through them, there was a liveliness in her voice that made it easy to imagine her at twelve, exploring a ship big enough to have its own movie theater.
She wondered aloud whether the grand staircase was still inside. She remembered how grand it was, and she could laugh about getting seasick there. Of all the places for the Atlantic to get the better of a twelve-year-old, hers had to be the grand staircase.
The Abbondandolo family celebrating Gala Night in Cabin Class, during their 1953 voyage from NYC to Germany. SS United States Conservancy Collection. Courtesy of Inga Bowyer.
Special Restaurant, featuring Tissot’s panels on the right and center. SS United States Conservancy Collection. Courtesy of Robert G. Lenzer.
“People don’t realize how big this ship really is,” she told me. “Each letter is three feet!”
The details just kept coming. We could talk about nearly a thousand feet of ocean liner, and she would give me something I could picture. A single letter painted on the ship, three feet high.
One last trip for the ship that brought her here
We’ve followed the SS United States for a long time at The Plain Truth. (Read Bob Barney’s commentary, here) She set the transatlantic speed record on her maiden voyage in 1952, a record she still held when she went down, and this just scratches the surface of her awesomeness. People fought for years to preserve her. There was real grief in seeing a ship with that history leave the surface for good. Her becoming the largest reef in the world for divers to explore thrills many but it is a travesty to us here at TPT for many reasons. I can understand why Cathy wished she could walk the decks once more and attempted to when she went to Alabama last year. SS United States Conservancy · Destin–Fort Walton Beach’s account of the reef project.
Cathy had gone to Mobile, Alabama while the ship was being prepared to head to the gulf and had photographs from that visit, too. She did the Battleship arial tour but something that day stopped the onboard tour which was unfortunate for her travels and desire to be on it just once more. She spoke admiringly of the genius naval architect of this ship, William Francis Gibbs, and spoke of the way the old liner still “pranced on the water, watertight even in its old age”, from Philadelphia. She wished she’d sailed on her again.
When the day came to say goodbye, she hired a crew to pilot her own plane from Somerset New Jersey to Destin. WKRG’s coverage of the Destin watch party.
I keep thinking about the distance between those two journeys. The first began with a little girl whose parents had two hours to pack and a train to catch at midnight. Years later came the crossing on the great American liner, with a movie theater, a grand staircase, and New York waiting on the other side. Then there was Cathy at 86, making one more trip for the ship that had carried her here to her family’s new life in America. And a beautiful life it was. She married a love and had 6 children.
Cathy used the words divine appointment when she told me how she believed God had worked through the Americans. I thought of those words again after we parted. We make it a point to share Why America is So Special at The Plain Truth and Cathy definitely witnessed some of the why.
I had come to Destin to cover the sinking of a ship I wished could have been saved. I was on my way out when two people called me back to their table, and there sat a woman who could tell me what it had felt like to be a child aboard her, headed for a country she would call home. God really blessed me as I could have walked out of the event around tens of other tables but walked near the one Cathy was sitting at!
I’m grateful to Cathy for opening those photographs and taking me, for a little while, across the Atlantic with her. She is a patriot who loves this Country and I am so glad I got to know her and get a huge hug from her before parting the memorial of the SS United States. She was a light in the midst of what I considered quite a somber day.