50 years ago, 200 students and 14 faculty from Sopron University were welcomed by the University of BC Faculty of Forestry in Vancouver.

The Hungarians had fled to Austria after the failed revolution in 1956. Many were rebels against the Soviet oppression.

UBC welcomed them, setting up a Sopron Faculty of Forestry in exile as a division of the relatively new faculty of forestry at UBC.

Well done!
(See the UBC alumni magazine Trek, spring 2007 issue, for a brief article. On June 7, 2007 UBC will hold a symposium and celebration for the 50th anniversary of their arrival at UBC.)


But in some ways it is just another story of heroism, refugees, and generosity in the face of oppression of individuals.
Stories that should be read by the bureaucrats, statists, and xenophobes who broad-brush bash foreigners during the current concern over terrorism - and by the leftist activists and their apologists in Canada and the US who conveniently overlook the tyranny of marxism while they bash free countries like Canada and the US.

PS:
(While attending UBC in the mid-70s, I met a student who had escaped from Hungary. She, her parents, and a brother took a train but got off before the border. They walked a long distance in winter conditions, until stopped by a soldier - until the soldier spoke they did not know they had reached freedom (in an adjacent country that used a different language).

(Years later I met a couple who left Hungary well before the revolution. They saw multiplying bureaucracy in the small manufacturing company he worked in (many people'S jobs were only to check up on people for the government) and recognized there was no future in such a society.)