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The tragedies of WWII, harboring the displaced and condemned, air raids, detention camp in Graz, retreating armies, hunger and death was a part of everyday life for Bob as a child. His family and two military aids crossed the Alps of war torn Austria in a covered horse drawn wagon. They were determined to meet the partisans and the Allied Forces. During this journey, Bob witnessed the tragedy of a Conestoga wagon filled with children pushed into a deep ravine by German Panzer tanks as they retreated on the inside of a mountain pass. While playing at a waterwheel, he rescued his sister Eva from a water sluice. Without his life threatening intervention, the accident would have been fatal.
The villagers at Triben struggled to structurally reinforce a bridge. The Colonel, Bob’s father then a Major, learned of the struggle by inexperienced villagers and descended from the hills to help provide the technical expertise. Bob’s father stood under the bridge while the Russian T-34 tanks crossed over. The village residents hailed the Colonel for saving their lives.
The Colonel got exemption from POW status from the Allied Forces and Soviet identification documents were issued. The family elected to return to Budapest on a Yugoslav partisan rail transport. The Colonel, an engineering genius, foregoes the temptation to remain in the West and put his talent to work lifting Hungary out of the ruins. At Miskolc, the family found their home destroyed by carpet-bombing. Food was in short supply. Bob had to go away alone to a Hungarian village, Lajoskomarom and later to Rorvig, Denmark to be fed by foster parents. His life turned for the worse. He was now alone and missed his Mom and Dad. Upon return to Hungary he escaped from a children’s camp on the outskirts of Budapest and found his way home.
The Colonel, after forced retirement, is recalled by the Hungarian Army but rejected the Soviet puppet regime and refused to join the Communist Party in 1949. Bob’s father’s vilification begins. Like Nelson Mandela, a patriot is imprisoned, tortured, and forced to work in an engineering gulag. The newly purchased family summerhouse and orchard, planted by father and his children at Belatelep on the Lake Balaton, were nationalized. The family was left to fend for themselves. Again bread and money were in short supply. Savings were confiscated from the kitchen cupboard and the pantry was sealed during the raid by thugs from the Government Defense Agency known as AVH. His mother, while caring for six children, was forced to work at a hospital. Bob worked the steel yards, shoveled the streets during winter nights, collected scrap metal, and loaded cement trucks.
The Communists classified their citizens as peasants, laborers or intellectuals. Bob belonged to class “X.” Bob was persona non grata. He joined the underground Bible Study movement, which was illegal under the regime. Bob advanced as the only high school student from his district to the semifinals of the Matyas Rakosi mathematics contest, but nonetheless, was denied admission to the Budapest Technical University because his father was considered an enemy of the State. He was left with no choice but to start apprenticeship as a tinsmith. Colonel Bela’s courage continued to inspire his son to persevere; the Colonel asked his son to look over the mathematical equations of his own invention. Bob introduced an additional concept that helped his father to complete the publication of a brilliant cost-effective approach for reducing the number of ventilation shafts for deep metro systems that can accommodate massive movement of people and material in the event of war under the City and the Danube. Bob’s contributions were published in a separate technical proposal.
Claims have been made that the work of his father, Colonel Bela Haris, was never recorded in the Metro’s archives. This is a lame argument in the face of Civilian High Court rulings and registration of his invention by the Patent Office in 1967. The arrogant descendents of the privileged Communists continue to ignore his father’s contribution to civilian and military society, usurp his genius, and refuse to honor the moral commitments made by the Hungarian Ministry of Defense. The family remains in search of justice to this day.
As a high school graduate with a strong mathematical aptitude, Bob was forced into a long appeal process which subsequently took Bob to the Technical University of Miskolc in October 1956. His talent was allowed to flourish, but his future remained uncertain. Bob was an active participant in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He was betrayed by opportunists but escaped from Russian captivity. The breakout to the West culminated in a historic meeting with the then Vice President Richard Nixon in Salzburg as part of a revolutionary student delegation. The history of this meeting is well documented. It is understood that failure to take action by the Eisenhower Administration helped the Soviets solidify their power base in the Eastern Bloc. A stormy winter journey across the North Atlantic aboard the USS General W. G. Haan as a refugee brought Bob to the shores of the United States in search of equality, liberty, and justice denied to him in his land of birth.
Bob learned English while holding down two jobs and received a scholarship to Fordham University. After leaving Fordham, he lived in a dilapidated Bronx Hotel until moving to a boarding house in New Rochelle. He was employed by Gries Reproducer Corporation as a shop floor inspector, got promoted to machine designer, began evening studies in economics at NYU, and met Joan Alexandra Thomas from the same city at a wedding in New York City in October 1960. The couple married in 1961.
President Kennedy was elected just two years before Bob became a citizen. Despite his Republican Party affiliation, Bob was always bipartisan in his thinking and actions. Hopeful and inspired he longs to become a United States citizen. Suddenly President Kennedy was murdered; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. the pastor of civil rights was assassinated; and again within a few months Senator Robert Kennedy was gunned down. The United States of America was engaged in an undeclared war! Congress expected and allowed drafted patriots to die in the jungles of South East Asia! No real declaration of war, no support from the world at large including the American public.
A possible Nixon Presidency has now become a powerful reality. Coming full circle, Bob, who first met Vice President Richard Nixon, late December 1956, in Salzburg in that small crowded room that included about 15 other Hungarian freedom fighters, left that meeting with the distinct impression, not much to his surprise, that Vice President Nixon and President Eisenhower sold the 1956 Hungarian Freedom Fighters down the river. Bob’s original perception during the revolt was instantaneously confirmed. The Balance of Power was a sacred cow in the fall of 1956 and the US elections left no room for confrontation with the Soviets. General Eisenhower did the same to the Poles when he failed to support the resistance in Warsaw during WWII and gave Berlin to the Soviets. Ike and Nixon were consistent. The leadership in the United States again failed to stop the proliferation of a regime determined to subjugate the liberties of a people that have been trampled throughout history.
Bob was sworn in as a United States Citizen in 1962 at courthouse ceremonies in White Plains, New York. The family celebrated his graduation as a mechanical engineer from New York University in the spring of 1964. The Hungarian Kadar Regime in 1963 issued amnesty to freedom fighters condemned after the 1956 revolution. Bob renounced his Hungarian citizenship and the Chairman of the Hungarian Central Committee, Pal Losonczi, complied by signing the document releasing him from dual citizenship in 1967. He was thereby formally freed from the clutches of Communism. At that moment, Bob was an unequivocal American citizen with an abiding allegiance to the Country that gave him safe harbor from tyranny.
Bob embarked on a new endeavor with the encouragement from his wife, Joan. Bob began to race his Kayak again, a sport he pursued in Hungary to advance his life at a time when successful athletes were granted many advantages. He introduced the sport to the Rowing Committee of the New York Athletic Club. Bob won multiple times National and North American championship titles. He was a member of the NYAC Rowing Committee, advanced to Chairman of the National Paddling Committee, and helped to rebuild the burned down NYAC’s boathouse at Travers Island. Bob raised the necessary funds, dollar by dollar, to field the first ever, United States Kayak and Canoe World Championship Team.
In 1966 the US Team entered East Berlin crossing the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie. West and East Berliners greeted them with hopeful expectations. Bob continued to build the popularity of Kayaking and Canoeing in the United States. He joined Canada, Mexico, Bolivia and other continental neighbors to debut the sport at the 1967 Pan American Games where he and his partner Billy Bragg won gold and two silver medals in the tandem kayak. In 1968 Bob and Billy were featured in Sports Illustrated.
The 1968 Olympic trials at Long Beach California were conducted in violation of the selection and racing course preparation criteria. The District Courts of Philadelphia ordered the United States Olympic Committee to give Bob and Billy berth on the 1968 United States Olympic Team bound for Mexico City. The favorable ruling came too late for them to join the high altitude training camp in Colorado. The United States 1968 National and North American Champion tandem kayak team remained stranded in Philadelphia and Los Angeles.
After graduating from NYU, Bob received job offers from Boeing, IBM, Combustion Engineering, and Pratt & Whitney. He accepted a position in controls engineering at Boeing Helicopters in Philadelphia and moved to Radnor from New Rochelle after the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Trials.
Bob’s engineering career accelerated rapidly. He was granted Secret Clearance from Army Intelligence. He volunteered to go to Vietnam, but a joint Boeing NASA Ames program for reducing helicopter rotor bang to minimizing early detection by the enemy was deemed priority. Bob was disappointed because he wanted to lend his help on the ground as a professional regardless of his opposition in principal against conducting an undeclared war. America called its citizens to duty and Bob was determined to help; driven by his honor and loyalty to his country, Bob was compelled to participate in anyway necessary.
While at Boeing, Bob began planning a secret return to Eastern Europe to extract his younger brother from the clutches of Communist tyranny. Bob’s wife Joan understood the probable consequences but unconditionally accepted the sole responsibility for possibly having to raise three children between two weeks and four years of age if her husband was captured or killed.
Boeing refused to permit Bob to execute his plan. He confronted management as to whether they were willing to step up to the plate and provide alternate means. There were no volunteers. The departure date was set in spite of corporate opposition for January 1968. The mission had to be accomplished. It was the life of his younger brother and Bob could not allow the communists to continue to oppress his family.
Bob’s best friend and extraction partner, Norwood Oliver, braved the late evening drop-off, five miles deep on the Yugoslav side of the border outside the town of Kastelec with car lights disabled. During the escape on foot, Bob and his brother Andras were spotted by Yugoslav border patrols crossing the mountainous terrain during a moonlit January night. Andras got tangled in the brush with thorns piercing his lips. Evasive action against equally hostile Italian border guards delayed the rendezvous by hours. The dawn pick-up below the Italian enclave of San D’orligo Della Valle was accomplished by placing a signal on a roadside tree. The nonstop drive to Rome had to be completed without their being able to rest in more than 24 hours.
The threesome was treated with considerable suspicion at the United States Embassy in Rome. They were directed to travel to Naples to see the US Consul, General Vitale. The buck was passed. The Consulate in Naples denied Bob, an American citizen, the right and privilege to bring his brother home to Pennsylvania for processing as a refugee. Bob’s younger brother was forced to stay behind in Rome at considerable expense and unnecessary risk in the then Communist leaning Italy. Friends and family contacts were brought to bear to cut through the extensive, senseless red tape. Upon his return, the US Intelligence community, anxious to know how the “great escape” was accomplished, debriefed Bob.
American LaFrance hired Bob as Chief Engineer and the family moved to Elmira, New York. He lost his job and then enrolled at Cornell University in Utica to study physiology aspiring to do research in cardiovascular fluid mechanics. The dream fell through. At that time, he was considered too old for admission to medical school after interviews with Harvard Medical School and the University of Pennsylvania. The family decided to return to the Philadelphia area where they struggled to raise their three children Alexandra, Robert, and Paul.
Bob took advantage of the early 1970’s oil embargo and set up a trading company, Tech Impex. Contracts for petrochemicals, acetylsalicylic acid, poliethilinglicol, and sodium nitrite were secured with Dow Chemicals, Allied Chemical and other major players. He captured the Spanish sodium nitrite market and Schering in Brazil became a major customer of his firm. Capitol Pipe and Steel Products appointed his company as a distributor enabling it to ship tons of carbon steel pipes to the Island Water Works and nickel chromium pipes to the Naval Shipyard in Honolulu.
Soon the firm became an exclusive distributor for Vishay Intertechnology, a manufacturer of resistors in Malvern, Pennsylvania and Holon, Israel. Tech Impex was assigned the Middle East, Far East, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. Success was short lived. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the subsequent events at the Gdansk Shipyard in Poland compelled Bob to unilaterally stop all shipments of Vishay products to the Eastern Bloc countries.
Bob’s solidarity against all forms of oppression remained unshaken. The Yalta accords and all pretenses under the doctrine of the balance of power were completely nonexistent by the beginning of the 1980s. Detente disappeared into oblivion. In early 1982, Bob advised Congressman Richard T. Schultz, member of the United States House of Representatives, that Romania, an alleged friend, with MFN privileges, was attempting to smuggle electronics components to Syria. This fact, coupled with pressure from the United States Congress for notorious human rights violations by Romania, forced Nicholai Ceausescu to renounce MFN status in 1988 claiming interference with national sovereignty.
In 1980, after the death of his mother, Ilona, Bob, and his family surrendered all future claims to parental worldly possessions including the family home on Lake Balaton and all claims to intellectual property rights to his sisters and brothers. The only thing of value Bob asked for and received was a horse blanket “cserge” which is what the family slept on in the stables during their exodus through the Alps in WWII and a framed picture of a rose painted by Colonel Bela Haris for his wife, Ilona with a falling petal.
Again, a new solution to move the business forward had to be found. In 1980, a subsidiary was established in Swindon, England to expand in Western Europe. In Pennsylvania, a new firm established in 1978 was activated, and major purchasing agreements with Dale Electronics and Bourns were signed. Transtek Industries became a franchised distributor for Augat and 3M electronic interconnect components in the Mid-Atlantic region. The company started expansion across the United States and opened a sales office in the Dallas/Fort Worth area using a pioneering distribution philosophy.
The old established distribution competition was upset, charging foul play, because Transtek elected to maintain no local inventory in Texas. Bob responded to a preemptive legal strike and filed an antitrust action claiming restriction of trade and monopolistic practices. The company ran out of money while President Regan moved the goal post making the Sherman and Robinson- Patman Acts toothless. The idea of central warehousing based on overnight freight services was crushed. Ironically, central warehousing is now the standard practice in today’s electronics component industry.
In 1988 Bob invested in a fledgling electronic data acquisition firm in State College where his sons were attending Penn State University. He collaborated with two other independent firms and introduced a versatile and rugged stackable PC standard for industrial applications. Sales catapulted and continue to grow at an accelerated pace. Multinational industrial and aerospace companies flock to use the rugged single board computers. The modular data acquisition systems designed and manufactured in the USA by RTD Embedded Technologies are well accepted by the US and Israeli militaries.
In late 1989, Bob rushed to Romania to witness the revolution following the demise of the Berlin Wall. The meaning of over 100 journeys since 1967 behind the Iron Curtain to Eastern Europe and the former USSR was suddenly realized. He continued to confront the Communists who were parading themselves as the disciples of free enterprise after morally and financially bankrupting Hungary and other Eastern Bloc nations. His mission appeared to reach the beginning of the end until the 2008 Presidential campaign started and Barack Obama became the face of possibilities. Bob’s uncompromising hope for equality, liberty, and justice has been reaching global proportions as he now fights for living wages, tax reform, financial restructuring, the reindustrialization of America, and a prosperous North American Economic Union.
In 1992, Bob quickly moved to aid the transition from a failed centralized Eastern Bloc economy by establishing RTD-Europa in Budapest. A close working relationship with the Budapest University of Technology and Economics was initiated in spite of the Universitiy’s objection to grant admission to Bob, a gifted mathematician in 1956, because of ideological constraints imposed by the Communist regime on the children of political prisoners. Bob engaged the services of the University teaching staff and transformed RTD-Europa into a Research and Design Laboratory at the University’s Stoczek Engineering Center. He enabled the University to gain access to advanced technologies and raised the instructor’s living standards comparable to their peers in America. A segment of the building was renovated at RTD’s expense and equiped with state-of-the-art computers, instrumentation, and Computer Aided Design software. The teaching staff was provided with unique opportunities to acquire advanced technologies and engineering know-how after the collapse of the Kadar Regime. Students were granted fellowships. The laboratory focused on designing compact, stackable, single board computers, digital signal processors, wireless communication devices, data acqusition systems and software. A scholarship was established to fund Ph.D candidates to honor the memory of Colonel Bela Haris. The RTD-BME Laboratory operated in partnership with the Department of Telecomunication and Informatics while RTD provided funding in excess of one and one half million dollars. The laboratory was closed in 2002 after the relocation of staff members to the new Informatics Complex. RTD suspended the operations due to space constraints and the need to repatriate technologies. As a final gesture, substantial funding was contributed to the construction of a modern acoustical laboratory with hopes that one day new mutual interest for cooperation with the University will be found without overreliance of foreign scientific and engineering talent.
For over 15 years Bob took on the Hungarian government and military tribunals. The newly transformed Communists holding onto their power base rejected his plea for a new trial for his father. For Bob, nothing less than full recognition and vindication was acceptable. He escalated his campaign. The Hungarian Supreme Court overturned this mockery of justice by the lower courts and ordered a new trial. In September, 1999, the Colonel was formally retried in an open court by a reconstituted military tribunal and was fully exonerated, but the complete truth of the exploitation of Colonel Bela Haris yearns to be told. True to form the Hungarian Ministry of Defense, however, failed to honor the letter and the spirit of the vindication and law. Bob threatened and documented a multimillion-dollar lawsuit on behalf of his family aimed at recovering moneys owed to his father under contracts with the Hungarian Ministry of Defense prior to his recall to the Hungarian Army in 1949. The subject moneys that the Ministry simply kept after recalling the Colonel are clearly shown in AVH investigative documents. The scandal was published in the Hungarian daily business newspaper “Napi gazdagsag” on November 27, 1999.
Grudgingly, the Hungarian Ministry of Defense agreed to restore Bela Haris’ rank, advancing him one rank to Colonel citing Parliamentary objections against promoting Bela to Major General. Subsequently, a famous soccer player Ferenc Puskas who defected for riches to the west was posthumously promoted to Brigadier General from Major in a week after his death in 2006. His coffin was draped with the Hungarian flag, a display of honor that Bob introduced in 2001 after months of negotiations to adopt this new military standard of respect for soldiers. The arrogant military rehabilitation committee refused to refund the monetary judgment. Meanwhile, Bob discovered that the monetary fine was deposited in the bank account of the Hungarian Ministry of Defense and not with the feared AVH as falsely pretended. He demanded the return of the 10,000 Forint fine, but he ran into fierce resistance. Bob responded to this insult by refusing to attend the military ceremonies restoring his father’s rank and returned to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania with his family at his side including, Bob’s son, Dr. Paul Andrew Thomas Haris, a then active Captain in the United States Air Force. The family was represented at the Millennium ceremonies in 2000 by Dr. Peter Gaal son of Bob’s sister Judit, the youngest daughter of Colonel Bela Haris, who did not live to see her father’s name restored.
Several months later a mutually acceptable agreement was reached and filed with the United States Embassy in Budapest. The Colonel was decorated by the military, reburied, along with his wife, Ilona, with full military honors, and a memorial was erected at the privately owned Defense Technology Park located in the town of Kecel in 2002. The United States Defense Attaché and the Hungarian General Staff stood in salute. Full compliance with the agreement remains however circumvented because Colonel Bela Haris was not executed and because he is now dead. Apparently, the Hungarian Ministry of Defense was unaware that a life time of persecution and exploitation is not compelling enough to erect a memorial on Castle Hill or to move the Hungarian Parliament to honor posthumously the contributions of a citizen’s genius to a proud nation.
At a memorial, on October 20, 2006, Bob addressed the whole town of Kecel prior to the turbulent fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution on October 23, 2006 in Budapest. Bob, a benefactor of the children of Kecel, demanded a sense of fairness and equality. He returned to Budapest again on March 15, 2007 to join the demonstration by tens of thousands on the streets demanding political change and social justice while celebrating the anniversary of the 1848 Revolution against the Habsburg Monarchy.
Robert John Steven Haris, “Bob”, “the child”, husband, father of three and now grandfather of eight grandchildren, takes a leading role in defining the real victims and heroes of the Stalinist and Kadar regimes. A biography of the Colonel Bela Haris is about to be published in the memory of those who cannot speak for themselves.
With the support of family and friends, Bob mounted his bicycle with his two sons, Robert J.S. Haris, Jr. (“Robi”) and Paul to compete in the 2007 Samsung sponsored annual Szupermarathon commemorating the memory of his comrades in a ride to Hero’s Square in Budapest from Vienna via Bratislava, the capitol of the Slovak Republic. This year Bob took the time to campaign for the Democratic candidates, participated in the Denver Democratic Convention, and continued to meet with numerous members of Congress on the global financial crisis while he prepared his cycling team of “Hope” to “ride like the wind” to victory this last October in the Szupermarathon, crossing for the first time the Eastern European borders without guards at checkpoints. The team plans to enter the race again next year to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.
With over a million miles in global travel, a life of diverse tragedies and triumphs, Robert is a testimony not only to the promise of what America can do for its people but also of what its people can do for America. Robert is an American in the eyes of many that happened to be born abroad who brought with him on that lonely ship the “hope” and “promise” of change for tomorrow. Robert understands that his mission is not over because the dream of fulfillment for his people has not been achieved. The walls are not completely down and the people still need to be made whole!
With the witnessing of another wall being erected, this time across the US and Mexico border, political gridlock, desire to provide all labor a living wage, human rights and justice, and a true love of America, Robert was compelled to change party affiliation and lend support to the 25,000 Knights of the Democratic Party by imparting his global insight, experience and vision.
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