Hungarian Refugee Going Home in Style

WARSAW — Thirty-eight years after crawling in the snow past armed soldiers patrolling the Hungarian border, Charles Tasnadi is going back to Hungary today in President Bush’s presidential jet.

For Tasnadi, 64, a news photographer, it will be his first trip home since the night in 1951 when he and his fiancee, Maria, escaped to the West through the “Iron Curtain.”

“I’ve waited a long time for this. I wouldn’t trade a million dollars for the feeling,” Tasnadi said.

Tasnadi, who began working for the Associated Press in 1964, is among a small group of media people flying with Bush from Gdansk in Poland to Budapest.