re:place Magazine

re:place Magazine: "One of the great stories in B.C.’s history began January 24, 1957 when 214 Hungarian refugees (200 students and 14 faculty members) arrived at the Matsqui train station. They were from the Forestry School in Sopron, Hungary. Two months earlier Sopron, and other Hungarian cities, had been invaded by Soviet troops. “Attempts to resist the approaching Soviet tanks,” Professor Antal Kozak wrote, “were futile. About 450 students and 50 professors and their families left Sopron fleeing across the open borders to Austria. Of these, about 250 were from the forestry school. This was not a planned departure . . . The Faculty of Forestry at UBC offered to ‘adopt’ the Sopron University of Forestry and guaranteed its maintenance for five years until the current students graduated.”"