Paul and Elizabeth Torok crouched low in a cornfield in the pre-dawn darkness along the heavily-patrolled border between Romania and Hungary.

It was the summer of 1948 and the young couple were fleeing the communist regime in Romania for a new life which eventually took them to Canada.  They later retired to the Penticton area in 1975.

Now the Toroks are donating $30,000 to the South Okanagan Similkameen (SOS) Medical Foundation to help provide medical equipment for the new tower at Penticton Regional Hospital.

But as the young couple waited nervously for the border patrol to pass by their cornfield hiding spot almost 70 years ago, retirement was the last thing on their minds.  They had to race across a wide strip of cleared land along the border without being spotted.

“It wasn’t easy.  They shot people on the border,” Paul said.

After a group of six Romanian soldiers passed by, they decided to make a run for it.  Suddenly another border patrol member with a German shepherd appeared.

“We were still in the open field, but still there was a little bit of darkness,” he recalled. “I said to my wife: ‘Get down, get down on your stomach as far as you can!’”

“We were very, very lucky that the dog didn’t smell us,” he said. “There was a breeze and the breeze was away from us.”

Being of Hungarian descent, the Toroks were able to get help from Hungarian farm workers who took them by horse cart to a nearby village.  They made their way to Budapest and later crossed into Austria, which led to another border encounter.