Category: History

Memoirs of a Hungarian Childhood Part IV (3) It is instructive to compare Hitler and Churchill as boys in school. Churchill at St George’s School, Ascot (1884). Headmaster’s remarks. General conduct: “very – bad – is a constant trouble to everybody and is always in some scrape. He cannot be

When in the Michaelmas Term of 1911–12 Ferenc Békássy began his studies at King’s College, Cambridge, he was not long in earning the attention of John Maynard Keynes, a Fellow of the College. Keynes was bisexual, before World War I heavily engaging in homosexual affairs, for many years a lover

Thomas Jefferson and His Hungarian Wines: Study of an Attitude1 Thomas Jefferson was an ardent patron of American viticulture. As an admirer of any kind of good quality wine, he purchased an enormous quantity from the wine producing countries of Europe: France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Germany. It is not

Death and Art. The Russians had a curious fascination with music. I listened to their songs, their beloved balalaika and watched their gravity defying acrobatic dances. Dancing and singing, the Russians claimed to hear “language beyond the mind”(zaumni iazik). Language beyond the mind. Before beginning to write Tolstoy habitually seated

I am reading W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, and it is stirring many of my own memories, and memories of remembering, too. The character Austerlitz is sent away from his parents in Prague on a Kindertransport as a young child in the 1930s, a train travelling from the central station

 THE ISLAND OF ISTVÁN VASDÉNYEY It is 1944. I am on an island of comparative security. The sea around me comprises the waters, skies and lands of our Hungarian soil, beset on two sides – a sea poisoned by peril, trepidation and fear […]. The bloodiest conflict between the largest

The Germans that survived the carnage at Dobogókő and Pilisszentkereszt scattered in the frost-stiffened Pilis forest. Most of them were captured by the Russians and the wounded locked up in a school room in Kesztölc. The Russians covered the floor with straw and the wounded lay there. The air was

The Margit Boulevard Military Barracks was the headquarters of an Arrow Cross detachment of the Hungarian military police operating in collaboration with the Gestapo. “You talk. We write”, said the wrestler. I stood there as the three men who arrested me sat with pen and pencil in hand staring at

In 1944 the youngest member of our family was the one and a half year old Csilla, then came Ágnes (10) alias Gigi, Judit (12), and finally myself (13). My mother was 39 at the time, my father László Németh, 43. My father had a medical degree, and prior to