Story of a Survival

By George Tivadar Radan

Th e historical period covered in this book includes highlights of the blood-drenched years when ordinary men who were unaware of their undesirability were persecuted, and six million of them executed. Th rough skillful maneuvering, daring and luck, and helped by his dual background, the author survived the horrors of this time in what can credibly be called a miraculous adventure. His situation may help draw attention to a special group of persons who were considered Jewish by some, but not universally so by all. These people survived the horrors of the Nazi era. Their story has never
been written until now, since most of these actors kept their secrets beyond the era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456884635

Book preview

STORY OF A

Survival

93994-RADA-layout-low.pdf

George Tivadar Radan

Copyright © 2011 by George Tivadar Radan.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011903758

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4568-8462-8

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4568-8461-1

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4568-8463-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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93994

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

After writing these memoirs, I realized that most of those who played a role in this book are now gone. However, since my own time is coming to a close, I want to acknowledge those persons still around who contributed in some way to this work.

When I shared my initial thoughts for this book with my dear friend, Professor Sterling Delano, he heartily encouraged me as he did with other projects during our friendship. I am very grateful to Sterling, with whom I shared the wonders of travel in Italy, and I wish him much success with his own new book, Brook Farm.

My previous publications were all professional volumes. This book was very different. It required a personal emotional involvement to express more than just facts. It required long contemplations, staring at faded snap-shots taken long ago, of persons who once had a great influence on my life.

I hope that this work will offer my children a clearer image of their father. It includes thoughts that I never shared with them because it never seemed the right time to do so. I hope they will enjoy and appreciate it.

It would be a gross omission if I did not mention the encouragement of my wife Maryann who was fascinated by the terror and the slim margin of survival in the past, ever considering it a miracle. While I was bogged down with daily chores and the academy, like a beacon she kept on reminding me that we have an obligation to survive, at least as a memory to our grand children.

I am especially grateful to Mary Ellen Fattori who patiently corrected the manuscript and pointed out many inconsistencies which occurred because of my limited capacity in accurately remembering the past.

I also owe a special thanks to my colleagues in the English department, many of whom encouraged me to share this account of the past as I have witnessed it.

I am also grateful to librarian Alice Bampton for her technical help in my battle with computers.

And there are those who shared or at least witnessed my effort to survive. Some of them are still alive and they all wanted to be remembered on hard copy and rightfully demanded mentioning. I am glad to do so.

And there are others who became monuments in stone forests in Hungary and other parts of the world. They are silent witnesses but their voices are sometimes stronger in my memory than the ones who are still around.

Throughout my life I experienced events that most writers would consider outstanding and heroic. For a while I was tempted to make them the focus of this work. Such glamour is essential to success. However, since I was there and personally witnessed these events with all their glory, I chose, rather, to point out the darker corners in life which are usually omitted. We should never ignore the clouds which often accompany a blue sky.

Contents

CHAPTER 1: Introduction

CHAPTER 2: Early Life—Gymnasium

CHAPTER 3: Young Adulthood—Numerus Clausus—Seminary

CHAPTER 4: Forced Labor

CHAPTER 5: Returning Home

CHAPTER 6: The Siege of Budapest and Its Aftermath

CHAPTER 7: My Father

CHAPTER 8: Escape from the Iron Curtain

CHAPTER 9: Ivan

CHAPTER 10: My Life in Israel

CHAPTER 11: Maryann and Life in America

CHAPTER 12: Sabbatical in France

CHAPTER 13: Summer Program in Italy

CHAPTER 14: Final Years at Villanova University

AFTER THOUGHTS

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

What one glance in a mirror can inspire! Throughout the centuries, mirrors were considered magical objects. They were able to predict the future and reveal the secrets of the past. In my case, this morning, the mirror does both. Before me, I see the past in an old man’s face covered with myriad of blemishes and carved with deep lines like an old oak tree revealing its age through dendrochronology. But I also see the future—and its certain limitations. I wish to complete this document and my reminiscences, before I join the generation of which I write.

Just like the young people I see today, I, too, was once strong, confident, full of hope, and an accomplished sportsman. I won many competitions throughout the years and engaged in many precious amorous adventures. Throughout the years, I also encountered some rough spots along the way. Strolling down memory lane, the temptation to detour around such events beckons strongly. But I will remain honest and tell the truth like a condemned prisoner, awaiting execution. Since mine lies not too far in the near distance, this should be relatively easy to accomplish.

The first part of my story looks back to a confusing, less-confident world. It was just a few years after the war ended, which had been dubbed the war to end all wars. People were still peering uneasily into the future. In Hungary, specifically Budapest, the memories of anti-Semitic reactions to the so-called Bela Kun regime and his excessive destructive zeal were still vivid. This revolt, which was conducted under Kun and Tibor Samuely, was frequently referred to as a Jewish-Bolshevist conspiracy. Indeed, many of the Kuns of Hungary were once Kohns or Kohens. By 1910, almost half of the journalists in Budapest were Jewish, but they were not sympathetic to the communist regime. A great number of Jewish physicians and half of all lawyers in Hungary were Jews or had Jewish backgrounds. In the mind, the average Hungarian capitalism was stereotyped as hopelessly Jewish. However, while some of the large capitals were in Jewish hands and close to 70 percent of the lessees of large estates were also Jewish, Hungarian capitalism was not overwhelmingly Jewish.

Although crushed in August 1919, the memory of Kun’s failed Red Terror was still lingering. (In fact, anti-Semitism in Hungary goes back even earlier to 1878 when Győző Istoczy suggested that the Jewish influx from abroad should be settled by sending the Jews to Palestine—a strangely modern idea that reappears in the works of early Zionist writers.)

Between 1919 and 1920, there was an open season against Jews, especially outside of Budapest. During this period, many innocent people lost their lives. During the 1920s, the Hungarian Jews continued to live under the shadow of the individual criminal acts of the once-Communist regime and the not-too-sympathetic regime of Governor Horthy. The violent repression of the White Terror was still vivid in the minds of the people. It was into such a world that I was born in Budapest to a Jewish father (who had converted to Christianity) and a Christian mother. I was baptized a Christian.

During this time, the Hungarian cultural atmosphere was deeply influenced by Jewish culture. A large disproportionate part of the press, theatre, and cabarets were strongly influenced by the ideas of an important core of Jewish physicians, lawyers, actors, writers, and bankers. The spirit and humor of the cabarets with their first-class performers was decidedly antifascist and Jewish.

This elite had a strong influence on Hungarian public life, although the orthodox segment of the Jews was always ignored, and assimilation for Jews remained the keynote of Hungarian culture. One would have found less than a dozen converted Jews who ever frequented the kosher restaurants or even knew the location of the twenty synagogues of Budapest. Entering one, they would have been terrified to hear the chanting of the Hasidic men within.

In fact, it appears from the countless Jewish jokes, which formed an intricate part of the Budapest society at the turn of the century, the average Jew in Budapest was more horrified if an orthodox Jewish family moved into their apartment house than if an arrowhead Nazi had. As a result, ever since the White Terror it became a standard practice with many Jewish families to have their newborn babies converted to Christianity—most of them baptized, yet still circumcised. There was no other way to survive in such an anti-Semitic world.

Such conversions were common to the Lutheran denominations and only a relatively small percentage was converted to Catholicism. In fact, a standard anti-Semitic joke of the time (frequently, scribbled on bathroom walls) involved the Jewish Lombroso types who, when asked about their religion, proudly announced that they were Christians. However, the next question was usually, And what was your religion prior to that? As a result, Jews frequently converted to Lutheranism and then to another Christian denomination. Thus, when the unavoidable questions arose, the answer would be, Oh, I was Lutheran before I became Catholic…

In my younger years, something of the belle époque, the romantic memories of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire of the fin de siécle were still strong. Not only my parents and their friends, but also we as children were enchanted by the music of Ferenc Lehar and recognized his impact decades later in the works of Gilbert and Sullivan. We were all moved as children when we heard the story of Sir John (Janos Vitéz) and his romantic love for Iluska. Although far from the famous Hungarian puszta, we associated the Wild West with it, as it appeared through the works of Cooper or Carl May (who was never in the United States, but his appeal was such that American films were based on his imaginary romantic Indian Stories). Budapest was a romantic place and was mentioned in many guide books as an important stop for the Orient Express and the opening for the semidarkness of the Balkans.

But while the Golden Age had a silver lining in the years preceding World War II, the memory of my youth, the spirit of the great epoch at the turn of the century was slowly fading—at least for me. Still, what remained was opulent and seductive.

The center and strongest manifestation of this seductive culture, only a kilometers away between Eastern Europe and the West, remained, of course, Vienna. The most turbulent times could not erase the romantic, sad, and haunting memories surrounding its monuments. Even the positivist faith that declared technological progress to be the key to modernization was absent in a Hungary that was in love with past memories.

My generation could still enjoy the romantic Taban with the thousand and one monuments of the one hundred and fifty years of Turkish occupation, complete with picturesque minarets and Turkish baths. In Pest, we could still stroll in the Váci Utca, the Rue de Rivoli of Pest, or walk on the beautiful and pretentious Danube coast, with its French Rivera-style coffee houses and five-star hotels, pretending that one was on the island of Île de la Grande Jatte disguised as a dandy who just stepped out of a George Seurat’s canvas.

As most seventeen-year-olds of my time, I found myself one day lost in a volume of Walks in Roman Pannonia in Hungary by Révai. It was during a romantic walk in Buda in the rich architectural remains still to be found—among the stones and the stories behind them. Revai’s words catapulted me into another century—in fact, into another millennium. Reading the volume I could connect the past with the present, imagining the bygone centuries, recreating a fossilized civilization of long ago. The book created a melancholy typical to the Hungarian spirit of the age. It underscored memories of bygone grandeur—and present misery. What I did not realize at that time was that submerging into the spirit of the past was really an escape from an oncoming disaster of the future, which everyone knew was imminent, but for which no one had the courage to prepare. But learning of this bygone age, and penetrating deeper into its secrets created in me a wish to approach the past methodically and to research it. It was during these times that the desire to organize this knowledge scientifically and to study and learn more about it methodically was born in my mind.

Indeed, I lived from birth in two worlds, often being rejected by one because the other accepted me. As a result, I achieved unique insights into matters surrounding the creation of two diverse concepts. In order to become entirely a part of the two groups I belonged, one had to lose his former identity and assume an entirely new one, denying that the other one ever existed or take a Canossa pilgrimage to regret that such identity ever existed. In my case, I was too deeply engaged in one.

Many years later, during my stay in Israel, which certainly was a melting pot of all nations, one was supposed to lose his or her former identity, but cases like mine simply did not exist. Thus I held onto my dual identity. In a way, it allowed me to look into situations, which were not available to others, but it also made me feel like a ship which lost its rudder in the middle of a stormy sea. However, some unorthodox interpretations, free of accepted and standard explanations resulted from this situation.

In my reminiscences, I consult long-forgotten documents, photographs, and maps with names on them that are different now. Being a scientist, I wish to avoid romanticizing the past. On the other hand, more than half-a-century sheds different lights and interpretations on matters, which I once considered unadulterated