Antal: An Autobiography and My Memoir an Account of My Life’S Experiences and a Search into My Identity and Historical Relevant Events Through the Ages of Time and Beginning of My Ethnicity

By Xlibris US

This shy young boy has already endured hardship and danger. He does not know what the future would hold for him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499078428

Book preview

BOOK 1

Chapter 1

At this stage, to get an inside look to the reader of what’s to come, I will just mention a few unique events that happened to me as a child. This will also be repeated later in the second book.

In the fall of 1944, as a nine-year-old in Hungary, I had to endure a very scary, intimidating behavior of a Soviet army officer occupying our house and my bedroom for months. Every night past midnight, he came back drunk, singing and swearing in Russian. After months of this, I knew the meaning of it, but the translation is too gross to write here. He’d call out blah, blah and my brother’s name, therefore awakening me and my one and a half-year-old brother in the bed with me and now crying. This officer was very fascinated with the round alarm clock on the nightstand beside his bed. He kept winding to hear the alarm go off, something he’d never seen before.

The Soviet army later moved on past Hungary and my village of Etyek, approximately thirty kilometers from the capitol of Budapest. On some hills around our village, heavy German army artillery had been abandoned. We kids found this fascinating and played on and with those guns. It happened. One of the guns still had a live shell, and an explosion occurred. The boy on the gun was killed. I was further away and very lucky that I was not injured.

In the summer of 1947, I was now living in a village called Ilsfed in West Germany. Two of my school friends and I were exploring an abandoned stone quarry, investigating a possibility of diving off a board that we found into a deep water pond below. From the three-meter (twelve feet) high cliff as it was, I happened to be the heaviest and had to test the board. As I moved to the front, I slipped and apparently dove straight into the deep water. I grazed my right thigh on a cliff-protruding rock while going down to the very bottom. The scar is still visible today. I was praying and thinking to my dear mother, I’m so sorry (liebe mutter es tut mir leid). Forgive me.

I thrashed with my arms and legs to reach the surface. In the meantime, my two friends waited for me at the edge of this pond and pulled me out by my hair. I was the only one that could not swim. With my luck, I was saved again, but bleeding I wrapped the leg with my shirt.

In October 1956, I went on a prospecting adventure as a twenty-one-year-old, looking for uranium and other precious metals in the vast wilderness of northern Quebec, the largest province of Canada with its thousands of lakes. My companion, an experienced French Canadian prospector, and I flew in a single-engine propelled airplane with pontoons attached for landing on water.

Approximately six hundred kilometers (four hundred miles) from nowhere, at an approx. altitude of five hundred meters (fifteen hundred feet), the engine stalled. The bush pilot, a twenty-three-year-old Austrian, remarked, Look, we have fuel. And with no explanation of what could be wrong, he started to flip many switches as my companion sitting behind yelled, Wake up! and slapped the pilot. Just as the plane came close to the treetops, the pilot turned left. The engine restarted again, and we landed on the nearest lake. I can tell you now that I believe in fate. We are all somehow destined in our lives.

To the reader, if and when this story or book should ever get published, I will of course remain anonymous due to the revelations from the history and present day of an enormous race, which is also my own. There’s also the mention of people I know of, and some are deceased. And even as they appear fictitious in the story, I beg their forgiveness. I also hope that my writing won’t be looked upon as being biased.

Chapter 2

Prologue/Reminder There are four things in life that a human being strives for and needs anywhere on this planet: freedom, security, happiness, and the need to be loved. As it happens, the world today is a broken place, and the human race is fighting wars all over this planet of ours. The cause is hatred, greed, and corruption by different factions of peoples, whether it is race, religions, governments and their leaders, and underworld criminals.

It is my belief that most of the world today has very little sympathy and respect for the Germanic race and ethnicity. It could very well be because of two wars fought against most of the world and especially the atrocity committed by the Nazis, Holocaust, and extermination of millions of Jews during the last world war. Anyone should never forget this. I, along most of the Germans living today, am appalled and ashamed for this crime committed by the Germans during that period of time.

I have to admit I’m an ethnic German and I’m searching through the history of my race. Maybe my writing could be considered as impartial. Going back in early history to Middle Ages and before are thousands of chapters one could find about the Germanic race and their language and culture. Going back to the third and fourth century AD, mixed Celts and Germanic tribes inhabited most of central Europe. I will mention a large amount of historical events that I believe a large population of the world is not aware of in today’s society. It can be found on the internet, specifically Wikipedia.

Around 400 AD, a Saxon tribe in northern Germany invaded the eastern and southern part of England, pushing out the Roman legions from England. Several small kingdoms (five, in fact) were formed. By 924–927 AD, the Saxon English ruler, King Athelstan, ruled all of England.

Charlemagne (742–814 AD)—or Karl der Grosse, king of the Lombards and Franks (Germania and Francia)—ruled from 768–814 AD. His wife was a German princess, and he consolidated a large portion of Europe. He built his castle-fortress and chapel in Aachen, Germany, now a city not far from the French border. He promoted learning and instituted an innovative administrative concept. He started Christianity for the barbarian population. In 800 AD, he traveled to Rome, and Pope Leo III crowned him Holy Roman Emperor.

Chapter 3

The Elector of Hanover (1698–1727) became King George I, a Hanoverian to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland (1714–1727). King George II, III, and IV (1820–1830) succeeded him. He was also king of Great Britain, Ireland, and the state of Hanover.

King George V, George Frederick Ernest Albert, ruled from 1910 to 1936. On June 27, 1917, he changed the name to the Royal House of Windsor from the House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, which it was called before for a long time.

Maria Theresa (1717–1780) from the House of Habsburg was empress from 1740 to 1780 of Austria, Bohemia, Croatia, Mantua, Milan, and Galicia. And she was queen of Hungary. She was a great ruler. She had many children with one daughter Marie Antoinette, who became the wife of King Louis XVI of France. Her ally was King George II of England. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were beheaded after the French Revolution of 1792. King Frederick II of Prussia said of her, That woman’s achievements are those of a great man.

This empress and queen were responsible for spreading the German race by settling many thousands of Germans into the eastern part of Europe and Hungary, where my ancestors settled from the German region of Ulm. We are called Donau Schwaben.

The German princess, Sophie Auguste Fredericke von Anhalt-Zerbst, born in Stettin, Prussia, became the tsarina of Russia, or Catherina the Great (1762–1796). This empress also settled twenty-five thousand Germans from 1764 to 1767 in 104 villages in the Volga Valley of Russia. Many of those found refuge in South America, Brazil, and later Argentina in the nineteenth century, where now are approximately three million of German origin in Argentina. Their culture and language is thriving today. One that I contacted is a young woman and her siblings who have my family name.

Looking at all these original Germans that were a big part of the past, I will continue to mention many more as my search goes on. I wonder how many people know of these and more of our history. I get the sense that it’s not too many in today’s world. It might enlighten some people, and it can be useful to know some of these happenings in our history.

Chapter 4

I will continue to tell more of how much the German culture, language, and influence was also spread around America from the early history on. The first German American, Dr. Johannes Fleischer, arrived with the first English settlers in Jamestown in 1607. The first American with a university education, he was followed in 1608 by five glassmakers and three carpenters or house builders. The first German settlement in what became the United States was Germantown in Pennsylvania, founded near Philadelphia in October 1683.

A large number of Germans migrated from the 1680s to 1760s with Pennsylvania as the favored destination. By 1745, an estimated forty-five thousand Germans were living in Pennsylvania alone. These replications of Germany would house prominent German businesses, such as the lager beer industry. German entrepreneurs, such as bakers, butchers, cabinetmakers, cigar makers, distillers, machinists, and tailors could be found in abundance in the miniature German towns.

I will mention some of the prominent, influential German Americans. Johann (John) Jacob Astor was born in 1763 in Walldorf, Germany, and died in 1848 in Manhattan, New York. A businessman and entrepreneur, he became the first American millionaire. He was the creator of the first trust in America.

Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, born September 17, 1730, in Magdeburg, Germany, and died November 28, 1794, in Utica, New York, was the son of a Royal Prussian lieutenant engineer, Baron von Steuben. In 1772, he immigrated to America. On February 5, 1778, von Steuben had offered to volunteer without pay (for a time), and on February 23, he reported to General Washington, providing his service at Valley Forge in