I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts, Souls, and Wars in Hungary by Marianne Szegedy-Maszak 2013

"A magnificent World War II love story and family saga--it is epic history, finely wrought and deeply  personal." from a review posted on the website of the Jewish Book Council

This memoir is about the life of Marianne Szegedy-Maszak’s large extended family. Starting with the author’s great-grandfather, Manfred Weiss, the founding industrialist of a manufacturing conglomerate in Budapest, she demonstrates how his wealth and connections catapulted the family into positions of economic and political power and prestige. Two of Manfred Weiss’s daughters married into other powerful families which enlarged the extended family’s sphere of influence: the author’s grandmother married Moric Kornfield who was from a prominent banking family, and her sister Daisy married Ferenc Chorin, a prominent industrialist who served in the Hungarian parliament.

All of those named above were Jewish. In fact, Ferenc Chorin was the great-grandson of a rabbi. But when, in the early twentieth century, nationalist anti-Semitic Hungarians started restricting admission of Jewish students to universities, many assimilated Hungarian Jews converted. In the generation following Manfred Weiss, the author’s family began converting to Catholicism and marrying non-Jews. In fact, many became more than just nominal Catholics: they attended Mass regularly and went to confession. Conversion, of course, did not save them from the terrors of Hitler’s regime. Nor did being born Christian necessarily protect Hungarian citizens. The author's father, a Christian Hungarian diplomat with a conscience, bravely took an anti-Nazi stand and ended up a political prisoner in Dachau.

The author provides the reader with much of the contemporary politics of Hungary which contextualizes her family’s situation.  Many Hungarians did not know which external threat was worse: a takeover by the approaching Soviet Union army or an invasion by the Nazis. Many Hungarians sought to punish Hungarian Jews for either their perceived Communist sympathies or what they saw as their rapacious capitalist behavior. But most of her family members, overly optimistic about the duration of the war, and not wanting to leave their business interests and property behind, decided to wait it out.

How her extended family got out of Hungary (some to Switzerland, most to the United States via Portugal) makes for very interesting reading and raises vexing questions about privilege. Yes, they had to leave some family members behind as hostages - insurance that the Nazis got what they wanted. Yes, their factories, their mining interests, and their property were nationalized. And they lost most of their fortune. But they were lucky that their prominence and their former positions of power worked in their favor: they were able to negotiate a way out.

The author ends with some chapters about their early years in America. Predictably, the generation of the author’s grandparents felt displaced; they yearned to return to Budapest, but, barring that option, they became citizens of the world and traveled constantly. Marianne Szegedy-Maszak lived within a large circle of Hungarian refugees who carried their past lives in Hungary in their hearts.

To read an article about a branch of Manfred Weiss's family's efforts to reclaim art stolen by the Nazis, click here.
To read a current New York Times article about rising anti-Semitism in Hungary click.

People
Author’s mother’s mother's family
Manfred Weiss – married Alice de Wahl
     Elsa Weiss – daughter of Manfred and Alice; married Alfred Mauthner
           Maria Alice Mauthner – daughter of Elsa and Alfred
           Ferenc Mauthner – son of Elsa and Alfred
           Annus Mauthner – son of Elsa and Alfred
           Christine Mauthner – daughter of Elsa and Alfred
           Hansi Mauthner – son of Elsa and Alfred
           Istvan Mauthner – son of Elsa and Alfred
          Gabriella Mauthner – daughter of Elsa and Alfred
    Eugene Weiss – son of Manfred and Alice; married Annie Geitler
          Alice Weiss – daughter of Eugen and Annie
          Annie Weiss – daughter of Eugen and Annie
          Gyorgy Weiss – son of Eugen and Annie
   Marianne Weiss – daughter of Manfred and Alice; married to Moric Kornfield
         Maria Kornfield – daughter of Marianne and Moric
         Hanna Kornfield – daughter of Marianne and Moric; married Aladar Szegedy-Maszak
              Aladar Szegedy-Maszak – son of Hanna and Aladar
              Andy Szegedy-Maszak – son of Hanna and Aladar
              Peter Szegedy-Maszak – son of Hanna and Aladar
              Marianne Szegedy-Maszak – daughter of Hanna and Aladar; married to Stephen N. Xanakis; author
                        Joanna LaRoche – daughter of Marianne Szegedy-Maszak
             Thomas de Kornfield – son of Marianne and Moric; married Helen
                       Thomas  and James de Kornfield – sons of Thomas and Helen
            Gyorgy (George) Kornfield – son of Marianne and Moric; married Elsie Kavalski
                       Stevie Kornfield – son of Gyorgy and Elsie
  Alfons Weiss – son of Manfred and Alice; married to Erzsebet Herczeg
      Gabor Weiss – son of Alfons and Erzsebet
      Marta Weiss – daughter of Alfons and Erzsebet
      Maria Weiss – daughter of Alfons and Erzsebet
      Janos (John) de Csepel – son of Alfons and Erzsebet
  Daisy Weiss – daughter of Manfred and Alice; married to Ferenc Chorin
      Erzsebet (Elizabeth) Chorin – daughter of Daisy and Ferenc
      Daisy Chorin von Strasser – daughter of Daisy and Ferenc
      Ferenc (Francis) Chorin – son of Daisy and Ferenc
  Edith Weiss – daughter of Manfred and Alice

Author's mother's father's family
Zsigmond Kornfeld – married Betty von Frankfurter
    Gyorgy Kornfeld – son of Zsigmond and Betty
    Mitzi Kornfeld – daughter of Zsigmond and Betty
    Moric Kornfeld – son of Zsigmond and Betty; married Marianne Weiss (see above)
    Pal Kornfeld – son of Zsigmond and Betty
    Ferenc Kornfeld – son of Zsigmond and Betty

Stefan Mauthner – cousin; relationship not clear
Vera, cousin of author’s grandmother, Marianne – married to Janos Zwack
     Peter Zwack – son of Vera and Janos

Friends and Acquaintances
Vilmos Bohm
Miklos Buk
Leo Goldberger
Vilmos Billitz
Pal Fodor
Jolie Gabor
   Magda Gabor – daughter of Jolie
   Zsa Zsa Gabor – daughter of Jolie
   Eva Gabor – daughter of Jolie
Jacques Kanitz – cousin of Farenc Chorin (husband of Daisy Weiss - see above)
Zoltan Friedman (changed to Merszei)
Bela Kuhn
Matyas Rakosi

Places
Budapest, Hungary
Ireg, Hungary
Oberlanzendorf Camp, Austria
Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Austria
Dachau Concentration Camp, Germany
Curia, Portugal
Lisbon, Portugal
Estoril, Portugal
Basel, Switzerland
Zurich, Switzerland
Rakovik, Slovakia

Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary, The First Complete Edition 2004

"For those unfamiliar with the story of Hannah's exceptional courage, this is a moving collection." from a review in Publisher's Weekly 10/25/2004

Hanna Senesh (Szenes), born in Hungary in 1921 and executed in 1943, was a thoughtful, soul-searching writer whose diary is the centerpiece of this volume. Other writings by Senesh
included are letters she sent, mostly to her mother in Budapest, Hungary from her new home in Palestine, and poetry, some of it translated from Hungarian, some of it translated from Hebrew. In this volume the diary is introduced by a foreword written by the American poet/novelist Marge Piercy, a preface by Eitan Senesh, son of Hannah Senesh’s brother, a translator’s preface by Marta Cohn, and a short essay entitled “Memories of Hannah’s Childhood” by Catherine Senesh, Hannah Senesh’s mother.

The diary published in this volume starts with an entry written when Hannah Senesh was thirteen in 1934 where she writes about having just visited her father’s grave. It ends in 1943, five years after she had immigrated to Palestine and was about to embark on a secret mission to help Hungarian Jews escape from what was, at the time it was being planned, not yet Nazi-occupied Hungary. Reading from start to finish, we embark on a journey along with the writer as she formulates goals and makes deliberate choices to help achieve those goals. She is constantly going back and reflecting on past wishes and choices, analyzing her doubts and deciding what her next steps might be.

Early in her story, like many teenagers, Senesh is preoccupied with her place academically, writing about her studies and her teachers, but she is also concerned, as many teenagers are, about her social status, evaluating the boys in her social circle, wondering which one was right for her, despairing that she’ll ever find the perfect match. She is from a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family and is not particularly religious, but in her diary, every year at Yom Kippur she looks back over the past year and makes a serious attempt to analyze what she has done wrong and how she can improve. 

Overt anti-Semitism rears its ugly head during her years at the Protestant girls’ school where her mother has to pay double to secure her Jewish daughter’s education and where Senesh, because she is Jewish, is eventually denied the opportunity to be an officer in the Literary Society. In addition, overt anti-Semitism is more and more prevalent in day-to-day Hungarian life. Her response is to embrace Zionism and to plan to immigrate to Palestine when she graduates high school in Budapest. She applies to attend a two-year agricultural school in Nahalal. Accepted by the school, she leaves Hungary in the early fall of 1939 right after war is declared by the French and British.

The entries written in Palestine are very interesting. Partly it is because she was maturing and her thinking and writing are more complex. And partly it is because she is a careful observer of the geography of the land, its settlers – their personalities and their politics - and its structures, especially of Kibbutz S’dot Yam where she decided to settle after she finished the two-year agricultural program. At first she is excited to be in Palestine. It feels liberating to her to be in what feels to her to be a Jewish country where there is important work to be done, far away from the oppression of Jews in Europe. But a theme that runs throughout this part of the diary and becomes stronger toward the end, is her constant analysis of her status in Palestine. She believed totally in the socialist principles of kibbutz life, but often found the drudgery of kitchen and garden work mind-numbing and not the best use of her talents. She is constantly questioning her decisions. Is she sorry she immigrated to Palestine? No. Is life here harder and less gratifying than she expected? Yes. Is there something she could be doing in Palestine to take advantage of her previous education and talents? She continued to hope so.

Another topic she returns to frequently is her loneliness and the guilt she feels at leaving her mother behind. She suffers from more and more anxiety as the war engulfs more countries, so when the opportunity to go on a secret mission is offered her, she sees it as the big moment she has been waiting for.

At the end of the diary and letters is a section called “The Mission” which picks up from where the diary ends and narrates the end of Hannah Senesh’s short life up to her execution in November of 1943. "The Mission" includes two pieces by fellow parachutists, Reuven Dafne and Yoel Palgi, and an extended piece by Catherine Senesh entitled, “Meeting in Budapest,” which is about the months she spent with her daughter once Hannah Senesh had been captured and returned to Budapest to jail. The last essay is a short historical note written by Professor Judith Taylor Baumel of Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

This volume also contains endnotes keyed to entries in the diary and other writings, and it also includes photos. A note on the title page indicates that parts of this book were published as “Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary by Shocken Books in 1972.

If you would like to read more about the parachutists from Palestine, including photos, click here.

Note: The documentary Blessed Is the Match, directed by Roberta Grossman, released in 2008 and available on DVD, is the story of Hannah Senesh's life based on the same material that is in the memoir. Voice-overs read excerpts from Hannah Senesh's diaries and from her mother's essay which is included in the memoir.  The film is most valuable for its many photos of the family, interviews with her brother's two sons, a short archival interview with her mother, and with contemporaries who knew Hannah Senesh. It also has archival footage of wartime Europe and of pioneers working the land in Palestine. Least satisfying are the dramatic reenactments, mostly in the last third of the film, deemed visually necessary because there is no footage and there are no photos of Hannah Senesh once she leaves Palestine and goes on her mission.

The film starts and ends with the moving ceremony of Senesh's coffin being taken from the ship in the harbor in Haifa that brought it from where her body had been buried in Hungary. The film shows the coffin being transported throughout Israel so its citizens can pay their respects, and then the ceremony where it is received in Jerusalem to be reburied with the bodies of other parachutists who had lost their lives.

The context provided in interviews by contemporary historians and in archival footage is useful. Having a voice off-camera recite several of Senesh's poems is affecting. But the diary itself reveals the life of this unusual young woman in a way the film can only hint at.

People (from the book and the film)
Family
Bela Szenes – married Catherine Salzberger
    Gyuri Senesh – son of Bela and Catherine
        Eitan Senesh – son of Gyuri
        David Senesh - son of Gyuri
    Hannah Senesh – daughter of Bela and Catherine; author

Elizabeth Salzberger – sister of Catherine; married to Steve Sas
    Evi Sas – daughter of Elizabeth and Steve

Friends
Eva Beregi
Surika Braverman
Magda Csecsy
Reuven Dafne
Mihaly Fekete
Peretz Goldstein
Avigdor Hameiri
Judit Kiss
Ilona Krausz
Aharon Megged
Marta Ozary
Yoel Palgi
Gyuri Revesz
Dina Schechman
Enzo (Hayim) Sereni

Places
Budapest, Hungary
Dombovar, Hungary
Janoshaza, Hungary
Nahalal, Israel
Sdot Yam, Israel
Haifa, Israel

Fiorello's Sister: Gemma La Guardia's Gluck's story by Gemma La Guardia Gluck, originally published in 1961, reissued in 2007 with new material, edited by Rochelle Saidel

"Rochelle Saidel, who edited this new edition with care, has given us a portrait of a remarkable woman who persevered through tragic circumstances. Gemma La Guardia Gluck’s story, written the year before she died, is her legacy, fulfilling the promise she made to herself during her dark days at Ravensbrück." from a review by Gloria Goldreich in Hadassah Magazine Feb. 2008 

Gemma La Guardia (1881-1962) and her famous brother, Fiorello who became a much beloved mayor of New York City, were born in New York City to Italian immigrant parents. Their mother, Irene Coen, was a descendent of the prominent Jewish Italian Luzzatto family. When the children were still young, the family returned to Italy. Years later Fiorello moved back to New York when Gemma and Fiorello were already young adults. Gemma met her future husband, the Jewish Hungarian Herman Gluck, in an English class she was teaching, and after they married, they moved to Budapest.

After the author has filled in this background she fast forwards to 1944 when she was already 63, a prosperous banker’s wife, mother of two adult daughters, one of whom had moved to the United States. She and other Hungarians thought they would be able to sit out the war, but in March of 1944 the Germans occupied Hungary and in incremental steps the life of its Jewish residents became more and more restricted and precarious. Gemma La Guardia became a target of the Germans because of her famous brother who was outspoken against the Nazis. They arrested her, first sending her to Mauthausen with her husband, then later sent her on to Ravensbruck, a camp of mostly women, many of them political prisoners.  As the Allies pushed east, the Germans moved women prisoners from Polish camps to Ravensbruck, further straining its capacity and resources.

The author was considered a special prisoner because of her relationship to Fiorello La Guardia. The Nazis were afraid to kill her because of her connection and their fear of retribution against German prisoners-of-war, but she found out later that they were also hoping to use her in a German prisoner-of-war exchange. Her status at the camp meant that she was not subject to the backbreaking work of most inmates, so she had more of a chance to observe the camp, its inmates and its administrators. She was a valuable eye witness. She called Ravensbruck a kind of industrial center and recorded details of the set-up of the camp and the routine of its inmates as well as specifics about deprivation, illness, slave labor assignments, punishments, medical experiments, relationships amongst inmates and their guards, and clandestine resistance activities.

Gemma La Guardia learned when the war was nearly over that her daughter and grandson were also interned at Ravensbruck. Neither she nor her daughter knew that the other was in the camp. Eventually they were reunited and freed. With nowhere to go in the chaos of post World War II Europe, they remained in Germany, trying to learn about the fate of Gemma and her daughter's husbands. She eventually was able to make contact with her brother who worked on getting them to the United States. The author writes about her difficulties in Berlin finding a safe place to live, and describes the difficult process of registering, claiming ration cards, and the like. When she finally got to the United States her reunion with her brother was brief; he died a few months later.

This new edition of the memoir includes family photos and documents as well as:

The Preface to the original edition by S.L. Shneiderman in which he provides an overview of the plight of Jews in during World War II and then talks about the contents and value of this specific memoir.

A Prologue and an Epilogue to the new edition by Rochelle G. Saidel in which she discusses her particular interest in Ravensbruck as a woman's prison, her search for Gemma La Guardia's original manuscript, the value of the memoir as a historical document, and Gemma La Guardia's family in America.

An Appendix which consists of letters between Gemma La Guardia Gluck and her brother Fiorello LaGuardia, July 1945 - May 1947.

Gemma La Guardia Gluck dedicated her memoir “to the martyred women of Ravensbruck, the thousands who perished and the few who survived.”  She was one of approximately 17,000 of about 132,000 who were interned at the Ravensbruck Concentration camp who survived and lived to tell her story. To read an essay on the history of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp written by Rochelle G. Saidel, click here.

People
Author's family on mother's side
Fiorina Luzzatto Coen - author's grandmother
    Irene Coen – daughter of Fiorina; married Achille Luigi Carlo La Guardia;
        Gemma La Guardia – daughter of Irene and Achille; married Herman Gluck; author
            Yolanda La Guardia - daughter of Gemma and Herman
                Richard Denes -son of Yolanda
            Irene La Guardia – daughter of Gemma and Herman; married John Andrew Roberts
                James Roberts – son of Irene and John
                Gladys Roberts McMilleon – daughter of Irene and John
                Clifford Roberts – son of Irene and John
        Fiorello LaGuardia - son of Irene and Achille
        Richard Dodge La Guardia –  son of Irene an Achille; married to Mary Kozar
            Richard Jr., Irene, and Marie Gemma La Guardia – children of Richard and Mary
                Marie – Richard’s granddaughter (unclear which of Richard’s children is her parent)

Friends and Acquaintances
Isidore Selig Cohen
Franzi Kantor
Joseph Shubow
Lotte Lehman Silbermann

Places
Trieste, Italy
Fiume, Italy
Budapest, Hungary
St. Louis, Missouri
New York City, NY

I Have Lived A Thousand Years: Growing up in the Holocaust by Livia Bitton-Jackson 1997

"Hers is a story of unimaginable brutality, but also of faith, hope, and courage, exemplified by her closing message: Never give up."  from a review by Kathryn Berman on the Yad Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies site.

Livia Bitton-Jackson was thirteen in 1944 when she was deported with her mother and brother from her hometown of Somorja (which had been part of Czechoslovakia, then was occupied by Hungary, then reverted to Czechoslovakia after the war) to a ghetto in the town of Nagymagyar in Czechoslovakia. Her father had already been arrested and sent to a forced labor camp. With great specificity the author describes the next two years as she, her mother and brother were moved from camp to camp.

The memoir opens with a foreword that describes a scene in Seeshaupt, Germany in 1995 when the author attended the fiftieth reunion of her liberation which had occurred in that town. It was an emotionally difficult reunion and one that made her think about the passage of time. She worries that with the aging of Holocaust survivors and the birth of subsequent generations, memories of the Holocaust will fade. To address those concerns she has written this memoir for a young adult audience, what she calls the third generation. 

Despite the fact that it’s written for young adults, all readers will be interested in her story which, although it has the same arc of many Holocaust memoirs, still has details that make important points and distinguish her story from others. Bitton-Jackson (whose name then was Elvira Friedmann) focuses on cruelty and starvation and also on luck and kindness, but she especially focuses on courage. 

In clear direct prose she starts by discussing restrictions such as the forced closing of businesses, including her father’s, and then moves on to the forced wearing of the yellow star and the crowding in the ghetto. She describes the burning of books and Torah scrolls, the old men rending their garments and reciting psalms. She writes about the inhuman conditions under which they were made to assemble and were then transported, the crying babies, the food, water and sleep deprivation. But she was lucky, too. Even though she was underage, which normally would have meant that she would have been gassed with the other children,when she arrived at Auschwitz she was singled out for work because she had golden blond hair.

But mostly she writes about the terrible conditions and the cruelty: the unbearable cold, the unbearable heat, the illnesses, the blisters and sores, the beatings, the starvation. She talks about how whenever they arrived at a new camp the current inmates swarmed  around new arrivals, asking where they had come from, what had they seen, what did they know. Each group sought information about loved ones they had been separated from. She was determined to save her mother and endangered her own life on more than one occasion to keep her mother alive and next to her. She pleaded, she hid, she stood up to authorities. She is especially adept at describing what the emaciated inmates looked like, including herself, her mother and her brother. She paints an indelible picture of horror.

The memoir includes a useful map of the camps where Bitton-Jackson  had been interned and a chronology.

To see a web-based brochure on former Jewish synagogues (including in Somorja) and some cemeteries in Slovakia, click here.

To read a 2/18/11 New York Times article on current thoughts about the need for new kinds of exhibitions at Auschwitz written by Michael Kimmelman, click here.


People
Markus and Laura  Friedmann – author’s parents
    Ellie (Elvira) L. Friedmann – author
    Bubi – her brother
Perl Friedmann – sister of Markus; married to Abram Schreiber
    Hindi, Suri, Layi, Breindi – their daughters
    Benzu and Elyu –their sons
Celia ? – sister of Laura
    Imre – Celia’s son
Serina - sister of Laura  

Bonnie Adler
Gyuri Kardos
Ilse Grunwald
Yitu Singer
Lisa Kohn
Beth Stadler
Misi Lunger

Places
Somorja (Samorin), Slovakia
Budapest, Hungary
Nagymagyar, Slovakia
Komarom, Hungary
Dunaszerdahely, Slovakia
Auschwitz, Poland
Dunaszerdahely
Satoraljaujhely, Hungary
Plaszow, Poland

Landsberg Concentration Camp, Germany
Muhldorf - a satellite of Dachua Concentration Camp, Germany
Waldlager Forest Camp, Germany
Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, Germany
Seeshaupt, Germany
Brataslava, Slovakia

Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America by Kati Marton 2009

“Enemies of the People, Kati Marton’s seventh book, [is]a powerful and absolutely absorbing narrative of her parents’ journey — a series of escapes, from Hitler, from Stalin, eventually to America.” From a review in the New York Times by Alan Furst in October, 2009.

When the Hungarian émigré journalist Kati Marton (b. 1949) was working on her first book on Raoul Wallenberg she discovered through an off-hand remark made by an interviewee that Marton’s mother’s parents had been murdered in Auschwitz. Marton was shocked to hear this and to learn that she had Jewish roots.

Marton’s highly educated parents – they both had PhD’s and spoke several languages including English – were totally assimilated and had each converted to Catholicism. They were upset when she confronted them and they refused to talk about their Jewish backgrounds. Both parents insisted upon looking forward, not backward. Her father was a patriotic Hungarian and an Anglophile who had been part of a triple gold-winning fencing team that had represented Hungary in the 1936 Olympics. When she tried to talk about the death of her grandparents at Auschwitz with her mother, her mother’s eyes would well up with tears and the conversation never took place.

This memoir recounts Marton’s early life in Budapest when her two parents were journalists employed by important American entities: the United Press and the Associated Press. Once the Soviet Union made Hungary a satellite Soviet state shortly after World War II, her westernized parents who had befriended American Embassy personnel became more and more suspect. Eventually each was arrested and sentenced to multiple years in jail, but they were released in 1956 during what turned out to be a temporary thaw in relations between the Soviet Union and the West. When the Hungarian revolution followed months later, but was violently suppressed by the Soviets, her parents then applied for refugee status and fled to America where her father continued to work for the Associated Press. 

The bulk of the information in the memoir was extracted from files on her parents Marton requested that had been kept by AVO, the Hungarian secret police. Marton was handed huge files of documents which revealed information about her parents that presented her with a much more nuanced and complex picture of them than she had realized.  Along with interviews she conducted with people who had known her parents in Hungary, she learned much that her parents had never told her. For example, she learned that before World War II because of increasingly restrictive laws against Jewish residents, they could not get the jobs in careers they were highly qualified for and tutored students in English to put food on the table. They survived the war because they had false papers and were hidden by Christian friends. And she learned that her father had had a connection to the Resistance.

But most revelations were about her family’s life under the Communist regime. She realized that informers had infiltrated their household staff. That when they went to restaurants the waiters were informers. That when her parents were in jail their jail mates were informers. And an informer in the American Embassy was the person who facilitated their arrest. What was most upsetting were the files about her parents’ time in jail – how they tried to break her father to get him to admit he was a spy. How they arrested her mother to put pressure on her father.

The documents were, in fact, a gift to Marton. Her parents’ lives were much more difficult during World War II and during the Soviet occupation than their children had ever suspected. Now she understood the difficulty they had talking about the past and their desire not to inflict that pain on their children.

America was a wonderful refuge for the family, but Marton found through the Freedom for Information Act that when her parents first arrived they were suspects here too. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover conducted surveillance for ten years, concerned that maybe her parents were Soviet agents.

This memoir includes family photos and has an index.
 
 To read an interview with Kati Marton about the memoir click here.

Family
Paternal side
Erno Marton – author’s grandfather
    Endre (Andrew, Andre) – Erno’s son; married Ilona Neumann; author’s father
        Juli – daughter of Endre and Ilona
        Kati – daughter of Endre and Ilona; married and divorced Peter Jennings; married Richard Holbrooke
            Elizabeth and Christopher Jennings – children of Kati and Peter Jennings
        Andrew Thomas Marton- son of Endre and Ilona
    Feri – Erno Marton’s son
   
Maurice Mandl – author’s great-grandfather; possibly original name before Magyarized to Marton

Maternal side
Adolf and Anna Neumann
    Ilona – their daughter; married Endre Marton; author’s mother
    Magda – their daughter; married Laszlo (Laci) Pless

Places
Bethesda, Maryland
Budapest, Hungary
Miskolc, Hungary
Melbourne, Australia

In My Brother’s Image: Twin Brothers separated by Faith after the Holocaust by Eugene L. Pogany, 2000

 "Pogany's haunting memoir of his Jewish father and Catholic priest uncle, the twins of the title, presents an intimate perspective on Jewish-Catholic relations over nearly a century in his family's native Hungary." from a review in Crosscurrents by Sally Walters, 2001

Eugene Pogany (born in 1951) has a fascinating family story to tell and this memoir reads like a novel. After World War I in Hungary Pogany’s Jewish paternal grandparents both converted to Catholicism and their children, identical twin boys and their younger sister, were raised as practicing Catholics. Their father, Bela, had converted to make it easier to get a civil service position, but the church became the focus of their mother Gabriella’s life. One twin, Gyorgy, grew up and became a priest; the other, Miklos, married a distant cousin who identified as a Jew. Miklos is the father of the author.

Pogany sets up this story in great detail to prepare the reader for what happened next: when World War II broke out the priest managed to get to Italy where he was protected by the church. Miklos, the author’s father, was originally forced to work in a labor detail made up of converts but was eventually transported to Bergen-Belsen where his wife was also a prisoner. The twins’ father, Bela, died before the war. Their mother, Gabriella was gassed at Auschwitz. Several witnesses said she was transported to Auschwitz clutching her crucifix.

The author’s parents miraculously survived the camp and eventually they moved to New Jersey in the 1950’s as did Gyorgy where he became a parish priest. By then the author’s father had reclaimed his Jewish religion, and the rest of the memoir deals with the tense relationship between the two adult brothers because of their opposing views on religion and their different experiences during the war. Neither understood the other. Miklos was bitter because he felt Gyorgy had been sheltered from the war in convenient ignorance of what was happening to the Jews and there was minimal outcry from the Church. At the same time Gyorgy could not get past the fact that his twin’s soul was in jeopardy because he no longer believed in Jesus as his savior.

The author, a practicing psychotherapist, makes insightful observations about the uneasy relationship between his father and his uncle. Their relationship fascinated him. He was especially troubled by what they did not talk about, the sorrow and tension that mysteriously hung in the air. This ties in to a discussion of aspects of his relationship with his father. Like the children of many Holocaust survivors, Pogany grew up in a house with many silences; he knew that certain subjects – like what happened to his grandmother - were off-limits.
Pogany concludes by delving into the subject of grief. He travels to Hungary first with his family and then just with his father, locating the site of his father’s grief in Svarzas, the small town where his father had last lived with his parents before the war.

Earlier in the story, to bring the characters to life, Pogany re-creates conversations and imagined motivations between ancestors he had never met (his grandparents, for example) that often seem self-consciously novelistic. He explains his motivation in his introduction, stating that though he was obviously not privy to the private moments of their lives, he felt comfortable re-creating them since he knew that the circumstances surrounding these conversations and private musings were not fiction. However, in these last chapters when Pogany becomes a character in the story, when, as an adult, he tries to get to know both his uncle and his father, the language flows, the emotions and conversations ring true.

Pogany has woven a lot of the history of the Jewish population in Hungary leading up to and during World War II seamlessly into his memoir as well as research on the role of the Catholic Church during World War II. He includes explanatory notes for each chapter and also includes photos.

To read an interesting article about Raoul Wallenberg and his mission to save Jews in Budapest click here.

People
Regina Pogany – Bela’s mother
    Bela Pogany (former Popper); married Gabriella Groszman; had grandfather named Adolph
        Gyorgy (Gyuri, George) Pogany – son of Bela and Gabriella;  twin of Miklos
        Miklos Pogany–son of Bela and Gabriella; twin Gyorgy; marries cousin Margit, daughter of Elizabeth
            Peter Pogany - son of Bela and Gabriella
            Eugene Pogany – son of Bela and Gabriella; married Judy; author
                    Ben and Elias Pogany - sons of Eugene and Judy
            Klari (Ellen) Pogany-daughter of Bela and Gabriella; married Max
    Laura Pogany –daughter of Regina; married to Karoly (Karl) Schneider
    Louie Pogany - son of Regina
    Koroli (Karcsi , Eddie) Pogany – son of Regina
Bertha – Regina’s sister; married to Henrik
    Elizabeth (Elza) – daughter of Bertha and Henrik; married to Laszlo (Lester) Deutsch
        Margit (Muci)- daughter of Elizabeth and Laszlo; marries cousin Miklos Pogany
    Rosi- daughter of Bertha and Henrik
    Josi – son of Bertha and Henrik; married to Mariska
        Laszlo (Laci) and Kroly (Kari) – sons of Josi and Mariska
    Charles – son of Bertha and Henrik; married Helen
   
Gyorgy Szanto – cousin of Miklos Pogany
Sigmund Popper – uncle from Vienna
Sigmund Berenyi - uncle
Robert Buday - relative

Morris Groszman –  married to Rosa (his second wife); Gabriella’s step-mother
David Deutsch – grandfather of Margit
    Laszlo – his son; husband of Elizabeth
   Alexander – his son; married to Munci
   Arpad – his son

Bela Kun
Tibor Szamuely
Miki Maier
Agi Gelb

Places
Budapest, Hungary
Galgocz, Slovakian region of Austro- Hungarian Empire
Barand, Hungary
Kondoros, Hungary
Szarvas, Hungary
Szeged, Hungary
Kormocz
Esztergom
Hosszupalyi
Vac, Hungary
Bor, Czech Republic
Szolnok, Hungary
Szentkiralyszabadja, Hungary
Bergen-Belsen, Germany
Auschwitz, Poland
Raguhn, Germany
Theresienstadt, Czech Republic
Neu-Hillersleben, Germany
Dresden, Germany
Gothenburg, Sweden
East Orange, New Jersey
Newark, New Jersey
Irvington, New Jersey
Sydney, Australia