Posts Tagged ‘hungary’
Written on March 11th, 2010 by adminno shouts
The tragic story of the Jews who lived in Bekes County, a mostly poor and rural region in southeastern Hungary, 120 miles from Budapest, was grimly echoed to greater or lesser degrees throughout a large section of Central and Eastern Europe.
A once active and thriving community had been decimated during the Second World War. Most of the Jews who managed to survive the Holocaust immigrated to places far away from the region: Israel, the United States and Australia.
Only a smattering remained in Bekes County following the war and into the country’s Communist era. As the decades past, the number of Holocaust survivors living here dwindled.
Nevertheless, their story, as well as the history of the formerly thriving community, is still being penned, and by the most unlikely of chroniclers.
Istvan Balogh, a 22-year-old university student, hails from a non-Jewish though multi-ethnic Hungarian family. Despite his deceptively young age, he is the author of two books (in Hungarian) about Jewish life in Bekes country.
“Before I was even 10 years old, my grandmother would tell me stories about Jewish life here from the time when she was young girl. She recounted how her best friend, a Jewish girl named Rozsi Leichter, was taken away on a train, only to perish later at a concentration camp,” Balogh said.
“From that point forward, I was drawn to the story of this community that once live here amid my own community, yet was no longer here,” he added.
He started work on his first book, about Jewish life in his hometown of Totkomlos, a small community of 6,600 people, when he was a mere 13 years of age. His passion for the subject remained throughout his adolescence and his volume was subsequently published by the time he was 18.
Balogh’s fascination with the story of the Jews of Bekes County and Judaism as a whole remained so deep in fact that, at the time he had graduated from high school, he enrolled and was accepted at the Hungary’s University of Jewish Studies in Budapest, where he is in his third year.
He has just completed his second book, a painstakingly researched tome, about the Jews from the entire region of Bekes County. In it, Balogh goes into great detail about hundreds of Jewish buildings and landmarks within dozens of communities stretched across Bekes Country. He describes the location and the current status of the landmarks, whether the local councils have made efforts to maintain them or whether they have fallen into disrepair.
“Every weekend I would come home and plot out which city, town or village I would go to. I would ask officials in the settlements where the Jewish landmarks were. If they were in a bad state, I would ask them why the situation was this way,” Balogh said, retelling his experiences meeting with town officials who were often two or three times his age
“I also searched through local registry offices, traced the names on tombstones, spent hours poring over documents in local libraries, anything that he could use to find connections between those people who lived in Bekes county and who could help me make the picture more complete,” he went on to say.
Through these sources, Balogh was able to gather the addresses of Holocaust survivors and relatives of victims and former residents of the region. He wrote numerous letters and tried to establish a correspondence with scores of people who had a connection to Jewish life in Bekes County.
The reaction from those who wrote back to the young, non-Jewish compiler of their history was positive, if not enthusiastic, according to Balogh. From the many responses he received, he was able to piece together a framework of what had once transpired in this area, now mostly devoid of any form of Jewish life.
“The letters which came back to me were not only invaluable in the research I was performing, but they also helped bring in a human element which was mostly missing in my desire to learn more about what had taken place here,” he said.
Some of what Balogh has delved into in his book can also be found on his Web site where he documents the location of dozens of Jewish cemeteries, the number of tombstones situated in each and their present condition.
As for professional ambitions, besides the near certainty that he will produce more books, Balogh hopes to become a professor of Jewish studies.
Written on January 29th, 2010 by adminno shouts
For years we have followed the story of the Whiskey Robber with great interest. It was a reporter for this so-called journal who brought the story of Attila Ambrus, the Hungarian hockey goalie turned bank robber, to the attention of Sports Illustrated in 1999.
Now Pestiside, the must-read for anyone interested in events in Hungary (Hungarians included), informs that Mr. Ambrus has made good use of the past decade he has spent in the pokey by earning a degree in communications (by correspondence) from Hungary’s Dunaujvaros College.
According to the Hungarian tabloid Blikk, Ambrus starts his days at 4 a.m. with his artwork and then his studies.
He was given a 17-year sentence in 1999 after robbing dozens of banks in Budapest.
Ambrus is the subject of a book by Julian Rubinstein, The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, which may be turned into a movie starring Johnny Depp.
Written on January 6th, 2010 by adminno shouts
The mayor of the southeast Hungarian city of Gyula (200 km southeast of Budapest) is offering an historic castle in the center of town for the price of one Hungarian forint (or 0.056 USD).
Klara Perjesi told the Bekes Hirlap newspaper that she is hoping an investor can be found for the Almasy Castle which is situated in an enclosed tourist complex adjacent to a popular Hungarian spa.
The name Almasy will be familiar to fans of the film “The English Patient” in which Ralph Fiennes starred as Count Laszlo Almasy. The film was based on a 1992 novel of the same name by Michael Ondaatje.
The castle has been left unused and relatively untended for the past decade and is a burden on the city in its current state, according to the mayor.
However — and it is a fairly big however — the city will only allow the use of the castle under the condition that the prospective investor handle the costs of renovation. (The cost of renovation is estimated to be several million dollars)
The mayor said that the city is hopeful an investor will come along and renovate the property — which she maintains is an attractive investment due to its potential as a tourist destination.
The castle was originally built in 1725 and then reconstructed after it burnt down in 1801.
Written on December 15th, 2009 by adminno shouts
An “online marketing specialist” who lost his job last week at the Hungarian branch of Vodafone has become something of sensation on Facebook – with at last check close to 2,100 fans.
According to a report on the Hungarian business portal Portfolio.hu, Tamas Muller was sacked from Vodafone for making one witty Twitter tweet. On December 4, rival mobile carrier T-Mobile’s Hungarian network was down, a fact that was announced at @tmobilehungary.
Muller retweeted this announcement and added “OK, give us a ring.” You can read the infamous Tweet here (in Hungarian).
Muller had only been with the firm for three months, and the incident happened immediately after he was promoted to online communication director. In fact, this article announcing his promotion appeared the day before the less-than-140-character missive.
Written on June 15th, 2009 by adminno shouts
“Ouch! Ouch again!” I said to myself, my favorite conversation partner when I am out and about alone, as I was during a recent trip to Bekescsaba, Hungary (220 kilometers southeast of Budapest). . This is nothing more than a touch of indigestion, albeit a tad more acute than usual. It was most likely the result of digging – somewhat overzealously — into some spicy and juicy kolbasz (Hungarian sausage).
Back home I eat lots of garlic and wash it down with green tea – plenty to counter any deleterious effects from indulging in fatty sausage. Further, a diet concentrating heavily on antioxidants, I knew, surely must make me immune from serious ailments. Okay, perhaps my physique is not going to be mistaken for that of Michael Phelps. But at 43, having never experienced any illnesses beyond a common cold in all that time, why should I spend an extra few bucks for insurance on this trip. The odds of not falling ill on this journey were strongly in my favor. The expense was simply not worth it.
The pain, though still noticeable, had subsided later in the afternoon. I had a light dinner and turned in for an early night. By midnight, however, the pain had returned with a vengeance. It was excruciating. In fact, if there is a word that signifies a type of pain beyond excruciating, then that’s what I would use to describe it. There was nothing else to do but put an end to my stupid male stubbornness and ring for an ambulance.
Within minutes I was at the hospital and answering questions at triage. The pain at that point was so great I hardly knew my own name, yet the nurse on duty insisted on extracting that morsel of information from me, as well as my mother’s maiden name and my date and place of birth. I thought was going to ask me the name of the president of Botswana and who won the National League batting title in 1953 next. Why is it that wherever one goes the people at triage seem more interested in extracting information which at the time appears trivial when compared to alleviating a person’s suffering?
Alas, I was eventually wheeled into an examination room. An ultrasound indicated that I probably had appendicitis and – as there is no 24-hour surgery in Bekescsaba – I would be operated on at 6 am the following morning. Thenceforward, I was ushered into a room at about 2 am and supplied with ample intravenous injections of all sorts during the interim.
The nurses in the ward seemed to marvel at the curiosity which had fallen in their midst – a North American, by all appearances the first of its kind to be treated in the hospital, certainly it this wing.
I tried to look on the bright side during the four hours that preceded the operation: if a person needs to have surgery it best to be alerted to it and have it down with the span of a few hours rather than be provided a date months in advance. In the latter case, all one can think about in the intervening period is, “Heavens to Betsy, I am going to have surgery on such-and-such a day.”
The operation went as scheduled. When I returned back to the world of the conscious, I was told that I did indeed have appendicitis, and not just any old kind. The operation found my appendix had perforated. Burst. It was the kind of ailment that would warrant an extended hospital stay, I was told. How much was this going to cost? I wondered.
Though landing in a hospital has to rank at the top of a traveler’s worst nightmares – right after getting stuck with a middle seat on a transatlantic flight with an insurance salesman on your left and another insurance salesman on your right – I felt that I was in competent medical hands throughout the experience.
Perhaps the stay could have been enhanced by better food, most of which seemed to be feeble attempts at luncheon meat. But moaning about hospital food appears to be a universal gripe and one that is surely outweighed by the overall price tag of my ordeal, which totaled an infinitesimally smaller amount than the horror stories of other uninsured individuals who underwent the same procedure in less fortunate locations, ie, a hosptial in the United States.
