Those Hungarians!
The Great Escape: Nine Jews who Fled Hitler and Changed the World
Kati Marton
Simon & Schuster, 288 pp.
reviewed by Allan Gould
Countries are different. They really are. Everyone knows that Poland, where the Jews thrived for a thousand years, was not the friendliest of places for its Jewish citizens during the Nazi era and even after. Most are aware that Denmark saved 90% of its Jews (although fewer are aware of how good Bulgaria and Italy were to them). But Hungary? Hungary is so strange. I've just completed writing a book with two Hungarian Holocaust survivors, who were treated like royalty by all their neighbours, both before and after the mass murders, and I could hardly believe it. Why Hungary?
The Great Escape: Nine Jews who Fled Hitler and Changed the World is a beautifully-written, often moving book by Kati Marton, a Hungarian/American author, born Jewish but whose parents hid that fact from her for years. And what a story she tells! She traces the lives of these amazingly gifted Hungarian Jews--four scientists, two photographers, two major film directors/producers, and a writer--and the fact that you may not recognize all of them is our loss- and our gain, when you read about them. The brief Introduction to the book is worth the price of the book, alone: two young physicists, Eugene Wigner (a later Nobel Prize-winner) and Leo Szilard, are seeking out Albert Einstein on Long Island in the summer of 1939, when he was vacationing there. They finally track him down, prove to him that the U.S. government must act immediately on creating some kind of atomic bomb (because the Nazis were closing in on that goal; thank God they had thrown all their Jews out of the country and considered physics a Jewish science. Based on these three immigrants' actions, President Roosevelt soon created the Manhattan Project, which led to the bombs which were dropped on two Japanese cities, and the start of the atomic age.
Whew. If science is not your forte, you'll be thrilled to see how two Hungarian-Jewish photographers, Andre Kertesz and Robert Capa, changed and even molded that art forever; similarly, in motion pictures, Alexander Korda (who produced The Third Man and many other major films) and Michael Curtiz (who directed Casablanca, one of the most popular films of all time, along with other classics). And how can we ignore Arthur Koestler, the great lover and supporter of Zionism (like another secular Jew from Hungary named Theodore Herzl, a few decades earlier), and author of arguably the most important anti-Communist book of all time, which is also a marvelous novel, Darkness at Noon? (I am almost reluctant to claim Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb and the man whom Peter Sellers modeled the character of Dr. Strangelove after- but he is one of the greats profiled here. Well, how about von Neumann, who was truly the Father of the modern computer?)
Now, name-dropping and ethnic-self-love get irritatingly chauvinistic, but I don't deny African-Americans the nachas [joy and pride] they get from Michael Jordan or Ray Charles, or the Arabs the invention of the zero, and everyone in the world loves to point out the great minds or great souls who have been produced by their nation or religion. Fine. What makes this book so intriguing and even irresistible to me is the way Ms. Marton captures the glory of Budapest and much of Hungary during the golden years between 1867, when their Jews were emancipated, and the first World War. As the author puts it, almost heartbreakingly, Hungarian Jews thought they had already found their Promised Land on the banks of the Danube, and had no interest in going to Palestine or anywhere else. (That great river would run red with blood and be clogged with tens of thousands of Jewish bodies during the Second World War.)
Nothing lasts forever, but the way the glory days ended for the Jews of Hungary so suddenly is horrific to read. By the age of 11, Edward Teller had experienced war, communism, revolution, counterrevolution, antisemitism and fascism. The brilliant physicist later wrote, "Having seen the end of Hungary as I had known it, I could imagine the end of Western civilization." This critic immediately thinks of that great response by Gandhi to a reporter's question about what the great man thought of Western civilization. "They should try it," he replied.
The Great Escape is hardly a must-read, but it is a strong reminder of what was lost to Europe when they drove their Jews out--and, by implication, how much more was lost when over a half-million Hungarian Jews were slaughtered in just the last few months of the war by the Nazis--and, yes, with the help of many Hungarian fascists. (How many potential Gershwins were murdered? How many scientists who may have cured cancer by now? Or how many average human beings, like you reading this review, who never got the opportunity to grow up, have families, and lead their lives freely?) This fine book is filled with memorable anecdotes and a deep sense of sorrow at how we (so-called) humans keep destroying this world of ours. And how interesting to read that the author, Kati Marton, was the wife of the late Peter Jennings, that very competent (Canadian-born-and-bred) broadcaster and long-time anchor of World News Tonight and the mother of his two children. Oh, those Hungarians!
Allan Gould is a Toronto-based author who often writes book reviews for this website, as well as attends and teaches at Kolel. (Visit his website: http://www.allangould.com)
