Genealogical Research

[Dreamwoven]

These notes, like that preceding, do not enable the writer to "go advanced", as is usual in the LitNet forums. I've copied and pasted the links into the text where this is possible (what a shame that LitNet has become so watered down!).

20 Sept 2012
Historical Context: My father was one of a group of Slovak Jewish relatives who fled during the late 1930s, a time of looming war clouds as Czechoslovakia broke up from the results of the Chamberlain-Hitler Munich Agreement*(see the map in the section on Resolution). Just how complex this breakup process was can be seen in the wikipedia entries on*Czechoslovakia and the Slovak-Hungarian War. At the time, Hungary was ruled by a Regent, Miklos Horthy from 1920 to 1944. The title of Regent was intended to indicate that the Hungarian Crown was being preserved out of the Dual Monarchy (Horthy was an Admiral in the Habsburg Empire).
The Horthy Government tried in vain to maintain armed neutrality,*but this was, of course, impossible under German domination. Horthy actually ordered the invasion and occupation of Slovakia. Even Poland obtained a small piece of Slovak territory as Central Europe began to disintegrate into the German vortex, to be followed by a disillusioned Neville Chamberlain announcing Britain’s unilateral declaration of war on Germany on 3rd September 1939. See the Guardian Observer Article of 6 September 1939: https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...on-chamberlain.

Who could have predicted that the Second World War would have been started by Britain and that the casus belli would be, in Neville Chamberlain’s words as he despaired of Germany respecting the Munich Agreement:
“How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war."

The quarrel refers, of course, to the German claim to the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia's mountainous border defences. There is also now much more information on the war in other respects. This website on Slovakia geneology research strategies is a mine of information, including an interactive map and much fascinating cultural background: http://www.iabsi.com/gen/public/history.htm

This was the first throwback to the long period of laissez-faire of the 1800s (the second throwback being the current one from the 1950s - Thatcherism and Reaganomics). It was the first throwback that formed the basis of Karl Polanyi's classic research on extremist politics.

The escape from Czechoslovakia: was made by a group of 6 relatives of which my father, Zoli - who was still single but in his 20s* - was the only unattached adult. The party was made up of two families: (1) Willie and Anci Weisz and their school-aged son George; (2) my father, Zoltan Kemeny and his older half-sister Joci (pronounced Yotsi) Kovacs and her husband Sandor Kovacs, both middle aged and with no children (all spellings follow my own capricious usage, being an anglicised version of the Hungarian). I only knew Sandor as Shani (S in Hungarian is pronounced as “sh”).

The intention was for all of them to continue from London to America. They had obtained a visa to Haiti by the bribe of a stamp collection.
Why Haiti of all places, I have always wondered. Was it not already a dictatorship under Papa Doc? In Wikipedia I found the answer. Under the*Monroe Doctrine*of US hegemony in all the Americas, Haiti was under a transition from US occupation to independence that stretched to 1941 which was when control of the budget was finally transferred to Haiti*(See under US. Occupation of Haiti 1915-1934).

It was, of course, impossible to cross the Atlantic during war-time so when Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939 this held the plan up until the end of the war 6 years later. For my father it held up the plan permanently, as he met and married my mother, Maria Kiss, a Hungarian Catholic in 1941, and with my birth in September 1942 they decided to settle permanently in London. Joci and Shani decided also to stay with them.
The early 1920s hyperinflation hit Czechoslovakia hard - see*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austro-...hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic.* In the 1930s Great Depression the Czechoslovak economy was in ruins with currencies losing their value.

As refugees were not allowed to take out anything other than the clothes they wore, they spent whatever they had on bribes to be allowed to leave. A stamp album was traded for a visa to America. It was common for people to secret two or three low denomination gold coins into their clothes, e.g. disguised as*crochet*buttons. Both Anci and Joci could crochet.
But if the refugees were taking precautions, so were the Nazi German border guards. Even as the refugee train steamed west, events were moving fast. They did not figure that there would be such a thorough search as to make this easy to detect. When it was discovered, and the guard asked whose coat this was, it was met with horrified looks and a stunned silence. The guard then threatened that if no-one confessed everyone in the carriage would be arrested and thrown into jail! Zoltan as the only unmarried adult member of the party said he did it, so he was arrested and taken off the train, though released later.

Where*this happened is impossible now for me to ascertain, but it was most likely on the border between Bratislava and Vienna, probably after the Anschluss*in Spring 1938. As a teenager I went via Vienna-Bratislava many times in visits to relatives.

The delay until Zoli could rejoin his relatives meant that they were stranded in London when the war broke out. They were helped by Quaker volunteers who provided them with donations of both clothes and some cash, as well as organised a medical check and work for those able to do so. I have no idea why Zoli ended up in North Devon. At first he could have been interned there as a citizen of a country at war with Britain. There is an evocative description of this in the BBC archive of*peoples’ memories of WW2. It is clear that formal internment camps were not an obvious solution. Makeshift arrangements using temporary storage in, for example, abandoned aerodrome buildings with mattresses on the floor as described in the preceding link was probably common. But being a citizen of Czechoslovakia rather than Germany or Italy it is more likely that he went directly into work in North Devon on the land. It would all depend on when they arrived in London, before Czechoslovakia was dismembered or after. There was a*Czechoslovak Government-in-exile*based in London and headed by Edvard Beneš. In any event, I believe Zoli picked tulips for a while. See*The Women’s Land Army: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_Land_Army.

So however it happened, Zoli ended up in North Devon where he met and married Maria Kiss, a Catholic Hungarian. This was why neither he nor Shani and Joci Kovacs completed their emigration to America. They stayed as part of a network of Hungarian-speaking Jewish and Catholic relatives in London. At the same time the Weisz family with a son who was the right age to start an education at Hackney Technical College could use the time in Britain for education and prepare to do a university degree at UCLA. George Weisz is the one remaining survivor of this refugee party (now in his 90th year) who made that fateful journey. I have been in email correspondence with him for some 20 years (this text was written down in 2012).

[tailor STATELY]

I've been enjoying your thoughts. I'm thinking these stories need to be attached to your family history in a less ephemeral way. I might suggest you get a free Family Search account... https://familysearch.org (or some other venue) and attach your memories to a family tree you create or other members of your family have created.

[Dreamwoven]

Thanks, Stately. Unfortunately, the links don't work so I can't create an ID to give me access.

[Dreamwoven]

Unfortunately, the links seem to be broken, I wonder if I am doing something wrong, I can't log in to the website either.

[Danik 2016]

I tried it out DW, for me the page appears in Portuguese. Seems to be ok but I didn´t post anything.Try changing the language to see if the problem persists.

[Dreamwoven]

Thanks for that tip Danik. I tried setting it to English but just get a blank page.

[tailor STATELY]

Sorry for the difficulty, I'll try some digging to see what might be wrong (the link works fine for me).

Here's some help from https://familysearch.org/ask/salesfo...676484&lang=en

Registering to use FamilySearch.org ( https://familysearch.org/ )


Issues Addressed


•How do I register for a free account at FamilySearch.org?

•How do I register for Family Tree at FamilySearch.org?
•How to register for an LDS Account or FamilySearch Account?






Information


To get the most out of FamilySearch, you need to register and sign in. Registration is free. The account is called a FamilySearch Account or, more commonly, an LDS Account.

If you have an account on LDS.org, you can access FamilySearch.org with the same account. Your username and password are valid for FamilySearch.org, LDS.org, and all other websites owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Before you start
•Do not register for another person. Instead, help the person register. Let the individual indicate a preferred method of contact and agree to the conditions-of-use statement.
•If you are a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it is helpful to have your membership record number when you register. You can get this number from your ward or branch membership clerk, from your temple recommend, or in the LDS Tools mobile application.
•Minimum age requirements must be met to register for an account. See Age requirement to register for an LDS Account and use FamilySearch.org (53870) for more information.
•​We recommend users not use the same email address for more than one account. See Registering multiple LDS Accounts with one email address (53775) for more information.
•If you have problems registering, please try a different internet browser, such as Firefox or Google Chrome.

Register for an LDS Account through FamilySearch
1.Go to FamilySearch.org.
2.In the upper-right corner of the page, click Free Account.
3.On the Account Information page, enter the required information, and click Continue. ◦Create a username and password that you can remember easily. Write down the information for your own records.
◦Usernames cannot contain a space or special characters. Use only letters and numbers.
◦Passwords must be at least 8 characters but no more than 128 characters, with at least 1 letter and 1 number.

4.On the Recovery Options page, enter either an email address or a mobile phone number that can receive text messages. You can provide both if you have both. If you do not have your own email address, see Procedure for obtaining a free email account (54448).
5.On the Personal Information page, enter the required information. a.Enter a contact name. ◾You must choose a contact name that is not already in use. The system suggests several contact names that you can use.
◾The green check mark next to the contact name indicates that the name does not contain any forbidden characters. It does not mean the name is not already in use.

b.Indicate whether you are male or female.
c.Select the country where you live.
d.Select your birth date.
e.If you are not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, click No. Otherwise, click Yes, and follow these steps: ◾If you have it, enter your membership record number. Entering the dashes is optional.
◾If you do not have this number, click Answer Questions, and follow the instructions on the screen (this feature is currently available only in English).
◾If neither process works, click Skip this step and remind me later. You can add your membership record number to your account later.

f.Enter the letters from the picture. ◾If you cannot read the image, click the top icon to hear the word spoken out loud.
◾To see a different image, click the lower icon.
◾If you do not see letters, try clearing cookies, cache, and temporary files. See Deleting temporary files and cookies from browsers (53752).

g.Click the links to read the Rights and Use Information and the Privacy Policy.
h.To indicate that you agree to the Terms of Use, click the box.

6.Click Create an Account.
7.Within the next 48 hours, activate your account. If you do not, you will have to start the registration process over.
To active your account, you will use either your email address or mobile phone, depending on whether you selected email or mobile phone as your recovery option. ◦Email: Go to your email account, open the message, and follow the instructions to activate your new account. If you cannot find the email, check your junk folder. If you are using email on a mobile phone to activate your account, be aware that the activation link does not fully process from some mobile phones. If you cannot use the link successfully, use a desktop or laptop computer to access the email and activate your account.
◦Mobile phone: On your mobile phone, find the text message with the verification code. Enter that code into the Enter Verification Code field. Click Verify.

8.If you receive one of the error messages below, the system found that an account already exists for you. Click Recover username and password to renew your existing account. ◦"We believe this account already exists."
◦"The mobile phone number that you entered is already used in an account."
◦"This membership record number is already used in an account."


After you create your account, you can sign in to FamilySearch.org and other supported websites. We suggest that you sign in to FamilySearch.org and select your settings and preferences. You can change your contact information to enable collaboration with other users, choose the newsletters and other updates that you want to receive, and set your preferences. To set your preferences, sign in to FamilySearch. Then in the upper-right corner, click your name, and select Settings.

Hope this helps,
tailor

[Dreamwoven]

Thanks, I still have problems registering, though. For some reason the website does not like what I am trying to do. Nor do they even ask me for an email address. Well, never mind, I'll just leave it.

[Dreamwoven]

Púchov, Slovakia, is where my father was living when Hitler
absorbed Czechoslovakia into the Third Reich. Joci took me there a
couple of times, though I have only the vaguest memory of it as a
town. We visited it at least once in winter, as I remember the Váh
River when it was freezing. I'd never seen this before, looking as if it
were steaming, so it stuck in my mind. I am not even sure I
understand why we went in winter, but we did. We must have gone
a couple of times to Púchov, as we also spent an autumn there, I was
invited to join a bear hunt but Joci would not agree to me doing
that, as she thought it was too dangerous, and once we picked
mushrooms. The most common we picked was cep, which in
Sweden is called Karl Johan:

"The French-born King Charles XIV John popularised B. edulis in
Sweden after 1818,[27] and is honoured in the local vernacular
name Karljohanssvamp as well as the Danish name Karl Johan
svamp".

Karl Johan is better known in Sweden as the founder of the Swedish Bernadotte dynasty, Karl XIV Johan, from its first king, the French Army Marshall Jean Bernadotte.

My father never talked about his time in Púchov, I have pieced
together what little I know from things he said in passing. As I
understand this, he had a gymnasium education but when Slovakia
became part of the Third Reich he was not allowed to work using his education. He must have had some kind of work originally that
reflected his level of education, though what that was remains a
mystery to me. He mentioned two trades that he developed for
himself. The first was that of stone mason, though what that
involved is unclear. The other was selling soda water. I only
extrapolate here from a passing comment he made once when he
was carbonating water using disposable carbon dioxide cartridges.
They looked difficult to use so I asked him how he came to be
making this. He said he used to sell the soda water in Púchov.

There is another aspect of this that I wonder about. My father
seemed to be what in Sweden is called a "dandelion child", maskrosbarn (the
dandelion is the flower that is used as the Swedish Greens to
symbolise the flower that grow up by pushing itself through the
concrete).

Zoli was the youngest child of the first wife of his father
who died in childbirth. His father re-married and his second wife
seemed to have disliked Zoli, as indeed is common in step-mothers
(see the Wikipedia website on stepfamily, especially the section on
stepmothers and the extensive fiction literature on this).

This would explain much about Zoli's feeling of isolation and his taciturn
nature. The same pattern repeats itself on the journey to England
where Zoli claimed the "blame" (being the only single adult in the
group) for smuggling small coins in the coat of one of the adults and
spent time in a Nazi prison that kept the whole party in England waiting for his release, by which time Chamberlain had declared was on Germany.
I must remember to ask George Weisz. Born in 1927, he would have been about 10 and may well have remembered the events
surrounding their attempts to leave for America, their application
for a visa to Haiti, which the self-styled "Regent" of Hungary,
Miklós Horthy and his government - see the earlier post on
Hungary - had to be bribed to obtain (with, I believe, Zoli's stamp
collection).

Then as now, the 1930s wave of neoliberalism brought
with it extensive political corruption and greed. See also earlier
posts on Karl Polanyi and the new poverty.

Another link I am able to make here is the role played by a Christian
woman who has always puzzled me. Her name was Irma, and it was Irma who told me of the Czech expression Strč prst skrz krk, (meaning “stick your finger through your throat” See the wikipedia item on this, and other Slovak expressions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Str%C4%8D_prst_skrz_krk. She had a grown son at the time called Roman.

I don't know her surname but she was very self-assertive and now I wonder if she had been vociferous in defending Joci and Zoli from the doubtless mobbing and hostility on the part of the anti-Semites in Puchov. (at this time Slovakia was part of Admiral Horthy's Hungary).

[Dreamwoven]

Kissin' Cousins.

Joci also took me to Hungary to visit my maternal relatives, all brothers of my mother. We also visited my grandparents in Rakamaz. For some reason the only relatives we stayed with in Hungary was the family of Kiss Misi. No relatives lived in Budapest, it would seem, as we stayed in a hotel. Misi lived in a detached house in Miskolc-Pereces. I have no memory of staying anywhere else. Misi had bought a Volkswagen Beetle and was inordinately proud of it, keeping it and its engine polished bright. He even gave it a pet name: "my Foxy", short for Volkswagen. Hungarians were always inordinately proud of their material possessions, probably because under communism they were starved of material wealth.
In any event, his eldest child, Manci (short for Margaret), was about my age and she was very affectionate. Every photo I have with her on it she is clinging to whoever she was with, and of course I responded, dazzled by her flirtatious charms. We were after all only 15 years old, but it was a summer thing only. Then when she wrote to my mother asking if she could come to visit us, fares paid by Maria, I encouraged my mother to agree. I thought to show her around London and who knows, we might have hit it off more seriously.
But when she came she was not the same person, very distant and critical of everything in London. She even made fun of the London accent, imitating the London way of saying "queue" instead of "thank you". It was a disaster, and I believed from her comments that she had met someone in Hungary with whom she was considering a more serious relationship. I had actually met him in my last days in Hungary.
She went back to Hungary and I never saw her again. But I did hear, much later, that her marriage was unhappy, and marked by violence and alcohol. By then I just felt sorry for her. I was always reminded by the Presley film Kissin' Cousins.*My brother had an almost identical relationship at an equally tender age with an English catholic cousin of ours, also the child of a Hungarian immigrant, Böbe, Maria’s younger sister.

[Dreamwoven]

The last visit to Slovakia that Joci took me on was to the town where my father’s family lived for generations. One of Zoli's brothers had traced the family name back some 400 years, first as German - Hartmann - and then after 1867 the Hungarian version of this, meaning Hard. Presumably the Hungarian version
became legal during the Dual Monarchy following the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. My paternal grandfather was a
proud Hungarian nationalist, and had named his sons after the Hun leaders like Attila and Árpád. He had a job on the railways as
a signal box operator. He resigned his position rather than swear the loyalty oath to Masaryk, the leader of the newly-formed
Czechoslovak Republic. He was running an old-style signal box, which today is a rarity, so while Joci wanted to visit the one where
her father worked, I suspect they would have been destroyed during the war. In any event we did not go. The signal box lever equipment
at the time probably looked like this. My Grandfather did not get his job back when it became clear that the Treaty of Trianon (1920)
resulted in the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My guess is that my paternal grandfather died in Auschwitz, in the
1940s, like all his other relatives who stayed in Slovakia.

The Political Situation: There was a period in 1938/39 when Slovakia was invaded and occupied by Hungary under the regency
of Miklós Horthy. Later, the ruler of Slovakia during the Nazi era was the Roman Catholic priest Jozef Tiso, under whom Slovakia
was a satellite state of Nazi Germany. The Wikipedia page on Jozef Tiso shows how closely the Slovak position concerning its Jews was
in line with Nazi Germany:
"The Party under Tiso's leadership aligned itself with Nazi policy on anti-Semitic legislation in Slovakia. The main act was the Jewish
Code, under which Jews in Slovakia could not own any real estate or luxury goods, were excluded from public office and free
occupations, could not participate in sport or cultural events, were excluded from secondary schools and universities, and were
required to wear the star of David in public."

The Jewish Code in Nazi legislation both in the Third Reich and its satellites is described in this Wikipedia page on Anti-Jewish laws. It
can be seen in the Wikipedia page on Slovakia's Anti-Jewish laws that these were introduced in 1939 making Slovakia the first
satellite state to do so, the first two being Nazi Germany (1933) and Fascist Italy (1938).
We went to visit the ruined and abandoned Jewish Cemetery.See Ruth Ellen Gruber. The inscriptions were in German,
Hungarian and Slovak, I didn't see any in Hebrew. It was an eerie feeling seeing a leaning gravestone with my surname on it in a
remote and windswept hillside in Czechoslovakia.

The First Letter from Levoča after WW2: The original copy of this letter is no longer legible, but some years ago I made some notes on what little I could make out. The letter was written in Slovak and dated 7/x, 1945, some 5 months after the Unconditional surrender
of Germany. It was written by Lajos who we met in Levoča on the last visit Joci took me on in 1956. Lajos was Hungarian and had the
letter been written in that language instead of in Slovak I could have understood much more.

The Holocaust in Slovakia: The Holocaust train (Wikipedia) gives this information under Slovakia:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_train

"On 9 September 1941, the parliament of "independent" Slovakia—a Nazi puppet state—ratified the Jewish Codex, a series of laws and regulations that stripped Slovakia's 80,000 Jews of their civil rights and all means of economic survival. The fascist Slovak leadership was so impatient to get rid of Jews that it paid the Nazis DM 500 in exchange for each expelled Jew and a promise that the deportees would never return to Slovakia. The decision by Slovakia to initiateand pay for the expulsion was unprecedented among the satellitestates of Nazi Germany. They paid 40 millions RM to the SS."

The Visit to Levoča: At a height of 2,000 feet Levoča has a beautiful setting, and at the time we were there (Mid-1950s) much of the
town was inside its Mediaeval walls, enhancing its beauty. There was much I don’t remember and much also that I failed at the time
to realise its significance. Lajos told us a lot about life in Levoča under Tiso and how local politicians would shoot any Jew seen in
the town from their upper windows. Perhaps there was a bounty on dead Jews as Tiso paid for the expulsion of Jews from Slovakia the
sum of 40 Million Reichmarks:

expulsion was unprecedented among the satellite states of Nazi Germany. They
They paid 40 millions RM to the SS.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Holocaust_train#Slovakia. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Slovak_Republic_(1939–1945)#The_Slovak_Republic_an d_the_Holocaust) for
further information on this.

Lajos and Jolan at some point fled to the forests of the Low Carpathians and survived by picking berries and mushrooms and
exchanging these plus whatever cash savings they took with them for food and barn shelter. Their daughter, Cita. Another Zoli, Jewish
and an engineer, joined the partisans near the end of the war and fought the SS Unit in the approaches to Slovakia to help the Red
Army approaching Slovakia from the east.

The Slovak Partisan Movement: See Slovak Partisans, Slovak
National Uprising, The Battle for Dukla Pass

[Dreamwoven]

This post gathers together the information I have managed to
collect on my parents background and how they met. It is an
interesting history of two people who spoke the same language
(Hungarian) but who lived in two different countries Hungary and
Slovakia - just some one hundred kilometres from each other's
home towns (Tokaj and Levoĉa, respectively). Tokaj is a few
kilometres walk from the village of Rakamaz where both my mother and her best friend, Nusi, were
born).
I have visited all the places in both countries, thanks to Joci, my
Jewish aunt, who took me as a young teenager to visit the people
and places involved. I am aware what a privilege this has been for
me and this is my way of thanking Joci for all she did.
These two countries have unusually complex histories. they were
both under Nazi domination during the war. Slovakia was ruled by a
Catholic priest, Jozef Tiso, who, as head of independent
Slovakia between 1939 and 1945 became a puppet of Nazi Germany.
How much he resisted or not is unclear. There is very obviously
much lack of clarity around the history of Tiso's rule of Slovakia.
Hungary was likewise ruled by a self-styled Regent, Miklós Horthy,
who was an Admiral in the Austro-Hungarian Navy. He claimed
Regent status on the grounds that the Holy Crown of Hungary, the
Crown of St. Stephen, should pass to whoever would be eligible as
successor to the last crowned head of Hungary - Charles I of
Austria, successor to Franz Joseph who founded the Dual Monarchy
(see the Wikipedia entry on Charles I from which the extract below
is taken).
"Charles I of Austria or Charles IV of Hungary (Karl Franz Joseph
Ludwig Hubert Georg Otto Marie; 17 August 1887 – 1 April 1922)
was, among other titles, the last ruler of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. He was the last Emperor of Austria, the last King of
Hungary,[1]the last King of Bohemia and Croatia and the last King of
Galicia and Lodomeria and the last monarch of the House of
Habsburg-Lorraine. He reigned as Charles I as Emperor of Austria
and Charles IV as King of Hungary from 1916 until 1918, when he
"renounced participation" in state affairs, but did not abdicate. He
spent the remaining years of his life attempting to restore the
monarchy until his death in 1922. Following his beatification by
the Catholic Church, he has become commonly known as Blessed
Charles of Austria."
I have visited Budapest several times with Joci. It is a particularly
beautiful city. The Fisherman's Bastion above Buda and with
extensive views over the Danube and Pest. is replete with images
and statues celebrating the old Hungary of Stephen I, crowned as
King in 1000 AD.
Austria-Hungary was dissolved in the Treaty of Trianon which left
the Crown of Hungary without a claimant. Admiral Horthy intended
himself to be Regent until that claimant emerged. Hungary was
particularly disadvantaged by the complexity of the Dual Monarchy
arrangement, together with the fact that while the other empires
dissolved by the treaty - Germany, Austria, Russia, were simpler to
keep intact (though by no means non-controversial) and Hungary
was politically too insignificant to worry about by the victors of
World War I. This website - http://
http://www.americanhungarianfederati...usHungarians//
trianon.htm (the link is in English and still works) - gives some indication of how strong feelings there are
concerning the dismemberment of Hungary. The Wikipedia page on
Stephen I (see above) is useful in showing how strong feelings are
still today over Hungary's treatment at Trianon. It is a profound
irony that this underlies the electoral strength of Jobbik in Hungary
today, and that it does so using antisemitism as a basis. There is
also probably an anti-German element in this, and the fact that
Hungary has not adopted the euro (see Hungary and the euro).
The Hungarian Second Army fought its way east from Hungary
alongside the Germans as far as Stalingrad. It was virtually
destroyed, suffering 84 percent casualties in the Russian breakout
from Stalingrad that comprised the turning of the tide in the Second
World War. The main focus of the Soviet offensive was to encircle
and destroy the 6th Army under Von Paulus, which it successfully
completed.
I've made the Eastern Campaign a major focus of my research,
partly because the approach to Stalingrad across the River Don took
place around the time of my birth. The main books I used were
Alexander Werth Russia at War: 1941-1945 (Pan Books, 1964)
Alan Clark Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict
1941-1945 (Penguin Books, 1966)
Anthony Beevor Stalingrad: the fateful siege 1942-1943 (Penguin,
1998)

[Dreamwoven]

I've come to understand that Joci was an important link person in our London life. She kept in touch with her sister Anci and visited her in Sheboygan, crossing the Atlantic on Cunard's Queen Mary. Anci did the same journey in reverse. Joci also introduced Maria to baking, as she*had a lot of recipes for continental cakes, like*sachertorte,*apple strudel,*rigo jancsi, Kugelhopf*- or kuglóf*(Hungarian) as I knew it - and*Linzer torte*(Linzer Torta) are all classic Dual Monarchy Habsburg era recipes.

Joci had a book of hand-written recipes in Hungarian and she and Maria made strudel with extremely thin pastry. Very difficult - I remember how they used to gently waft the pastry that had been stretched thin over the kitchen table by holding the flour-dusted cloth it was made on, to get air under it, so stretching it still further.

They baked for those who had come from Austria or other Habsburg countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and many of their customers were jewish (the northwest is one of the main jewish areas of London with Golders Green, Finchley, Hampstead Garden Suburb, Willesden Green). At busy times they worked though the night. Sometimes I helped by dropping some plum jam in each chocolate cup pastry form they made. Pouring the melted chocolate to fill the cups was much harder that I left well alone. Later I delivered cakes to customers by car.*I only took my licence when I was 19, and went to University soon after, though whenever I visited my parents I helped out by undertaking deliveries.

It was nerve-wracking work, and if things went badly they often had to scrap that particular bake and start again.

As their reputation grew and became better known this became their main work and major source of family income, especially after Zoli got too ill to work (making beaver lamb in the East End). Beaver lamb was made from sheepskins that were chemically treated to look like fur. The treatment process my father had to use involved formaldehyde, and working it in a small glassed-in area with a working table (I was not allowed in, of course). There is a description of working of lambskins n the early 1900s in this website:
http://www.oldandsold.com/articles09/furs.shtml. With travelling he had always had a very long day. He was very good at preparing beaver lamb, and the glassed in work area was jokingly called his “gas chamber”.

He left that job eventually and bought the goodwill of a sweet and tobacconist shop in Kilburn and worked there long hours, earning very little but always worrying about its economics. I cycled in to give him a hand as well as keep him company during this time.

For me, personally, there is a third reason. I benefited greatly from the many journeys Joci took me to Czechoslovakia and Hungary. That way, I also met many of my catholic relatives in Hungary, whom I otherwise would never have known. The last time was to Levoĉa, meeting Lajos and his wife Jolán, both were gentle and sweet, and had suffered so much during the war hiding in the forests. We also met another Zoli who joined the partisans, though I can't remember his surname.*The Slovak Resistance Movement including the Slovak Partisans had Jewish Brigades in it, though I have no idea whether my uncle and his wife, Cita, fought in a Jewish Brigade or not. They probably fought holding the Dukla Pass connecting Slovakia and Poland and through which the Red Army had to fight to reach Slovakia. See also The Battle of the Dukla Pass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Dukla_Pass

[Dreamwoven]

The Habsburg Empire:
is one of the few - perhaps the only - Great Power Empire in modern history to have been created and developed through marriages. Based on Vienna, it produced a rich multicultural tradition in widely differing fields of human endeavour that lasted 500 years - half a millenium: The House of Habsburg.

This thread will be about the influence of the Habsburg Empire on modern life. I became inspired to think more on this from having recently read Frederic Morton Thunder at Twilight: Vienna, 1913-1914.

Morton’s book explores many of the ideas that were spawned in Vienna - psychoanalysis by Freud and Jung; the Serbian restlessness leading to the assassination of the heir of Franz-Joseph that triggered World War 1; the unification of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Montenegro that was Josip Broz Tito’s achievment, in creating the non-aligned state of Yugoslavia. Sadly, it did not long outlast him.

Adolf Hitler also lived and worked in Vienna at this time. He was an Austrian ciizen, born in Linz. The Russian revolutionaries did all their early work in Vienna, (Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin), leading to the creation of the USSR after the First World War. The flowering of music in Vienna, both what we know today as classical music (Brahms, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart), but also of much popular music like the Viennese Waltz, and the work of Johann Strauss (both the Elder and the Younger). See also Tales from the Vienna Woods.

Finally the creation of the Dual Monarchy in 1867 (Austria-Hungary), otherwise known as the Ausgleich (or compromise), had a number of results that probably were not realised at the time. One consequence of which was the elevation of the Hungarian language to equality with German. This in turn resulted in the adoption of the Hungarian language by much of the Jewish population of the Hungarian Crown lands. This gave them what at the time was a major European language - Hungarian - instead of Yiddish.

Hungary suffered the same fate as Austria from the results of the First World War. But the repercussions of the ending of the Habsburg Dynasty continue to echo today, in the form of the Anschluss of 1938, and the movement the Freedom Party of Austria that Jörg Haider led and that even today has significant minority support. Hungary also has a far-right party Jobbik, which wants to reverse the Treaty of Trianon (1920), and in the 2014 election secured a million votes to become Hungary’s third largest party. It is not surorising that the Hungarian government watches this development with concern.

I have also been watching a TV programme called Jewish Vienna on Axess TV.

There are many links to relevent web pages, especially on Wikipedia.