"I am now only an American professor," Gen. Bela Kiraly said with a grin.
His grin was a survivor's grin -- a charming, elegant East European survivor with a sense of humor about himself and perhaps the end-of-1984 Christmas party. Smile and sip the holiday brew, for we were about to survive George Orwell's ominous year in which The Party prohibits free thought and exerts total control over Oceania -- Orwell's fictional masks for communism crushing Great Britain.
We were in non-fictional Brooklyn, however, in a real friend's home, and we were quite free to speak and think. I suggested the courage of freedom fighters like Kiraly was one reason we had liberty in lieu of Big Brother. His eyes twinkled at the flattery, then he demurred with his cheeky but humble protest that since the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 his freedom-fighter status had shrunk to mere membership in American academia.
I write this column because Kiraly, who along with Imre Nagy led the lone full-scale revolt against Soviet totalitarian control in Eastern Europe, died this past month, on July 4. He was 97.
During those 97 years, he had witnessed death, destruction and defeat at close hand. For Kiraly, Orwell's prison state was no fiction. He spent five years in a Stalinist prison, first with a death sentence, later a life sentence.
What is the difference between a Joseph Stalin and an Adolf Hitler? For a man like Kiraly, very little. Near the end of World War II, he faced death if the Nazis managed to arrest him. Hungary was a German ally, and Kiraly, a professional soldier, had a command on the Eastern Front that included a battalion of 400 Jewish slave laborers. The New York Times, in its July 8 obituary, quoted the Jerusalem Post from 1993, the year Kiraly was honored by the Holocaust memorial authority, Yad Vashem: Kiraly "put the 400 men under his command into Hungarian uniforms and treated them humanely."
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