"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...











Remembering a Hungarian Freedom Fighter