News From Abroad: A Window into Hungary’s Past
 
For the fall semester, Robert Mohr, assistant professor of economics, is in Budapest, Hungary, with 15 students from the Whittemore School who are studying at Corvinus University. Over the course of the semester, Mohr, who will be teaching while at Corvinus, plans to keep the UNH community updated about the Budapest study abroad experience through regular columns in Campus Journal. Below is his third column.

I have been reading books that relate to Hungarian history. I started with Arthur Phillip’s Prague. Contrary to what the title suggests, the novel is set in Budapest during the early 1990s. It follows a diverse group of young Americans as they explore a Budapest in transition. Next, I decided to go a little further into the past and read James Michner’s, The Bridge at Andau. This book recounts the details of Hungary’s 1956 revolution and the exodus to Austria that followed it. It explains how ordinary men, women and even children could fight off Soviet Tanks with only handmade weapons. Finally, I picked up Fateless, a novel by Imre Kertész, the 2002 Nobel Prize winner. This story recounts the (partly autobiographical) story of George Koves, a 14 year old Hungarian Jewish boy who survives several German concentration camps.

The books give me many insights into the Hungary’s past. A sculpture along the Danube that commemorates to the victims of Nazi oppression seems even more powerful to me now. It consists simply of rows upon rows of empty shoes left at the bank of the river. When my wife and I visited the “Terror Museum” at 60 Andrassy Boulevard, headquarters for first the Nazi and then the Communist secret police forces, I had a vivid picture what had happened in the cellars that we now walked through. On Oct. 23, when we stood among thousands to commemorate the events of 1948, 1956, and 1989, we felt that we had some small sense of why these crowds gather every year and why they assemble in the spirit of solemn commemoration.

Most of all, however, the books remind me of how much I don’t know and how little I understand. Almost daily I see Zsofie, my elderly neighbor who always makes a point of kissing my son and giving him candy or a little present. Her life has spanned the time frame of all three books. I speak no Hungarian and she speaks nothing but. I wonder what she has seen; what she has survived. When George Koves returns to Budapest, he meets his former neighbors. Although he knows and loves these neighbors, George finds that he is unable to explain, to communicate in any meaningful way, what he experienced or what meaning he attaches to it. As I explore Budapest, I sometimes feel like George’s neighbors. I see how much the city has changed. I also have an impression of Budapest’s past, but I’m not sure I can fully grasp the importance of these changes or the meaning that Budapest’s people attach to it. I won’t give up, however. I have just started, Under the Frog, a more lighthearted novel that follows the adventures of two Hungarian basketball players in the 1950s.