The economist Gyula Jobbágy (b. 1953) is a former student and teacher at the Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences (Marx Károly Közgazdaságtudományi Egyetem, or MKKE). In the late 1970s, as the leader of the university club, he organized numerous political debates and tried to establish an independent student organization to serve as an alternative to the Hungarian Communist Youth League (Magyar Kommunista Ifjúsági Szövetség, or KISZ). In 1981, the party leadership of the university forced him to emigrate.
Jobbágy graduated in 1976 and found work as an assistant lecturer at the Department of Scientific Socialism and from this time also led the university’s Közgáz-klub. Club life became more intensive and eventful under his direction: important political officials held lectures, concerts were organized, and banned films were shown. There was great interest in the club from both inside and outside of the university. Initially, Jobbágy got along well with the party leaders at the university. He remembered in an interview conducted in 2004 that the party secretary asked him to organize the annual May Day celebrations, instead of the KISZ secretary.
This changed radically in 1981, when Jobbágy began to organize an alternative, independent university forum. From the perspective of party leaders, the Meeting of Students from Universities and Colleges in Budapest (Budapesti Egyetemisták és Főiskolások Találkozója, or BEFŐT) represented an opportunity to unite and institutionalize the dissident students. They saw the danger of this initiative and their reaction to it arrived quickly.
Before the meeting of BEFŐT, which was scheduled to take place on 21 March 1981, Gyula Jobbágy was charged with anti-state conspiracy, propagation of anti-Soviet ideas, and cooperation with members of the Polish Solidarity movement. Political leaders wanted to fire Jobbágy, threatening that he would never get another job as an economist or teacher in Hungary. Finally, he was forced to emigrate with the “help” of a scholarship to study in Canada. Jobbágy recalled that the secret police awaited him there in Canada and knew everything about him. In Canada, Jobbágy taught political science at a university in Toronto. Although he enjoyed living in Canada, he was nevertheless homesick. Jobbágy was rehabilitated in 1991.-
Lokalizacja:
- Budapest, Hungary
János Gyurkó (1952–1996), was a monumental architect, a member of Hungarian Parliament, and Minister of Environmental Protection and Territorial Development of Hungary’s first post-socialist, freely-elected government.
János Gyurkó was raised in Pestlőrinc, a traditional suburb of Budapest. He was the eldest son of a churchgoing Catholic family with seven children. His parents were respected intellectuals; his mother was a doctor (GP), and his father was a leading chemical engineer for Hungary’s largest pharmaceutical factory. Upon completion of secondary school, János went on to study architecture at the Technical University of Budapest, where he received his degree in 1976, and another on monumental architecture in 1983.
Gyurkó began his career in 1976 at the Institute of Construction Science (ÉTI), and in 1986 moved to the National Office of Monumental Building Protection (OMF), and the Urban Planning Research Institute (VÁTI). He received a doctoral degree in 1986 for his dissertation, “The architectural typology of early Hungarian churches of the 11th–13th centuries”. In the meantime, he took part in a number of major reconstruction projects as a researcher and monumental architect in cities like Sopron, Győr, Kőszeg, Szombathely, Sárospatak (the Rákóczi Castle), as well as in the nationwide research on the architectural heritage of the Hungarian Israelite Church.
In the meantime, János Gyurkó took part in a number of independent initiatives, such as writing and distributing samizdat papers, joining Duna Circle events by protesting against hydroelectric works on the Danube, or solidarity actions organized for Transylvania. Alongside these engagements, he soon became close with the samizdat periodical, Deadline Diaries – Transylvanian Monitor, and its grassroots movement, ETE-Transcar. Later, he took part in the international protest campaign against Ceausescu’s “Bulldozer policy”, through the organization S.O.S. Transylvania. (His maternal ancestors and relatives lived in the easternmost part of what was once the Hungarian Kingdom, Háromszék County, on Secker land. He remained closely linked to his childhood family, and this formed an important part of his cultural identity.) Gyurkó, a monumental architect, volunteered, along with colleagues at VÁTI and outside assistants, to research and edit a nearly 400-page document about Transylvania’s endangered, multicultural heritage in 1987–88. The expertly-written, richly-illustrated publication was translated into French, and copies were sent to the UN, UNESCO, the European Council, the Vatican, and the ICOMOS (the International Council on Monuments and Sites). Press conferences and presentations were also held on the subject, and a travelling exhibition was organized to raise awareness in Hungary and abroad of the risk of losing thousands of buildings of unique heritage.
In May 1990, János Gyurkó won a seat as a member of the Hungarian Parliament in the first free elections following the political transition. He belonged to a small liberal fraction of the conservative governing party, the Hungarian Forum of Democrats (MDF). In early 1993, Hungarian Prime Minister József Antall appointed him the Minister of Environmental Protection and Territorial Development. At the end of that year, Antall died of cancer and the government rapidly lost public support. The elections in spring of 1994 left Gyurkó bitterly disappointed with politics; he left his position, and in the midst of clashes within his party, he quit MDF. Gyurkó returned to his job at the National Office for Monument Protection as a monumental architect. In autumn of 1996, he travelled to a countryside conference and was found dead in his hotel room from a stroke. He was 44 and left behind two children, a few valuable publications, and a number of work plans he was unable to carry out.
Some of his works include:
Kelet-Magyarország Árpád-kori templomai. In: A dákoromán legenda, Budapest, 1989.
Gyurkó, János [Romlaky, Tivadar]: Hargita és Maros megye lerombolásra ítélt falvai, Kapu, 1980. március
Az 1990 májusi romániai földrengés hatásai Háromszék templomaira. In: Pro Domo Dei (Eds. István Varga, János Gyurkó, Béla Nóvé), Budapest 1990„Őrizd meg ezt a lelkületet…” Gyurkó János emlékére, 1952–1966. Eds. Bartos, Csilla – Nóvé, Béla. Hatodik Síp Kárpátaljai Kulturális Alapítvány, Budapest, 1997.
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Lokalizacja:
- Budapest, Hungary
Gyönyör was a very important person involved in the process of dealing with the Hungarians minority’s constitutional rights. It was not an easy task, especially because the main aim of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia was to shape a homogeneous country of two coequal nations – the Slovaks and the Czechs. The constitution did not mentioned anything about minorities or other ethinic groups in these nations. Thus, dealing with problems of other nationalities became a difficult issue, but also a very important problem that needed to be solved. From 1969 Gyönyör worked in the Slovak government at the Department of Nationalities. Soon he became the key figure of this department and had the greatest authority. He remained in the Department until his retirement.
As a publicist he wrote articles for the Új szó (New Word) newspaper from 1968 onward. Új szó was first printed in 1948 and was one of the few periodicals that was written in the Hungarian language.
Gyönyör was never persecuted for his activities. For a short time he was under police surveillance because some members of his family emigrated. Due to this he temporarily lost his citizenship, which he acquired again in 1955. Throughout his life he received awards for his activities, such as that in 1990 from Madách publishing.
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Lokalizacja:
- Šahy, Slovakia 936 01
Vera Gyürey is a pedagogue and film historian, who played a key role in the restoration and preservation of Hungary’s film heritage. She had difficulty gaining admittance to secondary school and, later, university because her father, who was a baker, had had his own shop before the communist takeover, and she was stigmatized as class enemy. She started her career as a high school teacher in Hungarian language and literature, and she worked at the József Attila High School for decades, beginning in the early 1960s. Despite her family history, she was a devoted communist, and she supervised the Communist Youth Movement’s faction in school and was alarmed by nonconformist behaviour. According to the recollections of János Kenedi, who as a student openly sympathized at the time with the 1956 revolution and eventually grew to be one of the most significant members of the democratic opposition, Gyürey organized a politically motivated public trial against him which led to his expulsion from the same high school.
Gyürey was a pathbreaker in introducing film studies in secondary schools. In the mid-1960s, she supported the launch of a film club in József Attila High School, and she struggled to integrate film aesthetics into the curriculum. In 1985, she was invited to work in the Hungarian Film Institute by its director, István Nemeskürty, and to launch a training for secondary school teachers in film aesthetics. Gyürey had support for her lifelong professional interest in film in her husband, director István Szabó.
Before joining the staff of the Film Institute, Gyürey had a career in pedagogy. Responding to a call by literary historian and cultural politician István Király, she started to teach pedagogical methodology for students in the Hungarian Language and Literature program at Eötvös Loránd University. She also became a consultant on this subject at the Ministry of Culture and, later, at the National Pedagogical Institute (OPI). By the late 1970s, she had emerged as one of the most dedicated supporters of innovative schoolbooks in Hungarian literature, when she had to confront orthodox communists, like the aforementioned Király. She endured keen criticism in public debates which lasted for years, and eventually she left OPI and accepted the position at the Film Institute.
At the Institute, she quickly realized that the preservation and restoration of materials was an increasingly pressing task. In the mid-1980s, film archivists worldwide faced the same problem, because celluloid films were beginning to age and erode. She saved many documentary films by donating them to the Collection of Historical Interviews at the National Széchényi Library. In 1987, József Marx became the director of the Institute, and Gyürey was made his deputy.
After the regime change in 1990, Gyürey took over the Institute, which was renamed the Hungarian National Film Archive. She served as its director for two decades. During this time, she focused efforts on restoration, and documentaries, old newsreels, and films were restored, including such classics as Zoltán Fábri’s 1955 Körhinta (Merry-Go-Round). She also significantly enlarged the silent film collection.-
Lokalizacja:
- Budapest, Hungary
Dr Zoltán Gálig studied at the Teachers’ Training College in Pécs and at the ELTE University, Budapest. His professional career is firmly linked to the city of Szombathely, particularly to the city gallery. He has been working in the Gallery of Szombathely since 1985 and was its director between 2000 and 2005. His main research interests include the less known, marginalized tendencies of fine arts. His main themes are the art of the first half of the 20th century, contemporary art and, particularly, the role of women’s art. Following 1989, he played an important role in that art confined to the margins during socialism could be integrated in cultural debates and exhibitions.
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Lokalizacja:
- Szombathely, Hungary
Göncz came from a middle-class Catholic family from Buda. He related to this social milieu in an ambivalent way. On the one hand, he read sociographies by the so-called populist writers (népi írók), and he sympathized with peasant radicalism, while on the other hand, he lived the comfortable life of a young bank clerk at the National Land Mortgage Bank (Országos Földhitelintézet). This was a privileged institution in the late 1930s and early 1940s which managed for instance, the subdivision and lease of confiscated Jewish properties, and Göncz was employed here from the age of nineteen thanks to his family connections. Göncz worked for the Bank as a lawyer beginning in 1942, while he was studying law at the University of Budapest, from which he graduated in 1944. Then he was called up to do military service, but he deserted and joined the antifascist armed resistance. During the Siege of Budapest, he joined the Táncsics Battalion, a partisan force that saved military deserters and Jews from the Budapest ghetto. Göncz took an active and leading role in the battalion, and he sustained a wound to one of his legs.
Göncz was involved in the resistance movement through his networks from the Boy Scout movement and, in particular, from the Pál Teleki Work Group, which was established in 1943. He belonged to the Hárshegy Scoutmasters’ Circle (Hárshegyi Örsvezetők Köre, HÖK), which according to his recollections in the 1980s was too nationalistic for his tastes at the time, but which nevertheless was an important environment which had a lasting influence on him. Here, he came to know Hungarian folklore and the works of writer and essayist László Németh, and he developed patriotic feelings and a deep interest in the peasantry, which he considered the emerging leading class in Hungary. Older members of the scout movement formed the Pál Teleki Work Community, a quasi-political organization which held seminars and lecture series on historiographical and sociological questions that were key issues in Hungarian studies. This group maintained close ties with the Independent Smallholders’ Party, which was forced underground after the German invasion of Hungary and the rise to power of the Arrow Cross Party in 1944. Many members of the group joined the resistance, and Göncz contacted them via the Franciscans, who had a convent in which Göncz hid for some time.
After the war, the Teleki Work Community became an influential centrist platform within the Smallholders' Party, and Göncz held relatively high party functions. He led the youth faction, and he then served as personal secretary to party president Béla Kovács. After Kovács was arrested by the Soviet political police, Göncz became the secretary of the party representatives in the Parliament. As Göncz explained in his oral history interviews later, like Kovács, there were tensions within the party between him and, on the one side, the Fórum Klub, which Göncz described as an embedded communist cell in the Smallholders’ Party, and, on the other, the most outspokenly anti-German Hungarian Brotherhood Community (Magyar Testvéri Közösség), which, according to Göncz, maintained racist views. After Kovács was taken by the Soviets, Göncz was regularly interrogated by the various political polices. Sometimes the violent process lasted for weeks, and he was kept in prison under harsh conditions. The communists tried to turn him into an agent, but they failed.
At the same time, in 1949, the Smallholders’ Party was practically dissolved, and Göncz lost his job. He had difficulty finding a new one. Finally, through a former fellow scout, he got a job as a welder and iron worker, and, in 1950, he was hired by the Soil Improvement Enterprise (Talajjavító Vállalat) in Budapest. In 1952, he also enrolled in the University of Agronomy in Gödöllő, though years later he was not permitted to finish because of his involvement in the 1956 Revolution. In the early 1950s, Göncz focused on his job and family and was not involved in any dissident activity, although the political police kept him under constant surveillance. He was generally not interested in the reform communist movement around Imre Nagy, which he viewed as an internal communist issue in which he took little interest. The only somewhat significant political move on his side was that he hired the sons of people who had been interned in the Recsk Forced Labor Camp. In the summer of 1956, former members of the Smallholders’ Party reached out to Göncz. His first public appearance took place on 17 October 1956, when he criticized the Soviet agrarian model at one of the debates of the Petőfi Circle, a forum which has been generally considered important in the emergence of a revolutionary atmosphere.
In 1956 Göncz was not particularly well-informed. As he had been separated from political issues for years, it took some time for him to assess the power relations and the exact positions of the protagonists. As far as he could recall, this did not happen until 27–28 October, days after the outbreak of the revolution. Göncz played a role in making Béla Kovács, who was in complete retirement at the time, part of the uprising. However, in his assessment, the reestablished Smallholders Party leaned too far to the right, so he joined the Peasant Alliance instead, a former ally of the Smallholders which was also reestablished. After the revolution was crushed by the Soviet army, he played a key role in setting Indian diplomacy in motion to mediate between the Hungarian political elite and the Soviets. In February 1957, he was involved in the preparations to smuggle Imre Nagy’s memorandum “In Defense of the Hungarian People” out of the country. When people began to be arrested, he helped organize aid for the families of those who had been apprehended. Göncz himself was arrested in May, along with political thinker and politician István Bibó, with whom Göncz had worked on a political solution to the conflict, which they sent to the Soviets via the Indian ambassador. They were both sentenced to life in prison.
In 1960, he participated in the prison hunger strike, and the authorities blamed him and Bibó, among others, for organizing the protest. They were both released in 1963 in accordance with a general amnesty (which, however, did not apply to everyone, as the regime kept some people in prison on the grounds that they were common criminals, and not political criminals). In prison, he taught himself English and worked as a translator, and when he was released, this became his official profession. His former fellow prisoners provided him with work. The first novel he translated as a free man was William Golding's The Spire, which was published by Európa in 1965, where literary critic Elemér Hankiss served as an editor. This was followed by a series of classics, from works by Faulkner to works by Updike and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Göncz wrote his first play, entitled Rácsok (Barriers), in 1968. It is a reflection on his prison experiences, but it is set in Latin America. At the advice of friends, he published it only ten years later. His first work of long fiction was the novel Sarusok (The Sandaled Ones), which was published in 1974. The novel is a historical parable set in the Middle Ages. By telling the story of the heretical movement of the Waldensians, Göncz reflects on the relationship between the individual and political power.
His first trip to a foreign country during the socialist era was to Warsaw. In 1979, Sarusok was published in Polish as Trepkarze by Publishing Institut Pax (Instytut Wydawniczy Pax), and the Hungarian Writer's Union let Göncz visit Poland for two weeks. That year, he was actively involved in the publication of the book in memory of István Bibó, which was not allowed to be published officially, so it was released as a samizdat. Göncz and his former prisoner friend Ferenc Donáth played a mediating role among the members of the very heterogeneous group of authors. Göncz was an ideal figure to play this role, since he did belonged neither to the populist writers nor to the urbanist camp, two antagonistic groups which have been prominent in Hungarian intellectual history.
Göncz’s maintained this in-between position throughout the 1980s. He was an acceptable and appreciated figure for the most diverse figures in the dissident political scene. In 1982, the American-Hungarian Cultural Society invited him to give a lecture tour thanks to his friend, president of the society Tibor Hám, whom he knew from the Teleki Work Group. Two years later, he was one of the recipients of a Soros Fellowship. These five months made a deep impression on Göncz, and he felt liberated.
In October 1988, former fellow Smallholder József Bognár invited Göncz to reestablish the party, and Göncz joined the talks. While Tivadar Pártay (also a former Smallholder) firmly supported reestablishing the party, Göncz belonged to another faction led by Vince Vörös and soon-to-be prime minister József Antall. This faction suggested not provoking the communist party by relaunching a party, and instead it established the Béla Kovács Political Society. Göncz sensed ideological differences between himself and the dominant voices among the Smallholders, so he gravitated towards the democratic opposition, with whom he maintained good relationship.
In the early 1980s, attempts were made by the democratic opposition to revisit the history of 1956. Gyula Kozák organized a roundtable for participants in the revolution, a talk that to which Göncz contributed, and in 1986, an underground conference was held on the topic. In June 1988, Göncz was a founding member of the Committee for Historical Justice (Történelmi Igazságtétel Bizottsága), which promoted a fair revision of the history of the revolution. Earlier, in May 1988, he had also been a founding member of the Network of Free Initiatives, an umbrella organization of the various groups of the democratic opposition. Göncz knew several key figures of the older generation of the democratic opposition from prison. When Göncz became disappointed in the Smallholders, he joined the Alliance of Free Democrats (Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége) in November 1988, the party of the democratic opposition.
In June 1989, Göncz played a prominent role in the preparations for the reburial of Imre Nagy and his fellow martyrs of the 1956 revolution, which was initiated by the Committee for Historical Justice. Like the publication of the Bibó book, this was again an event that brought together people with diverse political views. Göncz’s election to serve as president of the Writer's Union in November 1989 indicated his growing reputation. After the first free parliamentary elections, he became the President of the Parliament in May 1990 and then the President of the Hungarian Republic in August 1990. He held this position for ten years.
As he explained in a 1988 interview, Göncz felt that he had lived in internal exile during the decades of the socialist system, and he proudly remembered not having made any compromises to further his career. For him, the communist party was monolithic: “for me, after all, [Imre] Pozsgay and Rákosi were profoundly the same," as Göncz put it.
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Lokalizacja:
- Budapest, Hungary
Zsuzsanna Göntér, the widow of the late President Árpád Göncz, was born in 1923 in the city of Győr in western Hungary. She started elementary school in Győr and then a few years later moved with her family to Budapest, where she completed grammar school in 1942 at a Catholic lyceum maintained by the order of Saint Ursula’s Daughters. As one of the first female university students in Hungary, she began to pursue studies at the Budapest University of Economics, where, two years later, she completed a BA degree in social nursing.
She met Árpád Göncz as a secondary school student, and they were married in January 1947. Since their wedding until the spring of 1990, when Árpád was elected President of Hungary, they lived in the same residential building in Óbuda with their four children. Their youngest child was only six months old when, in May 1957, Árpád Göncz was arrested, tried, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. Until he was released in accordance with the general amnesty of spring 1963, his wife Göntér had a hard life taking care of their four children for more than six years on her own.
As a trained social worker and nurse, she has worked as a professional helper for the disabled and the poor, especially for children. It is thus no wonder that she, as a “first lady” of Hungary, felt it her duty to support people in need of this kind of assistance by furthering the establishment of charitable civilian organizations. In 1993, together with her husband, she set up the “Hand in Hand Foundation” to promote the provision of special care for the disabled and for children with mental disorders. In the meantime, she took an active role in framing new Hungarian legislation in order to ensure the rights of the disabled and minors with mental disorders. Until 2014, she actively chaired the Foundation, but she then transferred her place to her younger daughter, Annamária.
In late 2015, her husband passed away. Since then, she has been the only standard dweller in the ex-president’s residency at Vérhalom Square in Budapest.
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Lokalizacja:
- Budapest, Hungary