Hungarian independence day makes me think about Britain
One of the most important and dramatic dates in Hungarian and European history is 15 March 1848. The dashing poet Sandor Petofi recited the stirring ‘Nemzeti dal’ (‘National song’).…
What Margaret Thatcher meant to Hungary
It is a most fitting tribute: an iron and steel statue of the Iron Lady in a city once behind…
Giorgio Perlasca’s Christmas in wartime Budapest
Artillery boomed over the Buda hills, the flashes of explosions slicing through the freezing winter dusk. The crack of rifle…
Remembering the Roma Holocaust, 80 years later
On 16 May, 1944, as the first full trainloads of Hungarian Jews trundled towards Auschwitz, the SS decided to clear…
Wartime Budapest was a haven, then a hell, for Europe’s Jews
One day in May 1944, in the Nagyvárad ghetto, Sándor Leitner saw an elderly man struggling to walk towards him.…
