When The Danube Ran Red

Opening with the ominous scene of one young school girl whispering an urgent account of Nazi horror to another over birthday cake, Ozsváth’s extraordinary and chilling memoir tells the story of her childhood in Hun­gary, living under the threat of the Holocaust. The setting is the summer of 1944 in Budapest during the time of the German occupation, when the Jews were confined to ghettos but not transported to Auschwitz in boxcars, as were the Hungarian Jewry living in the countryside. Provided with food and support by their former nanny, Erzsi, Ozsváth’s family stays in a ghetto house where a group of children play theater, tell stories to one another, invent games to pass time, and wait for liberation. In the fall of that year, however, things take a turn for the worse. Rounded up under horrific circumstances, and shot on the banks of the Danube by the thousands, the Jews of Budapest are threatened with immediate destruction. Ozsváth and her family survive because of Erzsi’s courage and humanity. Cheating the watching eyes of the munderers, she brings them food and runs with them from house to house under heavy bombardment in the streets. As a scholar, critic, and translator, Ozsváth has written extensively about Holocaust literature and the Holocaust in Hungary. Now, for the first time, she records her own history in this clear-eyed, moving account. When the Danube Ran Red combines an exceptional grounding in Hun­garian history with the pathos of a survivor, and the eloquence of a poet to present a truly singular work.

Red Danube intertwines politics and history with fly-on-the-wall glimpses of life spiced by a challenging relationship between the author and her mother, Erzsi. It tells of everyday events that might happen anywhere in the world. The stroke of a pen in the signing of a treaty, or a small change in the law, for some citizens meant the loss of way of life, or status, or security. These stories are about betrayal and unexpected grace, loss of trust and kindness from odd corners, loss of identity and finding a new one. The characters are fallible, everyday human beings brought to life through tales peppered with a wry humour.

Life in Budapest after World War Two.

Germany's invasion of Hungary in 1944 marked the end of a culture that had dominated Central Europe from the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. In this poignant memoir, Charles Farkas offers a testament to this vanished way of life—its society, morality, personal integrity, wealth, traditions, and chivalry—as well as an eyewitness account of its destruction, begun at the hands of the Nazis and then completed under the heel of Soviet Communism. Farkas's recollections of growing up in Budapest, a city whose grandeur embraced—indeed spanned—the Danube River; his vivid descriptions of everyday life in Hungary before, during, and after World War II; and his ultimate flight to freedom in the United States remind us that behind the larger historical events of the past century are the stories of the individual men and women who endured and, ultimately, survived them.

The State of the Jews examines the current predicament of the Jewish people and the land of Israel, both of which still stand at the storm center of history, because Jews can never take the right to live as a natural right.The volume comprises celebrations and attacks. Edward Alexander celebrates writers like Abba Kovner, Cynthia Ozick, Ruth Wisse, and Hillel Halkin, who recognized in the foundation of Israel shortly after the destruction of European Jewry one of the few redeeming events in a century of blood and shame. He attacks Israel's external enemies—busy planners of boycotts, brazen advocates of politicide, professorial apologists for suicide bombing—and also its internal enemies. These are anti-Zionist Jews, devotees of lost causes willfully blind to the fact that Israel's creation was an event of biblical magnitude. Indifference to Jewish survival during World War II was the admitted moral failure of earlier American-Jewish intellectuals, but today's progressives and New Diasporists call indifference virtue, and mistake cowardice for courage.Because the new anti-Semitism, tightening the noose around Israel's throat, emanates mainly from liberals, Alexander analyzes both antisemitic and philosemitic strains in three prominent Victorian liberals: Thomas Arnold, his son Matthew, and John Stuart Mill. The main body of Alexander's book is divided generically into history, politics, and literature. At a deeper level, its chapters are integrated by the book's pervasive concern: the interconnectedness between the state of Israel and the spiritual state of contemporary Jewry.

A detailed history of the Danube river.

The cross is one of Christianity’s most distinctive symbols, increasingly cutting across Catholic/Protestant and other denominational divides. Although the US acknowledges no official religion, a variety of both Christian and non-Christian denominations have flourished. Crosses dot the landscape, sometimes towering over it and at other times simply marking a grave or the site of a traffic accident, or providing a place for contemplation. Courts continue to decide whether it is better to remove long-standing crosses on public property to protect the separation of church and state, or whether removing such symbols might be misinterpreted as expressing hostility towards religion. Whether marking identity, triumph, love, grief, or sacrifice, the cross remains important in American life and continues to be the subject of works of art, music, literature, and political, religious, and social rhetoric, all of which this volume addresses in an accessible A-to-Z format.

This book promotes a historically and culturally sensitive understanding of trauma during and after World War II. Focusing especially on Eastern and Central Europe, its contributors take a fresh look at the experiences of violence and loss in 1939–45 and their long-term effects in different cultures and societies. The chapters analyze traumatic experiences among soldiers and civilians alike and expand the study of traumatic violence beyond psychiatric discourses and treatments. While acknowledging the problems of applying a present-day medical concept to the past, this book makes a case for a cultural, social and historical study of trauma. Moving the focus of historical trauma studies from World War I to World War II and from Western Europe to the east, it breaks new ground and helps to explain the troublesome politics of memory and trauma in post-1945 Europe all the way to the present day. This book is an outcome of a workshop project ‘Historical Trauma Studies,’ funded by the Joint Committee for the Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS) in 2018–20. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Based on a true story, the book tells of an English womans travels and experiences in the former Yugoslavia during the vicious fighting that saw its breakup. After the failure of her first marriage, in 1987 she moves to Amsterdam and there she meets and falls in love with Ilija Celar. They travel to pre-war Osijek and there Amanda experiences Serbian culture, relates humorous anecdotes, explores Kopacki Rit and other parts of Croatia. Following the election of Franjo Tudjman in 1990, Amanda and Ilija are made aware of the increasing tensions and are horrified by Croatian friends talking about racial purity. Following a sinister visit from paramilitaries to their home, they appeal to Josip Reihl-Kir the Osijek Police Chief, who tries to reassure them. Tragically, he is later ambushed and murdered by Croatian extremists. After witnessing the burning of Serbian and dissident Croatians books, maps and paintings, on the local piazza, Ilija receives a warning from a friendly policeman that he is on a death list. He and Amanda flee, in the middle of the night, to Baranja where Ilija becomes very involved in the defence of the villages and is one of the original 19 fighters. Fighting erupts in Beli Manastir on the night of the 19th August 1991. Meanwhile, in London Amanda joins the Serbian Lobby with Prince Tomislav, Michael Lees, and other prominent figures.She hurriedly returns to Baranja in October 1991, after receiving the news that Ilija is wounded, The story tries to convey the terror, so many Serbians felt when they heard Tudjmans Ustasha rhetoric and symbols he reintroduced from the Ustasha fascist regime of WW2. Then comes the nightly terror of the shelling attacks from Osijek, the arrival of refugees and the harsh conditions the people of Baranja must endure during these months.

Claudius Claudianus may be called the last poet of classical Rome. He was born about the year 370A.D. and died within a decade of the sack of the city by Alaric in 410. The thirty to forty odd years which comprised his life were some of the most momentous in the history of Rome. Valentinian and Valens were emperors respectively of the West and the East when he was born, and while the former was engaged in constant warfare with the northern tribes of Alamanni, Quadi and Sarmatians, whose advances the skill of his general, Theodosius, had managed to check, the latter was being reserved for unsuccessful battle with an enemy still more deadly. It is about the year 370 that we begin to hear of the Huns. The first people to fall a victim to their eastward aggression were the Alans, next came the Ostrogoths, whose king, Hermanric, was driven to suicide; and by 375 the Visigoths were threatened with a similar fate. Hemmed in by the advancing flood of Huns and the stationary power of Rome this people, after a vain attempt to ally itself with the latter, was forced into arms against her. An indecisive battle with the generals of Valens (377) was followed by a crushing Roman defeat in the succeeding year (August 9, 378) at Adrianople, where Valens himself, but recently returned from his Persian war, lost his life. Gratian and his half-brother, Valentinian II., who had become Augusti upon the death of their father, Valentinian I., in 375, would have had little power of themselves to withstand the victorious Goths and Rome might well have fallen thirty years before she did, had it not been for the force of character and the military skill of that same Theodosius whose successes against the Alamanni have already been mentioned. Theodosius was summoned from his retirement in Spain and made Augustus (January 19, 379). During the next three years he succeeded, with the help of the Frankish generals, Bauto and Arbogast, in gradually driving the Goths northward, and so relieved the barbarian pressure on the Eastern Empire and its capital. In 381 Athanaric, the Gothic king, sued in person for peace at Constantinople and there did homage to the emperor. In the following year the Visigoths became allies of Rome and, for a time at least, the danger was averted. Meanwhile the West was faring not much better. Gratian, after an uneasy reign, was murdered in 383 by the British pretender, Magnus Maximus. From 383 to 387 Maximus was joint ruler of the West with Valentinian II., whom he had left in command of Italy rather from motives of policy than of clemency; but in the latter year he threw off the mask and, crossing the Alps, descended upon his colleague whose court was at Milan. Valentinian fled to Thessalonica and there threw himself on the mercy of Theodosius. Once more that general was to save the situation.