Hungarian General Béla Király
It isn’t often that one gets to touch history, so when it happens, especially to a historian, it is noteworthy. I recently came across some old notes about the Hungarian General Béla Király, who died in 2009 at the age of 97. He had been active in saving Jews during World War II and had spent several years in prison in the early 1950s, awaiting execution in Hungary, under the country’s then Stalinist government.
I was a colleague of his in the Brooklyn College history department in the late 1960s and he was a perfect friend and gentleman in the best sense of both words. We shared similar interests in Central European history and had worked with the same doctoral thesis advisor though at different universities. Most of the time for those of us with Central European interests, he was just “Béla,” though occasionally we called him “General.” No one who knew him well ever called him “Professor,” though he had the title.
I recall his telling me once about having been invited to a social event in New York, and then walking out upon finding it was really a gathering of royalists fawning over Otto von Habsburg, then the pretender to the Hungarian throne. Liberal democratic Hungarians were rare in those days so Béla stood out. He once introduced jokingly his 1956 adjutant, then also a refugee, to me as “the reason we lost the revolution.” To have kept a sense of humor about all that he had been through revealed a humanity that I admired then and still do. Later, we lost contact but I followed from afar his move back to Hungary and his post-Communist success there.
It turns out that my wife has a friend in San Francisco who is of Hungarian background, spends considerable time in Budapest, and knew Béla. I asked her to send him my best wishes, though I didn’t expect him to remember me after the passage of decades. Imagine my pleasant surprise when I learned from this friend that he had, indeed, remembered me.
As a historian it can be too easy to become jaded or disillusioned about the human condition. Béla has been a constant reminder for me of what is noble and best in humanity.
Bertram Gordon is professor emeritus of history at Mills College, as well as an OLLI member, faculty member and volunteer. His most recent book War Tourism: Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage grew from his discovery of German-language tourism magazines published for German soldiers during their Second World War occupation of France. He can be reached at bmgordon@berkeley.edu.
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