Adam LeBor

Adam LeBor is deputy director of research at the Danube Institute. His latest book is The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance 1940-1945.

Sunday

Adam LeBor

Hungarian independence day makes me think about Britain

From our UK edition

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’). A group of revolutionaries seized a printing press and published the Twelve Points. Their demands included a Hungarian parliament, freedom of the press, civic and religious equality before the law, jury trials and freedom for political prisoners. A huge crowd gathered on the steps of the National Museum in Budapest and the revolution was soon in full swing. After months of war with their Austrian overlords, Hungary declared independence from the Habsburgs. But by summer 1849 free Hungary was crushed, after Russia invaded.

Sunday

Adam LeBor

What Margaret Thatcher meant to Hungary

From our UK edition

It is a most fitting tribute: an iron and steel statue of the Iron Lady in a city once behind the Iron Curtain. And not just any city – but Budapest, a place that Mrs Thatcher electrified with her visit in February 1984. The statue commemorating her 100th birthday was unveiled last week in the Millenaris culture complex in the Hungarian capital. The ceremony was both moving and beautifully choregraphed as several luminaries of the Thatcher era and her children Sir Mark and Carol gathered with Hungarian government ministers to commemorate her legacy. More than 40 years after her first arrival, the Iron Lady is still remembered in Budapest with affection and admiration.

Tuesday

Adam LeBor

Giorgio Perlasca’s Christmas in wartime Budapest

From our UK edition

Artillery boomed over the Buda hills, the flashes of explosions slicing through the freezing winter dusk. The crack of rifle fire sounded nearby and the air was thick with the acrid stink of cordite. It was 24 December 1944 and Giorgio Perlasca was trying to get to the Spanish Legation villa to celebrate Christmas. The Hungarian soldiers at the checkpoint said it was not possible to proceed. The Russians were advancing and were now just a few hundred yards away. Perlasca explained that he was a Spanish diplomat and asked again to pass through. The soldiers reluctantly agreed. A few minutes later Perlasca was inside the Legation building. Sixty people had taken refuge there but had somehow managed to find a Christmas tree and some presents for him.

Sunday

Adam LeBor

Remembering the Roma Holocaust, 80 years later

From our UK edition

On 16 May, 1944, as the first full trainloads of Hungarian Jews trundled towards Auschwitz, the SS decided to clear out the area known as the ‘Gypsy family camp’ to make room for the new arrivals. The family camp housed several thousand Roma and Sinti (Roma with German roots) people. Like the Jews, they were classified as racially inferior and enemies of the Third Reich. But while Jewish arrivals were immediately removed from their loved ones, Roma families were often allowed to stay together. Their numbers were much smaller and they refused to be separated. Claimant 3102250 finally received the standard compensation for her ordeal That day, the Roma and Sinti inmates, well aware of their likely fate, also refused to follow the SS’s orders.

Sunday

Adam LeBor

Wartime Budapest was a haven, then a hell, for Europe’s Jews

From our UK edition

One day in May 1944, in the Nagyvárad ghetto, Sándor Leitner saw an elderly man struggling to walk towards him. His face was swollen from beatings and he was barely able to stand. It was his father, returning from his interrogation by the Gendarmes. The Nagyvárad ghetto (now Oradea in Romania) was the largest in Hungary. Around 27,000 Jews were incarcerated there before being deported to Auschwitz. Leitner, a senior community leader, escaped to Budapest and survived the Holocaust. His post-war account of the fate of his fellow Jews is one of the most detailed eyewitness accounts of the savagery of the ghettoisation and deportations.

Saturday

Adam LeBor

A map of the road to Hell

From our UK edition

Few organisations reward incompetence as richly as the United Nations. Consider Kofi Annan, head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) during the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica. In January 1994 he twice refused General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda, permission to raid the Hutu arms caches, despite Dallaire’s warnings of the planned mass slaughter of Tutsis. In early July 1995, as the Bosnian Serbs advanced on the UN safe area of Srebrenica, Annan and several of his colleagues were away. The Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was travelling in Africa. Shashi Tharoor, head of the DPKO’s Yugoslav desk, was on holiday. General Rupert Smith, the British commander of UN troops in Bosnia, was on leave.