More than Luck: Surviving World War II and Communist Deportation in Hungary (1943-1959)

MARIA CSONKA BARDOS, the granddaughter of Hungarian inventor Janos Csonka, shares her memories about her childhood in war-torn Hungary during World War II and her teen years under Communist rule. Maria tells of her family’s nine weeks in a Budapest fallout shelter while Soviet forces drive out the German army from Hungary. She describes the Communist takeover in Hungary when the Csonka family is stripped of ownership of the machine factory established by her grandfather. She recounts the resilience that she, her three siblings, and their mother must summon in the face of deportation from urban Budapest to rural eastern Hungary. And finally, Maria exalts in recounting the joyful reunion with her father, John Csonka, in 1959 in the free world.