Hungary

Gábor Demszky was born in Budapest, on August 4, 1952. His parents were economists; his sister Anna is a special education teacher. He married five times, and is a father of four. He graduated from Kafka Margit High School in 1970, and in the...

György Konrád was born on April 2, 1933 in Debrecen but spent the first eleven years of his life in Berettyóújfalu. His father was a wealthy iron trader, his mother came from a middle-class Jewish family in Nagyvárad, his sister Éva is a biologist...

Elemér Hankiss was born May 4, 1928 in Debrecen. His father, János Hankiss was a literary historian and professor at the University of Debrecen. He graduated from Eötvös Loránd University as an Eötvös College student in 1950, he majored in English...

Dénes Csengey was born on January 24, 1953 in Szekszárd. He was a writer, a poet, and a politician, who died young at the age of 38 in Budapest on April 8, 1991. He is known as one of the emblematic figures of the regime change in Hungary. He...

Sára Karig was born in Baja on 13 June 1914 and died in Budapest on 2 February 1999. Her parents were teachers raising three children. Her mother laid great emphasis on her children’s progressive education. Sára Karig attended schools in Baja,...

Mrs. Anna Heinrich, a widow from Kazincbarcika, started a hunger strike on Christmas Eve of 1981 to protest against social injustices, the debauchery of the rich, and the destitution of the poor. She hung a poster in her window demanding pay...

Miklós Tamás Gáspár, Hungarian philosopher, political commentator / public intellectual, was born on 28 November 1948 in Kolozsvár (today Cluj-Napoca). He married twice and had four children. His father, Tamás Gáspár, was a Transylvanian-born...

László Antal, a world-renowned economist, was born on 22 January 1943, and died on 26 September 2008 in Budapest. He graduated from the Karl Marx University of Economics in 1967 with a degree in finance. After graduating, he began his career in the...

János Berecz, Hungarian politician, was born on 18 September 1930 in Ibrány, a small town in Szabolcs County. He married twice and had three children from his first marriage. His parents were poor peasants farming on one or two acres. He completed...

Sándor Demján, businessman and entrepreneur, was born on 14 May 1943, in Börvely, a town close to the Hungarian border, today part of Romania, and died in Budapest on 26 March 2018, at the age of 75. His father disappeared during the Second World...

Vladimir Farkas, one of the chief officers of the ÁVH (State Protection Authority) in the 1950s, was born in Kassa (today Košice), then part of Czechoslovakia, on 12 August 1925, and died in Budapest, on 13 September 2002. He received his first name...

Szabolcs Bognár, domestic relations attorney and social policy expert, was born on 25 June 1947 and died on 23 June 1999 in Budapest. His father, István Bognár, was a mechanical engineer, his mother, Amália Tóth, a piano teacher. He had two...

András Hegedüs, politician, sociologist, was born on 31 October 1922 in Szilsárkány, in a peasant family with a medium-size land, and died on 23 October 1999 in Budapest. He lost his father at an early age and his mother took care of him and his...

Charles Coutts, a Scottish journalist, was born in Peterculter, a suburb of Aberdeen, on 8 January 1921, and died in Budapest, on 6 April 2000. As a British soldier, he was taken prisoner of war in Japan during World War II, spending more than three...

Béla Király, general staff officer, military historian and politician was born in Kaposvár in 1912 and died in Budapest on 4 July 2009. His father was a civil servant at MÁV (Hungarian State Railways), his mother a post office employee, and he had...

Ferenc Morvai, businessman, inventor and politician, was born on October 22, 1946 in Nagyréde. His parents were poor farmers, taking care of him and his three brothers. He had three children from two marriages. He finished primary school in...

Miklós Jancsó, two-time Kossuth Prize and Béla Balázs Award winner film director, was born on 27 September 1921 in Vác and died on 31 January 2014 in Budapest, at the age of 92. He was married three times, and had two sons and a daughter. His family...

At the beginning of May 1988, Lieutenant Colonel Ferenc Tóth, the head of the BRFK's (Budapest Metropolitan Police) subdivision and head of the Budapest Economic Police, was deprived of his rank by the Minister of Interior and excluded from the...

Elek Nagy was born in 1926. He began his secondary school studies at the Upper Commercial School in Győr. As a high school student he received the so-called ‘SAS’ military conscription in May 1944. He did not participate in the fighting but was...

Pál Romány, former Minister of Agriculture and university professor, was born on 17 November 1929 in Szajol and died on 16 December 2019 in Budapest. He was the fifth child in his family, his father was a control car operator and his mother a...

Róbert Gábor, social democrat politician, was born in 1919 and died on 16 October 2017 in Washington, D.C. He first encountered politics at the age of 20, in 1939, when he joined the Social Democratic Party and the Trade Union Movement. He wrote...

Gábor Fodor, lawyer, politician, former minister, was born on 27 September 1962 in Gyöngyös. His father Árpád Fodor worked as a judge and later as a lawyer, his mother Klára Révfalvi worked for the Gyöngyös City Council, retiring as a chief...

István Tilinkó, a Hungarian member of the working class was expelled from the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party in the late eighties for drunk driving. He claimed that the exclusion was unfair because he received his fine, but the police...

Péter Rényi, Hungarian journalist, critic and retired deputy editor-in-chief of Népszabadság [Liberty of the People], was born in Temesvár (today Timișoara) on 15 September 1920 and died in Budapest on 8 October 2002. His original profession was...

Ervin Hollós, state security officer, author of party-state propaganda materials, university professor, was born on 25 October 1923 in Budapest and died on 10 October 2008 in Budapest. His father, Leó Sámuel Holzschlag, was a master hairdresser, his...

He was born in 1946. In the autumn of 1989, he was on the list of congress candidates for the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party Congress held in October, compiled by the Szeged City Party Committee. Sándor Nagy was Secretary of the Party Committee...

Zsigmond Járai, economist, banker, Minister of Finance, former Governor of the Hungarian National Bank of Hungary, was born in Biharkeresztes on 29 December 1951. His father, Antal Járai, was the founder and manager of a local timber and...

Zoltán Nyeste, engineer, writer and political prisoner, was born in Mezőtelki (today Telechiu), Bihor County, Romania, on 23 August 1922 and died in Nadap, near Lake Velence, on 2 October 2001. He came from a family of Protestant pastors, his father...