Other deaths won the headlines, but this month saw the passing of an im portant figure with local ties.
Gen. Bela Kiraly was a true hero several times over.
As a young officer in the Hungarian army (which was allied with the Nazis), he was put in charge of 400 Jewish slave laborers on the Ukrainian front. Kiraly bravely disobeyed orders to work them to death. Instead, he put the Jews in Hungarian uniforms and treated them humanely. For this, the Israelis at Yad Vashem honored him as a “righteous gentile.”
But Kiraly is best known for facing down the Communists several times in his native Hungary. After rising to the rank of major general and head of his nation’s military academy, he ran afoul of the Stalinists. Kiraly was convicted on trumped up charges and sentenced to death in 1951 — with the punishment later commuted to life imprisonment.
When the 1956 Hungarian uprising started, Kiraly was set free. Coming directly from prison and surgery, he didn’t hesitate to join the rebellion as commander-in-chief of the military guard — a position that would put his head back on the chopping block should anything go wrong.
Several days later, the brutal Soviet invasion rendered his task hopeless and, sure enough, landed him again on a Communist execution list. Kiraly and his staff — with CIA assistance — barely escaped to Austria, and then to the United States.
Though 44 and an immigrant, Kiraly decided to go back to school. He earned a Ph.D. from Columbia and became a professor of history at Brooklyn College, where he taught thousands of students and wrote many scholarly books in English and Hungarian before retiring in the early 1980s.
Yet Kiraly was far from done. When Communism fell, he was invited back to his homeland and, though now in his 80s, won a seat in Parliament.
Bela Kiraly was an inspiration for Americans and freedom-loving people everywhere — and a welcome reminder of what character really means.
(Source: NY Post)
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4 Responses
I saw this in today’s Post, and was glad to see it reproduced here, as hakoras hatov (recognition of good – i.e. gratitude) is very important. The writer of the original piece is Neil J. Kressel.
I personally, was previleged to have taken a course with him in one of the few terms (Fall 1969) that he taught at the Brooklyn College School of General Studies (evening). He went out of his way to be nice to Yeshiva bochorim and always checked with them to make certain that due dates for reports as well as exams were never on yomim tovim. On a personal note, several years later, I found a family Yichus Brief that tied my family in to Rav Akiva from Oven – d. 1496(Old Buda as in Budapest). He pointed me to sources showing Rav Akiva as a financial advisor to King Mathias Corvinus and was very gracious with his assistance.
Thank you for writing about this. As #2 says, this is very important. And #3, thank you for giving some more background information.
I just wish some people would tell children about ‘goyim’ like this, instead of about how they are bad and evil and hate us…
Daniel, unfortunatally, there are more that hate us than save us but you are right. Children should learn about people like this also.