Árpád Göncz
Árpád Göncz · Civil Rights & Human Rights
Écrivain et traducteur, condamné à perpétuité en 1958, premier président de la Hongrie démocratique
10 février 1922 — 6 octobre 2015
Budapest (Hongrie) — mort à Budapest
Árpád Göncz is recognized among Jewish contributors to Civil Rights & Human Rights — Écrivain et traducteur, condamné à perpétuité en 1958, premier président de la Hongrie démocratique
Origins and early life
Árpád Göncz was born in Budapest on 10 February 1922, and the site records him through his maternal grandfather, a Jew by birth who was orphaned very young and baptised; his mother Ilona Haimann was, in the words of the Hungarian press that covered this genealogy at the centenary of his birth in 2022, the daughter of a Székely sabbatarian mother and of a Jewish father who was wholly orphaned and baptised a Unitarian.
This fiche states the limit of the evidence plainly: the sources establish the grandfather's Jewish birth but do not give his full name, and the family had left Judaism a generation before Göncz was born.
Work and career
He studied law, served in the war, and after 1945 worked for the Smallholders' Party; he took part in the revolution of 1956, helped smuggle out Imre Nagy's manuscript, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1958 in the trial of István Bibó. He learned English in prison and, amnestied in 1963, made his living as a translator, giving Hungarian readers Faulkner, Hemingway, Golding, Doctorow and the whole of The Lord of the Rings, while writing plays and stories of his own.
He was a founder of the democratic opposition of the 1980s and of the writers' union, and after the fall of the regime he was elected president of Hungary in 1990 and served two terms until 2000, becoming the most popular public figure in the country. He died in Budapest on 6 October 2015.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: https://index.hu/
This page is published in seven languages from an English source. The translations are reviewed, but a mistake can still slip through. If you spot one on this profile — a wrong word, a lost date, a sentence that says something the English does not — please tell us.
Écrivain et traducteur, condamné à perpétuité en 1958, premier président de la Hongrie démocratique
Source: https://index.hu/