József Antall

Origins and early life

József Antall was born at Pestújhely near Budapest on 8 April 1932, and his connection to this directory is his maternal grandfather István Szűcs, born István Frankl at Szirák in 1867 to Hermann Frankl and Katalin Steiner, a Jewish family; Frankl was baptized a Catholic as a child and magyarized his name around 1901. Antall was raised a Catholic, and this fiche says so plainly.

Work and career

It also states plainly a distinction that is often confused: his father, József Antall senior, was a Christian official who, as government commissioner for refugees during the war, sheltered thousands of Polish refugees including many Jews and was recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations — that is an act of rescue, not a matter of descent, and it is the grandfather above, not the father's honour, that places Antall here.

Trained as a historian, archivist and teacher, he took part in the revolution of 1956 as a student organizer and was consequently barred from teaching; he spent the next three decades in the Semmelweis Museum of Medical History, of which he became director, publishing on the history of medicine and of Hungarian liberalism. In 1988 he joined the founding of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, became its president in 1989, negotiated at the round table that dismantled the one-party state, and after the free elections of March 1990 became prime minister.

His government privatized a command economy, restored local government, negotiated the withdrawal of the last Soviet soldier from Hungary in June 1991 and set the country on the road to the European Union and NATO. He governed while dying of lymphoma, which he made public, and he died in office on 12 December 1993.