The Survivor's Song: Under the hammer and sickle - Budapest to Montreal - Softcover

Fodor, Andrew

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9780988060463: The Survivor's Song: Under the hammer and sickle - Budapest to Montreal

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0988060469 ISBN 13: 9780988060463

Publisher: Thomas C. Fodor, 2013

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The first book of this two-volume series (Unarmed Soldiers: Budapest to Stalingrad and back) follows the author's three-years on the road with the Hungarian forced labor battalions during WWII, taking him from Budapest to the area of Stalingrad. Armed with only his wits, a smattering of courage, some unexpected help and lots of luck, he survived the brutal conditions with his joie de vivre and sense of humor intact. He had simply not allowed the fascists to break his spirit in the time of war, and, as he demonstrates in this volume, he certainly wasn't going to let the incompetent post-war communists do so either. In this volume, continuing to use the skill and inventiveness that helped him survive the war, he dabbles in forgery, distilling illegal liquor, commercial art, music, journalism, accountancy and much literary ado before finally realizing that the Great People's Republic didn't really need his expertise in order to make stupid decisions about the freshly-minted communist economy. These two books form a continuous stream but divide quite naturally into two sections, just as the history of Hungary did during and after the war. The reader should be aware that the events described at the beginning of this volume occur on the very next day after the previous book ends. Nevertheless, the two volumes can be read independently.

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