My Uncles

Here's everything I remember my father telling me about his brother Julius:
Julius was evil, my father hated him, and once when they were going to church Julius pushed my dad out of the car into a mud puddle. Period.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, the rest of this blog entry will focus on my mother's brothers. (I'll cover my aunts in a separate entry.)
I expect that you'll find some of this stuff hard to believe. That's perfectly understandable. It just means you haven't known very many Hungarians :-)



This picture was taken at my grandfather's funeral. He died of a heart attack soon after his middle son Mathias was killed in combat. From left to right are:
My mother Olgamaria - the youngest - about 28 at the time
Julius - the oldest - a full colonel
Annette - the oldest daughter - about 48 at the time
Janos's wife - I don't recall her name
Janos - the youngest son, a surgeon and recent military inductee
Ilona - the 2nd daughter
Missing from the picture is Margarete (the 3rd daughter), who was teaching in Germany at the time.

Julius was the oldest. He was (obviously) heavily decorated. It is unclear whether all those medals were the result of bravery, stupidity or insanity - from what I've heard it was a little bit of each. Despite being a career officer he wasn't exactly the military type. He had issues with authority and often bent the rules - sometimes past the breaking point. If he had not been demoted so frequently he would have probably been a general. My favorite story:
During WWI he was a junior officer on the eastern front. One day he was on patrol with a few men when they heard gunfire in the distance. As the patrol got closer they saw a Hungarian unit pinned down by a superior Russian force next to the road. While his sergeants were debating if there was anything they could do my uncle got up and walked down the middle of the road towards the Russians. When he got close enough he started jumping up and down waving his arms and screaming obscenities at them. Then he ran like hell... The Russians (figuring he must have a sizable force behind him to dare to pull a stunt like that) retreated under fire. And that's how my uncle got one of those medals.
My mother also recalled going to a track and field event with Julius when she was a child. They were watching some high jumpers and he wasn't impressed. He told her that (based on personal experience) when people are firing machine guns at you anyone can hurdle a 6 foot obstacle...
He died in combat near the end of WWII.

Mathias was definitely my mother's favorite sibling. I wish I had paid more attention to her stories about him. A couple of entries back I mentioned my mother jumping out of a loft and landing on a pig. After mulling it over a bit I now recall that Mathias had made a set of wings and talked my mother into trying them out. The pig was just in the right place at the right time. (I guess it was the wrong place from the pig's perspective...)
Another story:
Mathias and his fellow officers used to play this drinking game. A number of them would go to a small dark building where they'd go to the center one at a time, pull their service pistol, announce where they were going to shoot (e.g. the northwest corner) count to five (as everyone cleared that location) and fire. Then they'd all take another drink. When it was Mathias' turn, he said he was too drunk to have any idea where he was going to shoot and started counting. Five seconds of pure chaos ensued - people were cramming themselves through the doors and jumping out of windows. And he wasn't kidding. Nobody was hurt, but he wasn't allowed to play anymore :-)
He was the first of the brothers to be killed in combat.

My mother never talked much about her brother Janos. He was a few years older than her and I suspect that he was too serious for my mother's liking... I have met both of Janos' children and I know his son quite well. His daughter and one of his granddaughters are doctors, and another granddaughter, now a nurse, spent a year with us in Oregon when she was in high school.
My father apparently knew Janos (who specialized in athletic injuries) during the war and had a tremendous amount of respect for him. He told me that a Nazi official (whose job it was to 'recruit' high profile Hungarians) came to Janos to see if he could get his support. The exchange went something like this:
Nazi official - "If you could have any position, what would it be?"
Janos - "I'd like to be the head of the sports medicine society."
Nazi official - "But... you are the head of the sports medicine society..."
Janos - "Exactly."
As I mentioned in my prior entry, Janos stayed behind with his patients during the Russian advance and was never seen again.

So the sisters (who were all childless at that point) fled the Russians while all of the wives and children of the brothers stayed behind. I suppose the thought of walking 500 miles during the winter with children would have been a bit much... And that's how it ended up after the war. All the sisters in Germany, all the brothers deceased and their families remaining in Hungary andRomania.