NOTES 1. See interview in Candid
Science III: More Conversations with Famous Chemists, by Istvan
Hargittai
(Imperial College Press, London, 2003, p. 117). 2. George Olah's
autobiographical
memoirs, A Life of Magic Chemistry (Wiley Interscience,
NY,
2001, p. 45), briefly describes the last months of World War II
in
Hungary. (It was during this period that the Nazis attempted to
deport
the Jewish population of Budapest.) He states "I do not want to
relive
here in any detail some of my very difficult, even horrifying,
experiences
of this period, hiding out the last months of the war in
Budapest.
Suffice it to say that my parents and I survived." That statement
is the closest he comes to identifying himself as being Jewish.
Nearly
everything in the book is consistent with an upper middle class
Hungarian
Jewish background, with the exception of his attendance at the
Gymnasium
of the Piarist Fathers, a Roman Catholic teaching order. (It
should
be noted, however, that many of the parochial schools in Budapest,
e.g.,
the Lutheran Gymnasium attended by von Neumann and Wigner, had
significant
Jewish enrollments.) This source of uncertainty has now been
clarified
as a result of an op-ed piece in the New York Times on the
Holocaust
in Hungary, written by Kati Marton ("A Town's Hidden Memory," 21
July 2002). This article resulted in a considerable amount of
controversy
and letters to the editor. One such letter by J. L. Jankovich of
San Jose, CA, which was sent to the
Times,
but apparently not published,
could previously be found at: http://hungaria.org/lists/lobby/admin/article.php?articleid=136.
Concerning the German military occupation that began in the spring of
1944,
it states: "Yet for months thereafter our Jewish classmates could still
attend our Catholic high school and, after the interruptions of the
1944-45
winter, graduated there. (One of them, Mr. George Olah, now an
American
citizen, just received the Nobel prize a few years ago and went back to
visit his old school with pride.)" See also Our Lives: Encounters of a Scientist,
by
István Hargittai (Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 2004,
p. 77).