NOTES 1. See p. 111 of http://www.nap.edu/books/0309055415/html/82.html. 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 had
significant
Jewish enrollments.) Further information has materialized as a
result
of the publication 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).