Concur and your story of the wild pigs just before was very apt as to what can happen here if WE are not very very careful. That story should be repeated as many times to as many people as possible....People can relate to wild pigs, and a story that was probably told by a Hungarian man who escaped from the Russians in the 50's...I have an elderly friend who also escaped, and the story she told is indeed harrowing....
My guess is that many, if not most, young people (under the age of 50) don't know much at all about the Hungarian take over by the Russians.
Found this:
Priestley Medal 2008 Gabor A. Somorjai tells this story...more at link....
I was born in 1935 in Budapest, Hungary, just in time to live through the worst ravages of the Second World War, as the front between the battling armies moved through Hungary. The lives of my immediate family (my mother and sister) and my own were saved by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg in one of the houses under Swedish protection.
In the early 1950s, during my high school years, the Russian occupation brought the communist takeover of Hungary's government, and my "bourgeois" family background (my family owned a shoe store) classified us as "class enemies," which disqualified me from attending the university. However, because I was a good basketball player on my high school team, I was exempted and accepted into the Technical University in 1953, during the darkest period of Stalinist rule.
I was among 200 first-year university students in chemical engineering at the Technical University in Budapest. It was well-known that only 50 would be allowed to graduate after the four-year program, because the planned socialist economy had only 50 positions for chemical engineers.
In my senior year, in the fall of 1956, a few months before my graduation, the Hungarian Revolution broke out with the active participation of the students in the Technical University. After 10 days of freedom, the Russian troops reoccupied Budapest, and after two weeks, by the end of November, I escaped into Austria, taking with me my girlfriend, Judy, now my wife for more than 50 years.
We were lucky enough to be placed on a first-preference quota for university students, and we arrived in the U.S. in early January 1957. Our incredible luck held up when we were admitted as students in the College of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, by Kenneth Pitzer, who was the dean at that time.
pubs.acs.org |
