The ​Great Escape 1 csillagozás

Great Britain’s first movie mogul never did fully master the English language. Left to themselves, the Korda brothers spoke Hungarian and reverted to their childhood names, Lacikam, Vincikem, and Zolikam. Salami appeared from under the silver chafing dish in the Georgian dining room, and soon the three brothers were back in the Turkeve of their childhood, arguing – and ultimately yielding to the eldest’s implacable will.

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Almost all those present later used religious or mythological images to describe what they had seen. Grove's deputy, General Thomas F. Farrell, recalled, „The whole country was lighted by a searing light with an intensity many times that of the midday sun… Thirty seconds after the explosion came first the air blast pressing hard against the people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday.” Oppenheimer, conflicted, famously recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita, „I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.” Observing Oppie's ambivalence, von Neumann noted with typical budapest sarcasm, „Some people profess guilt, to claim credit for the sin.”

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It was inevitable that Leo Szilard would meet Eugene Wigner at the physics colloquium. Their initial bound was language. „Speaking Hungarian freely, ” Wigner remembered, „evoked the sweeter days of my childhood.” The two Budapest expatriates formed an odd couple in Berlin. Wigner was small, courtly and quiet, carefully dressed and excessively polite. His voice and manner were so wispy, that people mistook him for a modest man. „I think so,” he would reply when asked on the telephone if it was Wigner on let line. In fact, he was as competitive as his fellow Budapest expatriates. „Johnny von Neumann was a better mathematician,” Wigner acknowledged, „and a better scientist. But I knew more physics.” A steely ego was tucked inside the modest exterior. He was once asked why he chose chemistry. „Being Jewish,” he answered, „I knew I couldn't be prime minister of Hungary. I thought I should do something practical.”

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But as Sir Georg Solti, one of the most celebrated conductors of our time, wrote of his childhood in post-World War I Budapest: „Since that time, I have never been able to rid myself of the fear of anyone wearing a military or police uniform, or even a customs office uniform, because in Hungary uniforms always meant persecution in one form or another.”

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„Hungarians,” Arthur Koestler wrote, „are the only people in Europe without racial and linguistic relatives in Europe, therefore they are the loneliest on this continent. This… perhaphs explains the peculiar intesity of their existence…. To be Hungarian is a collective neurosis.”

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