Hungary’s Unlikely Chronicler of Jewish History

The tragic story of the Jews who lived in Bekes County, a mostly poor and rural region in southeastern Hungary, 120 miles from Budapest, was grimly echoed to greater or lesser degrees throughout a large section of Central and Eastern Europe.

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Whiskey Robber, Bachelor of Arts

For years we have followed the story of the Whiskey Robber with great interest. It was a reporter for this so-called journal who brought the story of Attila Ambrus, the Hungarian hockey goalie turned bank robber, to the attention of Sports Illustrated in 1999.

Now Pestiside, the must-read for anyone interested in events in Hungary (Hungarians included), informs that Mr. Ambrus has made good use of the past decade he has spent in the pokey by earning a degree in communications (by correspondence) from Hungary’s Dunaujvaros College.

According to the Hungarian tabloid Blikk, Ambrus starts his days at 4 a.m. with his artwork and then his studies.

He was given a 17-year sentence in 1999 after robbing dozens of banks in Budapest.

Ambrus is the subject of a book by Julian Rubinstein, The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, which may be turned into a movie starring Johnny Depp.

Use ‘English Patient’ Castle for Less Than a Penny

The mayor of the southeast Hungarian city of Gyula (200 km southeast of Budapest) is offering an historic castle in the center of town for the price of one Hungarian forint (or 0.056 USD).

Klara Perjesi told the Bekes Hirlap newspaper that she is hoping an investor can be found for the Almasy Castle which is situated in an enclosed tourist complex adjacent to a popular Hungarian spa.

The name Almasy will be familiar to fans of the film “The English Patient” in which Ralph Fiennes starred as Count Laszlo Almasy. The film was based on a 1992 novel of the same name by Michael Ondaatje.

The castle has been left unused and relatively untended for the past decade and is a burden on the city in its current state, according to the mayor.

However — and it is a fairly big however — the city will only allow the use of the castle under the condition that the prospective investor handle the costs of renovation. (The cost of renovation is estimated to be several million dollars)

The mayor said that the city is hopeful an investor will come along and renovate the property — which she maintains is an attractive investment due to its potential as a tourist destination.

The castle was originally built in 1725 and then reconstructed after it burnt down in 1801.

1 Tweet = 1 Lost Job + 1 Huge Following

An “online marketing specialist” who lost his job last week at the Hungarian branch of Vodafone has become something of sensation on Facebook – with at last check close to 2,100 fans.

According to a report on the Hungarian business portal Portfolio.hu, Tamas Muller was sacked from Vodafone for making one witty Twitter tweet. On December 4, rival mobile carrier T-Mobile’s Hungarian network was down, a fact that was announced at @tmobilehungary.

Muller retweeted this announcement and added “OK, give us a ring.” You can read the infamous Tweet here (in Hungarian).

Muller had only been with the firm for three months, and the incident happened immediately after he was promoted to online communication director. In fact, this article announcing his promotion appeared the day before the less-than-140-character missive.

I Left My Appendix in Bekescsaba

“Ouch! Ouch again!” I said to myself, my favorite conversation partner when I am out and about alone, as I was during a recent trip to Bekescsaba, Hungary (220 kilometers southeast of Budapest). . This is nothing more than a touch of indigestion, albeit a tad more acute than usual. It was most likely the result of digging – somewhat overzealously — into some spicy and juicy kolbasz (Hungarian sausage).

Back home I eat lots of garlic and wash it down with green tea – plenty to counter any deleterious effects from indulging in fatty sausage. Further, a diet concentrating heavily on antioxidants, I knew, surely must make me immune from serious ailments. Okay, perhaps my physique is not going to be mistaken for that of Michael Phelps. But at 43, having never experienced any illnesses beyond a common cold in all that time, why should I spend an extra few bucks for insurance on this trip. The odds of not falling ill on this journey were strongly in my favor. The expense was simply not worth it.

The pain, though still noticeable, had subsided later in the afternoon. I had a light dinner and turned in for an early night. By midnight, however, the pain had returned with a vengeance. It was excruciating. In fact, if there is a word that signifies a type of pain beyond excruciating, then that’s what I would use to describe it. There was nothing else to do but put an end to my stupid male stubbornness and ring for an ambulance.

Within minutes I was at the hospital and answering questions at triage. The pain at that point was so great I hardly knew my own name, yet the nurse on duty insisted on extracting that morsel of information from me, as well as my mother’s maiden name and my date and place of birth. I thought was going to ask me the name of the president of Botswana and who won the National League batting title in 1953 next. Why is it that wherever one goes the people at triage seem more interested in extracting information which at the time appears trivial when compared to alleviating a person’s suffering?

Alas, I was eventually wheeled into an examination room. An ultrasound indicated that I probably had appendicitis and – as there is no 24-hour surgery in Bekescsaba – I would be operated on at 6 am the following morning. Thenceforward, I was ushered into a room at about 2 am and supplied with ample intravenous injections of all sorts during the interim.

The nurses in the ward seemed to marvel at the curiosity which had fallen in their midst – a North American, by all appearances the first of its kind to be treated in the hospital, certainly it this wing.

I tried to look on the bright side during the four hours that preceded the operation: if a person needs to have surgery it best to be alerted to it and have it down with the span of a few hours rather than be provided a date months in advance. In the latter case, all one can think about in the intervening period is, “Heavens to Betsy, I am going to have surgery on such-and-such a day.”

The operation went as scheduled. When I returned back to the world of the conscious, I was told that I did indeed have appendicitis, and not just any old kind. The operation found my appendix had perforated. Burst. It was the kind of ailment that would warrant an extended hospital stay, I was told. How much was this going to cost? I wondered.

Though landing in a hospital has to rank at the top of a traveler’s worst nightmares – right after getting stuck with a middle seat on a transatlantic flight with an insurance salesman on your left and another insurance salesman on your right – I felt that I was in competent medical hands throughout the experience.

Perhaps the stay could have been enhanced by better food, most of which seemed to be feeble attempts at luncheon meat. But moaning about hospital food appears to be a universal gripe and one that is surely outweighed by the overall price tag of my ordeal, which totaled an infinitesimally smaller amount than the horror stories of other uninsured individuals who underwent the same procedure in less fortunate locations, ie, a hosptial in the United States.