Increasingly these days, reporters are covering the anti-Semitic mood surfacing in Europe. But one of the best pieces appeared on October 29, 2013 in the NY Times.
Journalist and author Marianne Szegedy-Maszák — whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, plus numerous other well-known publications — remarked on the dichotomy within Germany’s infamous World War II leader and drew a parallel between Hungary today and that nation 70 years ago.
Her analysis is from an atypical journalistic perspective. Right off we learn,
“My father, Aladar Szegedy-Maszak, a Hungarian diplomat, dined with Adolf Hitler three times.
And then he went to the concentration camp at Dachau.”
And she revealed more,
“At a diplomatic reception in September 1934 … my father could not reconcile the old-fashioned, modest, almost shy Hitler with the raving lunatic he had seen at rallies.
“The final time he met Hitler was June 7, 1942. The prime minister of Hungary was invited on an official visit to the Führer’s wartime headquarters in East Prussia and asked my father — now deputy head of the political division in the Foreign Ministry — to go with him. They ate in Hitler’s dining car and my father saw what he later referred to as “the Satanic nature of his character.“
Speaking about her parents, Szegedy-Maszák asked rhetorically ,
“I wonder what they would make of Hungary today. The same stereotypes of the past — the association of Jews with Communism and capitalism — fuel the support for Jobbik today.”
