This is an anthology of personal accounts about seeking freedom and escape from persecution. The majority of the protagonists had survived the Holocaust in Hungary and had written about their wartime experiences as children, and post-war experiences as teenagers in two earlier collections in 1992 and 1998. These are their recollections of escaping from Hungary, the land of their birth -- where they never had real roots - following the 1956 Uprising against communist rule. Most of the storytellers were around twenty years of age and eager to learn the language of their new home and complete their education to become professionals. They describe a mixture of hope and fear as refugees, the challenges with a new language, new customs and their struggle to earn a living, in many cases without the support of a family or friends in the land where they were accepted to settle down. Their family backgrounds represent a broad range and so does the spectrum of careers at the time of writing their stories more than a half century later. The subject seems to resonate at this time when millions of displaced persons seek a better life in freedom and security around the world.
About the Author: BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES OF THE EDITORS Susan V. Meschel arrived in the USA in January of 1957 and lived with her family in Aurora, Illinois for a few weeks. After a month she landed a job at the Toni Company as a chemistry technician. In the fall of 1957 she began graduate school at the University of Chicago on a fellowship. Susan received her MS in 1959 and PhD in chemistry in 1961. In 1962 she became a US citizen. From 1967 to 1989 she taught chemistry and physics as Assistant Professor at Roosevelt University and the University of Chicago. From 1961 to 1967, and from 1989 to the present, she has been active in research in high temperature solid state materials science at the University of Chicago and at Illinois Institute of Technology. She authored more than 60 scientific papers. In addition, she also published on the history of women in the sciences and on metallurgy in the Bible. She coauthored two books with Andrew Handler. Since retirement she has been a volunteer at the Museum of Science and Industry and at the Field Museum of Natural history in Chicago. Susan is married to George Meschel, a clinical psychologist, who also became a US citizen in 1962. They have two daughters, Judith and Eva and two grandchildren, Jared and Ashlyn. Peter Tarjan arrived in New York Harbor on December 31, 1956, but could only land on January 1 for lack of a Navy tugboat. Thanks to his uncle's friends in Boston, a week later he was working as a totally unqualified metallurgical X-ray technician at MIT. With his first paycheck he went to meet his cousin, Van, a Korean veteran studying on the G.I. Bill at Purdue, where Peter received a scholarship and graduated with a BS EE "with distinction" in 1959. He earned an SMEE from MIT in 1960 and he worked for GE in Syracuse, NY for 3 years. He received the PhD from Syracuse University in 1968. For 19 years he worked for Cordis Corp. and its CRC subsidiary as Chief Scientist in Miami, FL and then joined the Biomedical Engineering Dept. of the University of Miami as Chairperson for 10 years and later as Professor until 2009 when he retired. His name appears on 23 US Patents and 21 technical book chapters, many juried articles and as editor of Children Who Survived the Final Solution, iUniverse, 2004. He married Susanna Moross 51 years ago. They have two sons, Joshua and Aaron, and three grandchildren, Noah, Miles and Oona. Peter is a docent at the Lowe Art Museum and a frequent speaker about the Holocaust in Hungary.