 To obtain a copy see details below. | (from the backside of the book) Lost Years The vast majority of innocent men and women taken to Soviet slave tabor camps during the Stalin era from 1924-1953 remain there still, in unmarked graves in the frozen Siberian tundra, a silent and unnoticed testament to the horrors of the Gulag (Main Camp Administration). "Lost Years" is the story of how one Hungarian young man was able to survive, told in the simple straightforward words of personal experience. The author was brought to Soviet NKVD headquarters in Budapest for questioning when he was only 16 years old, along with his father a well-known cardiologist. The inner strength and fortitude upon which he was able to draw, even after the death of his father, speaks to the indomitable will to live that this young man, author of this tale, was able to draw upon. From the time of his arrest in 1945 when the Soviets occupied the Pest side of Budapest and were bent on eliminating all possible dissent, then through the ten torturous years in the feared Far Eastern section of Siberia known as Kolyma, the author recounts his daily life and experiences. This is a heart-rending read and brings the reader face to face with the fact that Stalin was one of the world's most brutal mass murderers. |
| In I955 he was released and allowed to return to his family who had not seen or heard from him in all those years. The author took part in the 1956 Hungarian uprising, not with weapons but using his camp acquired knowledge of the Russian language in a fruitless attempt to make the Soviet soldiers understand the real reason for the Hungarian uprising. When the uprising was crushed the author escaped to Austria where he asked for and was granted asylum in the United States. | Once therein a new life opened, one of freedom and accomplishment where he became a specialist in the printing ink industry, married an American and enjoyed life in the land of the free where they live together after raising two children in Northern Virginia. His memories never left him, and they are all recorded here in his "Lost Years", a powerful but simply written book which can only teach as we explore the insidiousness of how power corrupts and is able to create and maintain a Gulag. |