George paloczi horvath biography of barack

Paloczi-Horvath settled in Richmond, London with his family, and earned his living as a freelance writer and journalist. He also wrote political biographies of Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Many took part in revolts and many escaped. The world in my time is full of survivors, prison graduates and liberated minds.

Their reports are conditioned by their intellectual tools and by their approach. Mine is that of a writer who has a background of social anthropology and of history. There was a time not very long ago when the art of remembering became of vital importance for me. I spent more than a year alone in a humid, cold cellar cubicle, without anything to read.

George paloczi horvath biography of barack

Some eighteen waking hours day after day, month after month in a cubicle three yards by four, with a wooden plank for a bed, four unlovely walls, a very bright naked electric light glaring mercilessly day and night — an ocean of time and a human being utterly dependent on his brain as mainstay, as entertainment — and as defense against madness!

Most of us prison graduates with long solitary-confinement records have good memories. After our terrible periods of loneliness we were thrown into larger cells, and there we compared notes with others. It turned out that in trying to fill out the millions of empty seconds, most of us had evolved similar systems. Most of us were aware that through our repeated struggles in trying to remember everything, our memories improved.

The mental muscles, it seems, grow stronger with exercise — and exercise they certainly had in our case. You lectured to yourself, you did mental translation exercises; some people even played chess in their heads with imaginary opponents. The most dangerous times came in the evenings when one was tired but was forbidden to lie down and sleep.

In the evenings I permitted myself the luxury of reliving my travels. It was great luck that I have been in some forty countries and could occupy myself with reviving some of my journeys. And again this reliving of the past strengthened the mental muscles. I first noticed this in reviving in detail the trip between Cairo and Istanbul.

Actually I made that trip eleven times during the Second World War. The Haifa-Beirut-Tripoli railway was not built then, and the journey in reality took nearly five days. When I first tried to revive it in memory it took only two hours. One could tell the time by prison routine. Some two weeks later I let my mind dwell again on the Cairo-Istanbul trip and I did not get through it in my head in one evening.

And at the end of my solitary-confinement period it took three whole evenings, because I not only remembered hundreds of details of the journey, the faces of the sleeping-car attendants on the Cairo-Haifa run and on the Taurus express, but also the various people to whom I talked on the trips and my moods and thoughts at various stages of the journey.

Another pastime was trying to remember the names and faces of all the people I had met in Tehran or Cape Town, Stockholm or Paris, and all the other cities I had visited in my life. Summary George Paloczi-Horvath was born in into the feudal nobility of Hungary. Your review Optional. Guillory Allan G. Hedberg, PhD Dr. Create a new list.

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