Amerikai Magyar Hírlap, 2002 (14. évfolyam, 4-45. szám)
2002-02-01 / 5. szám
AMERICAN Hungarian Journaí MEDITATIONS by Dr. Bela Bonis Pastor (562) 430-0876 First Hungarian Reformed Church, Hawthorne Last December we celebrated Advent about hope, based on something God did in human history in the little town of Bethlehem 2000 years ago. Based also on the promise that God will continue to act creatively, lovingly and redemptively in human history, and in our personal histories at a moment when the world desperately needs a reason to be hopeful. Our hopes are a measure of our greatness. When our hopes shrink, we ourselves are diminished. Psychologists remind us that hopelessness is the seedbed of melancholy and destructiveness. Those of us who live in cities know how hopeless poverty breeds mindless violence. Against such a backdrop comes the Christian faith with its particular hopefulness, resilient and very old. It has lived through military catastrophes, national defeat, exile, persecution, holocaust, Sept. 11, 2001. For the moment the war on terrorism is forming an overarching foreign policy objective. But if terrorism is to be defeated, the U.S. must quickly embrace broader global goals. And these goals must be defined by something more than the quest for wealth - developing markets, securing resources, and in general make the world safe for corporations to do business. It is precisely the unconstrained pursuit of those objectives that has alienated even comfortable citizens in the European Union, not to speak of impoverished people everywhere. In our better moments we Christians believe that God has joined mercy and justice in compassion, in the person of Jesus Christ who is the incarnation of the dream of the writer of Psalm 85, who says that "mercy and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other." Jesus persists in his effort to make us squarely face the fact that it is the reign of God that He is proclaiming and confronting us with - not the reign of human perfectibility or even life under the law. He pushes and pushes against every excuse, every modification and every "weasel way" out of that confrontation we can invent. Instead of perpetuating a world of violence, God requires peacemaking: seeking justice, rescuing the oppressed, defendig the orphan, feeding the poor, sustaining hope, passionately searching God’s will. GYPSY PARADE! BANGÓ MARGIT SOLOIST OF THE BUDAPEST 100 MEMBER GYPSY ORCHESTRA with her 6 MEMBER ENSEMBLE coming to dazzle you with her outstanding performing skills as well as the quality of her voice. SINGING, DANCING, MUSIC SZABÓ JENŐ ZITAR, ELECTRIC & ACOUSTIC GUITAR BARKOCZI JENO - electric piano DANCS ZOLTÁN - drums NANASI LAJOS - singer HORVATH MONIKA-dancer 2002. január 31, csütörtök este 7 PM r r CSARDAS Hungarian Restaurant 5820 MELROSE AVE., L.A., (HOLLYWOOD) JEGYRENDELÉS: (323) 962 6434 *************************** TV Drama Honors Italian Fascist Who Saved Jews By Raffaella Malaguti ROME, Jan 27 (Reuters) - The story of an Italian Fascist who saved over 5,000 Jews from the Holocaust might sound like a farfetched Hollywood plot, but it really happened and Italy is about to celebrate it in a two-episode television series. Forgotten for four decades at home and abroad, the strange story of Giorgio Perlasca emerged in 1987 thanks to the Hungarian Jews he saved from deportation disguised as a consul. Perlasca died at 82 in 1992, just in time to receive long-overdue honors from Hungary and Israel. Ironically, Italy was the last country to honor him. But now the televised version of Perlasca's dangerous months concealed as a Spanish diplomat in Budapest will be part of events to mark this year's Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27. The drama was screened in parliament earlier this week and watched by members of Italy's centre-right government including post-Fascist deputy prime minister Gianfranco Fini and Lower House speaker Pierferdinando Casini. It provided food for thought in Italy, where the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini deported thousands of Jews. "This film...re-unites us...with the Jewish population which was badly hit in World War Two and also unites us Italians, divided during Fascism and now united again in the memory of those moments," Casini said. Perlasca never found anything odd in the fact that he - an early supporter of Fascism who fought with nationalist troops in the Spanish civil war - risked his life to save Jews. “I could not bear the sight of people being branded like animals. I could not bear seeing children being killed,” Perlasca told the Italian journalist who first told his story a decade ago in a book called “The Banality of Goodness.” “That's all there was to it. I don't think I was a hero. At the end of the day, I had an opportunity and I seized it. We have a saying here: ‘opportunities make a man a thief, well, they made something else out of me,” he said. “JORGE“ THE DIPLOMAT In 1944 Budapest, no one who met the Spanish consul “Jorge” Perlasca had realized he was neither Spanish nor a diplomat and in reality bore the all-Italian name of Giorgio. In fact he was a meat trader who was under the protection of the Spanish embassy when the real ambassador left the country. Seeing his chance to help, he appointed himself consul and with the aid of embassy staff ran a protection program for Jews, organizing safe houses on territory protected by the Spanish embassy and providing food and false documents. An elegant man with perfect command of Spanish, Perlasca fooled everyone, even the Hungarian foreign minister. Perlasca said in those days he often met famous Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who helped tens of thousands of Jews escape Nazi death camps by giving them Swedish passports. But while Wallenberg's story was internationally renowned, when Perlasca returned to Italy, no one, not even his wife believed him. So he simply put his story to rest. BY SUSAN JANCSO 4 • (CONTINUED FROM LAST WEEK) 1 will not drive to Vegas on my own, but I can certainly take a Greyhound bus to the City of my Dreams and get my just reward. Once there, I can live like a princess for two days, forget all my troubles, get a few positive impressions and start the new year relaxed and happy, as one should. The room at the Aladdin was complimentary; I only had to pay if I didn’t show up at the prearranged time. The deadline for cancellation was 48 hours. Monday would have been the last day to do so for a Wednesday trip. Monday went by in a flurry, and I did not call to cancel the room. I remembered the saying that inaction is a way of action too. I decided by not making a decision in a timely manner. Now there was nothing else to do but go. I got on the Internet and made reservations for the 8 o’clock express on the Greyhound Line. Early Wednesday morning Julius dropped me off at the bus depot on Alameda, in downtown Los Angeles. Entering the station was like suddenly finding myself in a third world country. Long lines, dark faces, mostly black or Hispanic. People sitting on the floor or on their luggage talking far too loud, babies crying and children running around, stepping all over the suitcases lined up in front of each exit. A “mentally challenged” kookoobird yelling out obscenities at everyone who passed before him. But when the time came to board the bus, everything went in a very professional manner. Our driver, a young black lady cheerfully announced that her name was Regina, and we were going to have a great trip. Soon we were on our way, and the bus wasn’t even full, I could rest my foot on the empty seat next to me. This was nice, and so it remained until we got to Claremont. I was surprised that we were even stopping there. Looking out the window, 1 saw an extremely fat young woman, wearing tight jeans on her enormous behind, get out of a car and embrace the man who drove her, as they said their good-byes. How romantic, I thought to myself - she is probably going to work, maybe to drive one of these buses to faraway destinations. And he loves her so much, no matter how huge she is... Soon I found out, to my horror that the fat lady was a passenger on our bus, and she decided to sit next to me. She landed on me with a thud, and never left my side until the end except for a few minutes in Barstow, where she bought some food, which she proceeded to eat, making her behind even bigger than it already was. I could hardly breathe, and 1 remained miserable for the rest of the trip. If I had ever doubted the statistics stating that half of all Americans are overweight, this experience brought it home to me. Going on my own had its advantages, though. I could start early and return late, as opposed to Julius’s way of cutting short every trip on both ends. With him, we would not have left L.A. until the 4 o’clock rush hour, struggling through heavy traffic, trying to avoid fender-benders - and driving more than half the time in darkness. With Greyhound, I would be in Las Vegas shortly after one o’clock. On the way back, with Julius I would have to rise with the first rays of the sun, no matter how little sleep 1 got, because he had to be back in L.A. before the banks closed. With Greyhound, I picked the convenient hour of 2:45 p.m. for my return trip, arriving a few minutes after 8 p.m. The bus made a few stops along the way and built up a delay of about an hour. Even so, it was only 2:45 and I was a short cab ride away from my destination. I hailed the first cab and asked the driver to take me to the Aladdin. * * * (TO BE CONTINUED) Some, including Deaglio, say Perlasca's tale was ignored because in a postwar Italy trying to deal with its Fascist past, forgetting was easier than remembering. “There was a great desire to forget and not much desire to draw comparisons. If a modest man - alone and without a solid political representation - had managed to carry out those deeds, why then hadn't others done the same?” Deaglio wrote. The television drama, called "Perlasca," aired on stateowned network RA1 January 28 and 29. *************************** MONTE CARLO Hotef & Casino, Las Vegas „CITY Of LIGHTS” Please Support our Advertisers! ■(■■■■MB AMERIKAI mm, , Hfl Ufagyar Ifirlap |fl|
