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Horváth, Csaba (1932) |
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He was born in Budapest. His army-officer father was in command of Esztergom Barracks in the early 1940s and also served on the front. The family moved westward into Germany as the Soviet army approached, but returned to Esztergom from the British zone of occupation in the autumn of 1946. His father had been taken prisoner by the Americans and arrived home shortly before. However, the father was soon arrested and then released after an investigation by the Russian authorities, but sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes by the Hungarian authorities. Thereafter, Horváth's mother kept the family by being a bookkeeper. His father was released in 1956, but he was rearrested after the defeat of the revolution and not released again until 1960. Horváth received his secondary education at the Benedictine Gymnasium, but was sent away after the nationalization of the schools and sent to the Machine-Tool Factory as an apprentice turner. There he completed a technical-college economics course at evening classes and received his school-leaving certificate in 1952. He applied for the University of Economics, but was turned down for being a 'class alien'. As an enlisted soldier, he worked as a miner from 1953 to 1955, when he returned to the Machine-Tool Factory. In 1956, he was admitted to study law at an evening course of at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and to study at the Technical College of Engineering in Esztergom. On October 28 that year, he was elected secretary of the Workers' Council of the Esztergom Machine-Tool Factory, which delegated him onto the town national committee, where he was also elected secretary. He took part as a workers' council delegate in the Akácfa utca meeting of the Greater Budapest Central Workers' Council on November 21. He was made head of the labour department at the Machine-Tool Factory. Having been appointed manager of the factory, he was then arrested. He was interrogated by the county police and then interned with associates at Kistarcsa and later Tököl. In June, he was remanded in custody again, sentenced to four years' imprisonment on December 28, which was increased to ten years on appeal on May 14, 1958, but he was freed in 1963. He moved to Budapest and found a job as a turner at Láng Engineering Factory. In 1970, he began to earn his living as a freelance translator from English. In 1985, he took a degree in economics after an evening course, and in 1987, he received a doctorate from the Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences as well. He then worked at Delta subsidiary of the Newspaper Publishing Enterprise and later at the publishers Primo. He established his own publishing company in the 1990s. |
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Horváth, Csaba: 'I've never regretted what I did for a moment'