Michael Fitzalan

Karoly, The Love Story That Never Was. Michael Fitzalan

This is the story of Karoly, a man whose family protected Katia and other Jewish refugees who were trying to escape the advance of Nazi Germany, from the west, and the advancing Russian's 'Red Army' and their Romanian allies, to the east; Karoly was a teenage boy who was used as human-shield by Romanian 'liberators' in Hungary. After the war, he was sent to prison while Hungary was under communist control. He was committed as a political prisoner for being a member of the Independent Small-holders Party, the communist party's only serious political rival. Under the communist regime, anyone who held authority in the community was a threat and Karoly was arrested under a trumped up charge. He was sent to Márianosztra where he was given the option of starvation or working as a miner in a forced labour camp. Karoly worked in a coalmine until he escaped the cruel communist regime in 1956. This is the story of a man who cheated death and suffered un-imaginable privations before escaping to England to start again from nothing, a broken and mentally enfeebled refugee who rebuilt his life through hard work and determination. Acknowledgements: My grateful thanks to all those involved in this project, including: Nick Dunne and Tom Gately. Particularly, I wanted to thank Karoly for reliving the horrors of the war and his time as a persecuted farmer and political prisoner during the communist occupation. Especially, I want to thank my wife, Suzi, and my two sons Alexander and Barnaby. The people of Hungary suffered, Karoly suffered, Katia suffered, The Jewish population of Budapest suffered; Hungary became part of the Holocaust. This must never happen again, in the name of communism, or capitalism, or for any idealism, in the name of any religion, to any country or any people.