Opapa's Preface to Árpád's Manuscript

The Science of Intelligence; Unfolding the Human Potential

I was poking around Opapa’s computer files today, and came across a document I hadn’t seen before. I can’t believe I missed it: it is a short text that Opapa wrote in 2005 — a preface for Árpád’s manuscript.

As I’ve written in previous posts, I knew that Opapa had Árpád’s manuscript translated in March 2005, less than a year before his own death.

Opapa also sent one other text to the translator: a Hungarian-language oral history entitled “Auschwitz,” documenting the experiences of Hungarian deportees. I knew that the two were closely connected, but in Opapa’s preface, he offers the full explanation, along with many critical details that I did not know:

There are many new details here:

I did not know that Árpád and Margit were “on [their] way” to visit Matyi, Opapa’s younger brother, “in a labor camp outside the city” when Árpád was taken away. I knew Matyi had gone to a labor camp, but I haven’t tracked down which one it was. Nor did I know that Árpád’s last words were “Give this paper to George. It is very important,” though Opapa did wrote something similar in his short story, “Inherit the Earth.”

Also new is the fact that Opapa visited the “concentration camp archives” in Munich as “an officer in the U.S. Army.” That must have been soon after the war, in either 1945 or 1946. It was surely an overwhelming experience, sifting through “hundreds of thousands of concentration camp inmates and gas-chamber victims” before finally “giv[ing] up the search.”

Finally, Opapa confirms that he kept Árpád’s manuscript “in his desk drawer for some sixty years” because it was “too painful to open it.” I am again reminded of Opapa’s short story, “Inherit the Earth,” in which the protaganist, “John,” proclaims that he would “never read” his father’s manuscript.

If it took “sixty years,” that means Opapa did not open Árpád’s manuscript until 2005, the same year that he died. Like Opapa’s own autobiography, and like Árpád’s manuscript, the project remained unfinished.

But maybe that doesn’t have to be the end of the story.