I am traveling this week to two different conferences, so I don’t have time to research and write a full post. But instead of skipping this week, I thought it would be interesting to write the beginning of a post. Or really, to write about how I begin my research process for a post — which is usually with a question.
This week, the question popped up while I was reading a book, David Frey’s Jews, Nazis, and the Cinema of Hungary. I found the book almost a year ago, when I was on sabbatical in Florence, browsing the shelves of the European University Institute’s library. I skimmed through the book back then, but I wasn’t in the right place in my research to really dive in.
Now I am. After researching Laci’s work in the Berlin film industry in the 1920s, as well as his job as a cameraman in Budapest, I have started to familiarize myself with certain names, and I am beginning to understand the dynamics of the era.
So I picked up Jews, Nazis, and the Cinema of Hungary for a second time. This is how the book begins:
When István Székely, fresh from Berlin, cruised down Pasaret Street in Budapest in his brand new Buick in 1931, he was the embodiment of the optimism that was soon to reinvigorate Hungarian filmmaking.
David Frey, Jews, Nazis, and the Cinema of Hungary, p. 1
Immediately, two words jumped out at me: “Székely” and “Berlin.” Berlin, because I had just been researching the Berlin film scene and “Székely” because I recognized the name.
But why? Where had I seen the name Székely?
I searched through my old posts, and found it. In 1939, it had been István Székely who promised to loan my grandfather $232 for a ticket on an oceanliner to escape Europe! Here is what I wrote in my post, “Crossing the Atlantic,” in June 2023:
Just three days later…Árpád wrote another letter — this one to Opapa — informing him that Székely István, a prominent Hungarian film director who had moved to California in 1938, had “transferred 232 dollars from Grunard to French Line in Pest onto your name.” Székely, I presume, must have been a friend of Laci’s, who was also in the film industry in California. Moreover, $232 was not a small sum: it’s the equivalent of about $5,000 in today’s dollars.
By 1939, Székely had left Budapest due to rising anti-Semitism.1 So had Laci. Both of them were now in Los Angeles, where they were part of a large migration of European film-makers abandoning Europe due to fascism. From there, they were trying to raise funds for others to get out — including my grandfather.
When I realized this connection, I had a lot of questions:
What was Laci’s relationship to Székely? Did they work together on films?
Had Opapa met Székely in Budapest in the 1930s? According to Frey, Székely didn’t emigrate to the U.S. until 1938.
I didn’t have time to research the answer to these questions, but I will!
Here’s the other tantalizing connection that emerged as I read through Frey’s book. In chapter 2, “Constructing the Fantasy of Hungary,” Frey writes the following about major figures in Hungarian cinema:
Between 1931 and 1938, Hungary produced 132 films. Nearly half, 63 films in total, featured one of three leading men: Pál Jávor (28 films), Antal Páger (21 films), or Imre Ráday (14 films).
Frey, Jews, Nazis, and the Cinema of Hungary, p. 112
I recognized another name: Antal Páger.
He was one of the Nazi sympathizers that Opapa was trying to arrest in 1945! I mentioned him in a post back in May, entitled “War Criminals at the Cinema.” In fact, I had included him in my “nuts to crack” for that post:
Zita Szeleczky, Sári Fedák, Antal Páger, and Ferenc Kiss were all actors. There seems to be a broader connection between propaganda, actors, and fascism here. What does this all mean?
Páger was a major Hungarian film star who was also, it turns out, a major antisemite. According to Frey, “Antal Páger reportedly raged that ‘the Hungarian film industry will continue to produce crap until the leadership of Hungarian film production is taken out of the hands of those elements expelled from Berlin.’” Note Páger’s use of the term “those elements” to refer to the Jewish filmmakers who fled Berlin after Hitler came to power in 1933. That’s when Laci left Berlin.
Antal Páger was awful. That’s why he was on the list of Nazis that Opapa was tracking down after the war, when Opapa was a member of the OSS. Other people on the list included former Hungarian Prime Minister Béla Imrédy and the Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi.
Alas, my grandfather never found Páger (he was in hiding in a small village in western Hungary), and he was not arrested. Instead, Páger went on to star in many more Hungarian films, and even won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival in 1964. Ugh.
The connections are unbelievable: it feels like I’m uncovering a plot to a movie, but it’s just the facts of history. Here’s another one. I couldn’t help but do just a little bit of research, and look what I found: Antal Páger starred in a 1937 film directed by none other than István Székely. What was that experience like for Székely? Was that one of the reasons Székely left Budapest? Here is the poster:
Normally, I would research these connections further, and then write my post. But today, I’ll just leave you with more nuts to crack:
How did the relationship between Székely and Páger develop over time?
Did Laci ever work with Páger? Had Opapa met Páger?
This research adds a new dimention to Opapa’s work tracking down war criminals after World War II. He would have known actors like Páger not only as “film stars,” but also as individuals who had personally betrayed his family and friends. What did this experience mean for him?
Frey wrote about Székely’s emigration to Hollywood in 1938. I am going to copy the full paragraph here, because I think it offers insight into the way “Jewish-ness” was being defined by the Hungarian state. Székely, as Frey notes, had a Jewish mother, but had converted to Catholicism over a decade earlier, in the early 1920s.
Székely’s identity was “complex and ambiguous.” He was raised in a hughly educated, assimilated Budapest home by a bourgeois Jewish mother and a father whose Sabbatist Protestant religious identity was deemed “Jewish” by Habsburg authorities when he was drafted in World War I. Székely lived in a Jewish neighborhood and among Jewish circles, but attended Catholic Sunday school of his own volition. Székely even converted to Catholicism after the Great War, but in the late-1930s, rightist nationalists targeted him as the symbol of Jewishness in film.
Frey, Jews, Nazis, and the Cinema of Hungary, p. 186
Interesting ... I just did a bit of research into both Istvan Szekely and Antal Pager and didnt find anything more than you did so far (of course) .... interesting though that Istvan Szekely emigrated to America in 1938 and died in America in 1979, but was still a Hungarian citizen when he died (at least according to Wikipedia). Regarding Antal Pager, I found this https://good.film/title/movie/204176/late-season, and the below in the Hosier Chronicle (maybe you can, or already have, found this and been able to read it, looks like the newspaper page was ripped):
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It looks like the movie he won a prize for has an extremely relevant theme to his life.