Trivia

He was a political scientist and Holocaust survivor whose parents were killed at Auschwitz. He researched and recorded the history of the Holocaust in Hungary.

He was a professor of political science at the City University of New York for more than three decades. He wrote more than 60 books and hundreds of articles, including many works on comparative politics and the Soviet Union. He was best known for his 1,600-page, two-volume work "The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary". He also wrote and edited studies of the Holocaust in Romania and Ukraine, and testified at war-crimes trials for Holocaust perpetrators.

He was not allowed to attend high school because he was Jewish, so he studied at home by candlelight. During WWII, he was working as a cabinetmaker's apprentice when he was drafted into a forced-labor unit in the Hungarian army and sent to the Eastern Front. He and and four other Jews eventually escaped into the Hungarian forest. With military police searching for deserters, they found a hut, hid under piles of hay, and were discovered by a farmer, Istvan Novak, who sheltered them.

He grew up in Dej, part of Northern Transylvania, which came under Hungarian control in 1940. His father was a farmer and bricklayer, and his mother was a homemaker.