Sunday, October 19, 2008

Frank and Larry's Hungarian Word Game

When Frank and Larry started telling me at dinner last night about the new word game they had created for themselves, I thought about Ropi and I knew I had to get this on video. So after dinner we went into the other room and we got it on tape.

Frank and Larry are brothers who grew up in Kosice, Czechoslovakia (now the Slovak Republic) in a Hungarian speaking Jewish family. Larry got to the US before WW II to go to college. Frank spent WWII in Europe. At that time Kosice was controlled by Hungary. In Fall 1940 he was conscripted into a forced labor camp attached to the Hungarian army. He was, in his words, lucky enough that the army unit to which his labor camp was attached was stationed and worked always in Hungary proper. Other units were sent out to the Russian Front. Their parents were first sent to a local ghetto and eventually to a railroad station where 80 people were squeezed into a cattle car and deported to Auschwitz in April 1944. (The cars were originally designed for 40 people or 6 horses.) His labor camp was about 150 men and sent to do work for the military such as building roads or whatever military projects were needed. (I was just clarifying background information to put the video into context. Yes, I realize I should video tape this too. But Frank has participated in the Steven Spielberg project to video tape Holocaust survivors, so he does have an hour or more of tape already recorded.)

[This is the corrected version.]

After the US got involved in WW II, and Larry was finishing school, he was given the option to be drafted into the US army or be among the first to be returned to Europe after the war. He joined the army and became an American citizen about 90 days later. He was sent to basic training in Camp Roberts, California as an infantryman, and during one of the exercises an American officer appeared who was looking for him. "They were interested in my educational background and high intelligence scores and took me out of infantry and sent me to officer training in Fort Benning, Georgia." After four months he became an officer - 2nd Lieutenant. He was scheduled to go to the Japanese theater of operations. Life expectancy there was very short so he contacted the intelligence officer and explained that the army would get better service from him in Europe because he spoke German, Hungarian, French, and understood Slovak, and had studied Latin. All this in addition to English.

They trained him for the European theater and send him for training in Maryland where he became a POW (prisoner of war) interrogator, mostly Germans. They also sent him to counterintelligence school and he successfully finished that and became a CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps) officer. He was sent to Germany. The war ended, and there were a lot of German prisoners of war he had to interrogate. He was helping to chase Nazi bigshots, and the most important Nazi he arrested was Ernst Ittameier.

Larry returned to LA in 1946 and Frank was able to join him in 1952. They have lived in Los Angeles ever since. Frank is now 92 and Larry is 88. They talk on this video about how they keep their minds sharp by tracking down the meanings of old Hungarian words and translating them into English.


For those who want to know why I was having dinner with them, well, it's a little complicated. My parents were divorced when I was five. My father didn't remarry until after I got married. After he died, his widow, my second mom, married Frank. I guess it wasn't that complicated.

7 comments:

  1. These two are great-- Larry is so funny with how he keeps talking and his older brother keeps trying to interject for the first few minutes! I wonder if my kids will be like them! I hope so-- and I hope they get along and are tight up into their 90's! I hope they are as sharp, too-- these guys must be a riot!

    Now I can appreciate what Empress Elizabeth of Austria and Hungary took on when she married Josef-Franz and decided to learn Hungarian because her MIL hadn't been good to Hungary.

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  2. Well, it was a pleasure to watch it. Well these words are still active in Hungarian language such as csoszogni. Well their English accent remained kind of Hungarian but not as Hungarian as people living in Hungary. Their Hungarian remained good as well.

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  3. Ps. Kosice is Kassa in Hungarian. I tell it because I didn't know its Slovak name. We still use Hungarian names for cities which used to be Hungarian. I could mention a few exceptions such as Belgrade (we call it Belgrád and not Nándorfehérvár) but for exampel for us Bratislava is Pozsony because when it was Hungarian city we called it Pozsony.

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  4. Ropi, glad you liked this, you were the inspiration to video tape this conversation. I think that they gave csoszogni as an example of a word that has a similar meaning to the old word - yani beni (I know that isn't spelled right, I'm just trying to write what it sounded ike) they were looking up.

    And thanks for the comments on how Hungarians still call places by their Hungarian names.

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  5. I don't know how to spell in Hungarian, but I'm sure that's the word. Thanks. Do you use that word when you are talking?

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  6. Yes, I do. Hungarian is an agglutinating language so we have an other form of it: jövés-menés (it means when everyone runs everywhere for example in an office and there is a kind of chaos). So it is not a death phrase at all.

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