Presenter: Yeah. Dr. Sacks: And I don't know what determines the sort of thing when Torey was -- as a young Hungarian who went to went to Australia and was working in a chemical factory.A vat of acid exploded in his face.
buo the the pen brand comes from um the greatest female chess player in history udit Polgar is Hungarian George Soros the investor Hungarian there's a lot of hungarians that one could pick to begin a movie about the entire country's history with but literally the only person who gets singled out visually isAR rubic um they actually used to have Rubik's Cube on the stamps like it's a very big part of national pride you can
and ending up in the Great Hungarian Plain up there. Great Hungarian Plain is the last bit of steppe. So that area, open, rolling grassland, is the homeland of these people.
They first struggled against it. The Hungarian government went to the banks and said on behalf of their mortgage holders, we're gonna pay you back in forints.
They did nothing about it. The Hungarians were listening to the Turks.
And Hungary was once a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. And Hungarians have a very strong sense of ethnicity and ethnic pride. For those of you who've spent time there, you realize the enormous pride.
They first struggled against it. The Hungarians pioneered this.
I picked up a because I had a friend, a girl I became friends with at tryouts, who fenced epee. I think she was Hungarian , and her dad fenced epee. So I was, like, oh, I'll fence epee, too.
They did nothing about it. the list of the Hungarian musical soiree dutifully written out.
Unfortunately not enough time for the whole thing today, but can you talk about your time at Auschwitz and surviving with your sister, especially with Dr. Mengele? After four years of Hungarian Nazi occupation, four days in a cattle car without water, just very little air.
But there's also nutritional information on some of our patients. He was a Hungarian refugee.
I like to share some of my yesterdays with you, not to make you hate them, but to tell you what hatred does. I am a Hungarian Jew. The devastation of Hungarian Jews were the worst murdered of men, women, and children in the last days of the war.
I am a Hungarian Jew. The devastation of Hungarian Jews were the worst murdered of men, women, and children in the last days of the war. When Hitler was facing defeat, he brought the Holocaust to Hungary.
was just medically ill. So a Hungarian psychiatrist offered to come and treat him, and he did. And as he walked away from the room, he said, he is not insane.
met erno rubic in while writing this book uh and uh what was it like to meet this reclusive Hungarian architect so I I like to think of Mr rubic as like the Wily Wonka of Eastern Europe um because he's very wealthy he's very private and he's really brilliant it actually took me two years to get a 1our interview with him um and literally until like the
what do you what do you know about the Rubik's Cube and she said well you know I know most foreigners don't know that that it's Hungarian and we are very proud of the fact that it is Hungarian it's sort of their biggest cultural export even though no one even knows they're exporting it um and then I said do you know anything about Erna rubic and she sort of looked at me with this
memories. I mean, magazines? Are there Hungarian food magazines? Yeah. So they definitely talk more about what Hungarians eat.
And the Americans who had no idea what was going on the other side of the Iron Curtain were recruiting anyone who even spoke the language. My father did speak Hungarian , and that was enough to be recruited. They also recruited many Soviet agents, so it was a complete disaster.
That rose by 17%. And this Hungarian telecommunications company-- I'm not going to try and pronounce it-- is bust. It doesn't exist anymore.
They did nothing about it. material from the Hungarians and taking it from them as well.
And I'll never forget. 80% of Hungarians thought a piece of their country was in another country. So they are dissatisfied.
And Orban, the current prime minister, is blaming the migrants. And he only wants Hungarians . He doesn't want anybody that's not a Hungarian .
And in that war, their fathers, brothers fought on the Turkish front, mostly, because they were Hungarians . And after the war, the borders shifted, and the places they were born became part of other countries.
They did nothing about it. And they wanted this because the Hungarians were listening to the signals of two important countries, one Finland, where the language is very similar to Hungarian ,
You can see this great swathe of carpet going from Manchuria in the east right across central Europe and ending up in the Great Hungarian Plain up there. Great Hungarian Plain is the last bit of steppe.
And the whole history of the Scythian and the Scythian-related peoples is of this movement, always from the east to the west, always ending up in the Great Hungarian Plain, which, as I say, is the last bit of steppe in the area. Now, there is a bit of steppe-- that's a Mongolian steppe, in fact, where, as I say, it was very, very well-preserved.
And then there were two others after me, before Obama. I can't do a Hungarian accent-- it is impossible, I remember, to destroy more than a quarter of the Earth's population with H-bombs.
Little did I know that we were the daily ration for the gas chamber. When Hitler declared the assault on Hungarian Jews, it was during the Final Solution. The Final Solution then, that not one Jew will survive to bear witness.
And as he's being wheeled out, he makes his first request. He was speaking an old Hungarian dialect. He'd gone to prison when he was 20.
Let's continue with another of these Hungarian Jews.
the man behind Microsoft Office and the Hungarian notation they use at Microsoft.
And he was Puerto Rican and Hungarian , and he was playing Mexican.
And she grows up in a Hungarian Jewish family in Queens.
This reminds me of a Hungarian proverb.
I feel if you're not Hungarian , there's no excuse for a green bell pepper.
So that's operating as well. But even if you take out the Hungarian telecommunications company and you just focus on American stocks, you find the same effect for domestic stocks. So this fluency construct really matters.
And I was surprised to read about Hungarian influence in your cuisine, not because I didn't know about your global influences, but that was an unexpected influence from my perspective
So here theyíre visiting an Austro-Hungarian artillery gun emplacement in 1915 and heís the kid sitting on the barrel of the cannon.
They did nothing about it. The Germans were taking what the Hungarians had, and it was going back straight to Hitler.
They did nothing about it. wanted to look as good as the Hungarians .
And this is a painting of my aunt by a Hungarian artist named Felix In talking to family members,
And the Czechoslovak constitution is based on the American Constitution with one difference-- it had equal rights language in it in 1918. But the thing that is interesting-- Hungary was the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But all of a sudden, there was this country-- Hungary.
And he only wants Hungarians . He doesn't want anybody that's not a Hungarian . And they are now the scapegoats.
So I decided to do a 10-minute documentary called "The Hungarian Conflict." And it was the story of how hundreds of thousands of Jews
Our government was an ally to Germany and chose not to report the Jewish people yet, but ordered strict restrictions. From 1939 until 1944, Hungarian Jews were stripped of their rights and entitlements as they had never existed.
Well, I won't go too much into it, but suffice to say Hungary has a rising far right, which is dangerous. And Hungary was once a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. And Hungarians have a very strong sense of ethnicity and ethnic pride.
I spoke Hebrew, then Hungarian , and then your language.
There's a man called he was a Hungarian theater critic in the 1960s, and then later the American playwright David Mamet started to realize that there was a pattern.
He was pissed off for a variety of reasons: one the Hungarian rising was going on and he had other things to do and he wasn't told about it, number two.
just left actually I went to study with a Hungarian Guru and having and I stayed there for a long time in the way that