Kati Marton, "The Great Escape"

Kati Marton, "The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who

Fled Hitler and Changed the World" (2006)

 

"They are the scientists Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, and

John von Neumann; Arthur Koestler, auther of Darkness at Noon;

Robert Capa, the first photographer ashore on D-Day;

Andre Kertesz, pioneer of modern photojournalism; and iconic

filmmakers Alexander Korder and Michael Curtiz."

-- 책 뒤표지에서.

 

아래는 책 본문에서:

 

"Hungarians," Arhtur Koesler wrote, "are the only people in Europe

without racial and linguistic relatives in Europe, therefore they are

the loneliest on this continent. This ... perhaps explains the peculiar

intensity of their existence.... Hopeless solitude feeds their

creativity, their desire for achieving." (p. 11)

 

A age twenty-one, Szilard packed his bags. He was armed

not only with a superb education, but, from his mother,

a strong sense of ethics. (p. 39)

 

Edward's father noticed the ease with which the boy tackled his

sister's algebra problems.... Give him a copy of Euler's geometry,

Professor Lepold Klug advised. "He read Euler," Teller's sister

Emmi recalled, "the way I read love stories." (p. 52)

 

Wigner was homesick.... he complained that "the town had no

coffeehouses where scholars and their students went for lively

extended conversation." ... "[W]e at Princeton had to teach what

ought to have been absorbed in high school or in a coffehouse.

Coming straight from the cultivated physics environment of Berlin,

I often felt in Princeton that I was talking baby talk." (p. 93)

 

Upon its American publication ... the New York Times wrote

that [Koestler's novel] Darkness at Noon "does more to clear up

the mystery of what has happened in Soviet Russia and, ultimately,

what underlay the Soviet- Nazi pact than any publication. (p. 139)

 

In their native [Hungarian] tongue, [von Neumann and Teller]

talked not only of science but literature, the classics, poetry --

for the sheer pleasure of exercising their minds.

"When [Teller] could forget his problems," Enrico Fermi's wife,

Laura, recalled, "he delighted in simple pleasures. His

favorite auther was Lewis Carroll. (pp. 151-2) 

 

On March 4, 1983, the seventy-seven-year-old Koestler took

a lethal dose of tranquilizers.... [F]or Koestler, it was a characteristic

act -- a final assertion of control over his own fate. (p. 212)

 

If you want to understand me, Kertesz urged Gurbo, "you must

read the poetry of Ady." Endre Ady, the hero of Kertesz's

Budapest generation, was the greatest of

the twentieth-century Hungarian poets. (p. 216)

 

Andre Kertesz's black-and-white images of New York City --

the city he loved to hate -- have become among the world's

most enduring.... It is astonishing that such an angry man

produced these perfectly composed, harmonious images. (p. 217)