Remembering 1956 seventy years later: The Maléters – A story of suffering, struggles, survival

Type of Abstract (select): Individual Presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
After the arrest in Hungary of her husband, Colonel Pál Maléter on November 3, his ex-wife Mária Maléter (née Pausz) and two of their children, Pál, aged 10 and Mária, 9, fled Hungary on November 21, 1956 and sought refuge in Vienna, Austria. The third child, Judit, aged only 7, joined them a month later because she had the flu at the time of the fleeing. Then the family of four went to Montreal, Canada first, before they were invited by the International Rescue Committee to address the United Nations in New York on behalf of her husband and the other captured Hungarian government officials.
On the double occasion of the 70th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian revolution and freedom fight, and the 250th birthday of the United States commemorated in 2026, my aim is to present the role of the UN, and then Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld in particular, in Prime Minister Imre Nagy’s and Pál Maléter’s case in Hungary on the one hand, and the contribution of the Maléter family in the USA, on the other hand, after they received their green card shortly after Maléter’s execution in 1958. The research is based on the Memory Project interview with Pál Maléter II, who died in 2017, and his recollections published in 56 Stories: Personal Recollections of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. A Hungarian American Perspective. Online databases of newspapers and the digital facsimile of Foreign Relations of the United States documents between 1861-1960 have also been consulted for this presentation.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Nóra Deák graduated as an English-Russian high school teacher in 1990 in Debrecen, then received an LIS MA degree in 1997 in Budapest. She was a librarian between 1990-2022, and now she works as an international relations officer at the Secretariat of the MTA. Her research on the reception, registration, and resettlement of the 1956 Hungarian refugees in the US was supported by a Fulbright Visiting Research Scholarship at the American Hungarian Foundation, and by Rutgers University Libraries during 2014-2015 in New Brunswick, NJ. She participated in The Post-1956 Refugee Crisis and Hungarian Émigré Communities During the Cold War project.