Nicholas Nagy-Talavera
Nicholas Nagy-Talavera (M / Hungary, 1929-2000), Holocaust survivor
- KEYWORDS : <Auschwitz>
Biography
Nicholas Nagy-Talavera was born February 1, 1929 to prosperous merchants of Sephardic Jewish descent and spent his childhood in Oradea, Romania. In 1944, when he was 14 years old, Nagy-Talavera was arrested by Hungarian police and handed over to German authorities, who transported him to Auschwitz concentration camp. He returned to Budapest in 1945 to find that his parents had also survived the war by hiding with Christian friends.
In 1948 Nagy-Talavera enrolled at the University of Vienna. Arrested by the Russians and convicted of espionage, he spent the next seven years in the USSR's gulag system. He was released in late 1955, and returned to Budapest in time to participate in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. When the revolution was failed he fled to Vienna, and thence to the United States.
Nagy-Talavera completed his Bachelor of Arts and Ph.D. degrees at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught Russian and Eastern European History at California State University, Chico from 1967 until his retirement in 1991.