Adam LeBor is deputy director of research at the Danube Institute. His latest book is The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance 1940-1945.
It is a most fitting tribute: an iron and steel statue of the Iron Lady in a city once behind the Iron Curtain. And not just any city – but Budapest, a place that Mrs Thatcher electrified with her visit in February 1984. The statue commemorating her 100th birthday was unveiled last week in the
Artillery boomed over the Buda hills, the flashes of explosions slicing through the freezing winter dusk. The crack of rifle fire sounded nearby and the air was thick with the acrid stink of cordite. It was 24 December 1944 and Giorgio Perlasca was trying to get to the Spanish Legation villa to celebrate Christmas. The
On 16 May, 1944, as the first full trainloads of Hungarian Jews trundled towards Auschwitz, the SS decided to clear out the area known as the ‘Gypsy family camp’ to make room for the new arrivals. The family camp housed several thousand Roma and Sinti (Roma with German roots) people. Like the Jews, they were
One day in May 1944, in the Nagyvárad ghetto, Sándor Leitner saw an elderly man struggling to walk towards him. His face was swollen from beatings and he was barely able to stand. It was his father, returning from his interrogation by the Gendarmes. The Nagyvárad ghetto (now Oradea in Romania) was the largest in
Few organisations reward incompetence as richly as the United Nations. Consider Kofi Annan, head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) during the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica. In January 1994 he twice refused General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda, permission to raid the Hutu arms caches, despite Dallaire’s warnings of