''Chance Survivor'' (2012) is

Andrew Karpati Kennedy Andrew Edmund Karpati Kennedy (born Kárpáti Andor Ödön; 9 January 1931 – 20 December 2016) was a Hungarian-born British author, literary critic and academic with a passionate interest in the language of drama. Biography Early years Born i ...

's literary memoir of his childhood and youth in Hungary, in a wartime labour camp near Vienna, and, from his mid-teens, at school and university in England.

Summary

"Strong visual, sensory images reconstruct the slow, orderly world of a provincial Hungarian town in the early 1930s and its abrupt collapse, seen through the eyes of a bright, curious little boy born into an affluent, assimilated Jewish family." When the Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944, Kennedy and his parents and sister were deported not to

Auschwitz Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...

as intended but to a labour camp on the outskirts of Vienna. His father died there, but he, his mother and sister survived. Kennedy reprints his evocative account first published in ''

The Observer ''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', whose parent company Guardian Media Group Limited acquired it in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the w ...

'' of travelling on one of the deportation trains. He describes his return to his old school in

Debrecen Debrecen ( , is Hungary's second-largest city, after Budapest, the regional centre of the Northern Great Plain region and the seat of Hajdú-Bihar County. A city with county rights, it was the largest Hungarian city in the 18th century and i ...

, his brief spell at the

Fasori Gimnázium Fasori Gimnázium (lit. "secondary school on the tree-lined avenue"; fasori=tree lined, gimnazium=secondary school), also known as Fasori Evangélikus Gimnázium ("Fasori" Lutheran Secondary School), official name: ''Budapest-Fasori Evangélikus G ...

in Budapest and his outings to the theatre and opera as a young teenager. "Part II of the book, set in early postwar England, shows most clearly the trauma sustained by this boy who emerged from the camps alive yet unable to exist in the deepest part of his psyche: the Hungarian language." We see Kennedy moving to England to stay with his uncle in Ware and attending Hertford Grammar School, before earning a place at the

University of Bristol , mottoeng = earningpromotes one's innate power (from Horace, ''Ode 4.4'') , established = 1595 – Merchant Venturers School1876 – University College, Bristol1909 – received royal charter , type ...

to read English Literature. "What follows", writes Lazaroms, "is a long meditation on language, literature, and the tribulations of 'becoming English'."

Critical reception

"With hindsight, one understands what an enormous work of emotional archaeology must have been involved in digging out that little boy from under the ruins of his destroyed world and reconstructing the smells, feelings, spaces and relationships that belonged to it."Yudit Kiss, ''PN Review'', vol. 40, no. 2, November - December 2013.

Notes

External links

Publisher's page on ''Chance Survivor''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chance Survivor 2012 non-fiction books British memoirs The Holocaust in Hungary Books about Hungary