György Bálint (originally surname Braun; 28 July 191921 June 2020) was a Hungarian

horticulturist Horticulture is the branch of agriculture that deals with the art, science, technology, and business of plant cultivation. It includes the cultivation of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, herbs, sprouts, mushrooms, algae, flowers, seaweeds and no ...

, Candidate of Agricultural Sciences, journalist, author, and politician who served as an MP.

Biography

Bálint's parents Braun Izidor and Koch Rozália were

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

from a long tradition of farming. He graduated from the Royal Hungarian Institute of Horticulture in 1941. His parents and their children were deported to a

concentration camp Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply ...

during the

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...

; only Bálint and one of his sisters survived. He was taken first to

Mauthausen Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town A market town is a settlement most common in Europe that obtained by custom or royal charter, in the Middle Ages, a market right, which allowed it to host a regu ...

and then to the extermination camp in

Gunskirchen Gunskirchen is a town in the Austrian state of Upper Austria. Geography Gunskirchen lies in the Hausruckviertel. About 11 percent of the municipality is forest, and 78 percent is farmland. Internal combustion engine maker Rotax has been headquart ...

. He weighed 42 kilos when he escaped in 1945. He was a

, Candidate of Agricultural Sciences, journalist, author, and politician who served as an MP. He died at 100 years of age in 2020 from

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei, identified in Wuhan, China, in December ...

during the

COVID-19 pandemic in Hungary The COVID-19 pandemic in Hungary is part of the ongoing worldwide pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 () caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (). On 4 March 2020, the first cases in Hungary were announced. The first coron ...

References

1919 births 2020 deaths Hungarian centenarians Members of the National Assembly of Hungary (1994–1998) People from Gyöngyös Jewish Hungarian politicians Alliance of Free Democrats politicians Hungarian journalists Hungarian agronomists Mauthausen concentration camp survivors 20th-century Hungarian male writers 20th-century journalists Horticulturists Deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic in Hungary Men centenarians {{Hungary-politician-stub