In Memoriam Göncz Árpád

Beloved former president of Hungary died on 6th October, 2015.

Hungary’s first democratically elected president, Göncz Árpád, has died aged 93. He was born 10, February, 1922.

He graduated in law from the Budapest Pázmány Péter University of Arts and Sciences in 1944.

Göncz Árpád joined the resistance against the Nazis during World War II and then became secretary of the Independent Smallholders Party, which won the first post-war election.

He was jailed for taking part in the 1956 uprising. He was arrested in May 1957 and sentenced to life imprisonment on August 2 of the same year, without the possibility of appeal. Along with more than 4,000 other revolutionaries and freedom fighters, he was released from prison under amnesty in 1963.

He was elected president by the parliament twice, in 1990 and 1995, and was credited with helping enforce the fledgling democratic constitution.

His fatherly manner endeared him to Hungarians, who nicknamed him “Uncle Árpi”.

Göncz Árpád worked as a translator and playwright until 1988. He has published several novels, plays and essays, and also translated a great number of – more than a hundred – prose works from English into Hungarian.

Some of his notable translations include E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

In 1988 he returned to politics, co-founding the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), and – like another writer, Václav Havel in the Czech Republic – became Hungary’s first democratically elected president.

He left the presidency in 2000 and devoted himself to charitable work. He is survived by his wife, Mária Zsuzsanna Göntér, and four children including daughter Kinga, a former foreign minister.

source: BBC