Praise for In My Brothers Image
This is not just another story of the Holocaust. It is a lesson in tolerance... and it is written in tears from deep within the soul.
Middlesex Jewish Star
Moving... [Pogany] makes us understand the complexityand feel the heartbreakof his familys one-of-a-kind history.
New York Post
Profoundly riveting and morally compelling.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
A tool... to help move Christians from... mere defensiveness to... moral ownership for the part that Christians played in the evil of the Shoah.
Father David C. Michael, The Pilot
Remarkable... There is much to recommend about this book for anyone interested in World War II and the Holocaust. There is also much to recommend to any Jew or Christian who wishes to contemplate the complex relationship between faith and experience.
The Roanoke Times
[Poganys] book is one of the most compelling personal narratives to come out of the Holocaust.
Booklist
A memorable family story, full of vivid atmosphere and stirring incidents.
Kirkus Reviews
Eugene Poganys power-packed and poignant narrative of his fathers wartime years, his return to his Jewish faith while his brother became a Catholic priest is highly readable and deeply inspiring. I recommend it to all readers who wish to know more about what happened to European Jewry during the Holocaust.
Elie Wiesel
In this powerful and searing memoir Eugene Pogany opens his heart to share the incredible story of his Jewish father and his Christian uncle, twin brothers whose lives were profoundly altered in the crucible of the Holocaust. In My Brothers Image is a sensitive and overwhelming tale which constitutes a vital addition to the legacy of the Shoah.
Alan L. Berger, Raddock Eminent Scholar Chair of Holocaust Studies, Florida Atlantic University
In My Brothers Image is a very remarkable contribution to the Holocaust Literature. It is a riveting account of a very unusual familial conflict, caused by the conversion to Catholicism by some members of a Hungarian Jewish family. This fascinating conflict between two identical brothers echoes the schism between their separate religions. Reading the book turned me into a virtual witness to what happened, day by day, to the Jews of Hungary between World War I and the end of World War II. Eugene Pogany lovingly tries to understand and bring to life the struggles and soul searching of the generation before him. His book is a real page turner.
Edith Velmans, author of Ediths Story
PENGUIN BOOKS
IN MY BROTHERS IMAGE
Eugene L. Pogany is a practicing clinical psychologist in Boston. A frequent speaker on anti-Semitism and Jewish-Catholic relations, he has written for Cross Currents, Shma, Jewishfamily.com, and the Jewish Advocate. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with his wife and two sons.
I N M Y
B ROTHER S I MAGE
Twin Brothers Separated by
Faith After the Holocaust
Eugene Pogany
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc. 2000
Published in Penguin Books 2001
Copyright 2000 by Eugene Pogany
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
A portion of this work first appeared in Crosscurrents.
Photographs are from the private collection of the author.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Pogany, Eugene.
In my brothers image / Eugene Pogany.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-66420-9
1. Pogany, Nicholas, 1912 2. Pogany. George, 19121993. 3. JewsHungaryBiography. 4. Jewish converts from ChristianityUnited StatesBiography. 5. PriestsHungaryBiography. 6. Holocaust, Jewish (19391945)HungaryBiography. 7. Holocaust survivorsBiography. 8. HungaryBiography. 9. United StatesBiography. I. Title.
DS135.H93 A163 2000
909.049240820922dc21
[B] 99-053358
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.
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And still it is not yet enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselvesnot till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
R AINER M ARIA R ILKE
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T he moment one definitely commits oneself, wrote Goethe, all sorts of things occur, raising in ones favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. In addition to those individuals mentioned in the Authors Note who helped with the factual content of this book, there are numerous others whose assistance and goodwill were invaluable in making it a reality. I wish to express my gratitude to Nancy Malone, O.S.U., the tireless and visionary former editor of Cross Currents: The Journal of the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life. Along with her discerning coeditors, Joseph Cunneen and William Birmingham, Nancy introduced this story to the journals interfaith readership by featuring my essay, In Each Others Likeness, in its Spring 1995 issue (Vol. 45, No. 1). I have quoted briefly here from both that essay and my later piece, Exile and Memory: Reflections on Tisha BAv, which appeared in the Winter 199596 issue of Cross Currents (Vol. 45, No. 4).
My friend Jrgen Manemann, of Westflische Wilhelms University, Mnster, Germany, further advanced the telling of the story by translating In Each Others Likeness into German and facilitating its publication in the Swiss Catholic periodical Orientierung, where it appeared in August 1997 (Volume 6, Number 15/16). Similarly, I wish to thank Professor Randolph L. Braham, preeminent scholar of the Hungarian Holocaust, who graciously recommended my essay to the distinguished Budapest Jewish quarterly,