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Can a psychoanalytic book reviewer reflect anything but awe about a memoir that recounts how a Jewish youth resisted fascist torture, cheated Nazi exterminators by a daring escape, and then endured two more years of imprisonment by the very Communists he had joined in that struggle, yet never relinquished his integrity? Egon Balas achieved this and more. He went on to develop himself without formal training into a creative economist and world-class mathematician using these skills to solve problems for the system that rejected him.
The problems for the analytic reviewer, is that unlike those in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, the lines of conflict set down in this volume are entirely external. Yet Balas’ unadorned writing is so forthright that one may consider if the writer's possibly unrecognized internal conflicts also contributed to his ability to endure his hardships of guilt induction, threats, tortures, and inducements without a single betrayal of his comrades. Balas, at the setting down of his memoir and nearing eighty, is still endowed with that rare intelligence that allows him to look backward with precision as it allowed him then, to look forward with life-saving anticipation. This book not only chronicles his survival but also records the names and events of his fellow resisters who did not survive. All this is set in the larger historical context. The style of his account is deliberately flat, yet the story is so compelling and the historical events so tragically grotesque that at times a sense of irony emerges. Consider the following, which took place in a Hungarian political prison shortly before the end of the war:
On another occasion Csonka called out from the list of names the name of Friedmann, the German miner who had given me his pullover. Friedmann was a big, well-built man with a wide face, flat nose, blue eyes, and blond hair. He looked like a textbook German, and Csonka did not select him, but after calling a few other names, he then calle