Istvan Hollos—19 April, 1872—2 February, 1957

Some weeks before his 85th birthday, Istvan Hollos died in Budapest after a long illness and much ill-fortune. Only the gravest physical and mental strain was able to break him. Up to his eightieth year he stood the tribulations of our troubled times with undiminished capacity and zest for work. I well remember the objective stoicism with which he talked of his abduction and escape in the winter of 1944–45. Together with other inhabitants of the building where he lived, he and his wife were driven barefoot through snow and ice to the embankment of the Danube, one of the sites of mass execution, where the victims—shot dead or half dead—were indiscriminately thrown into the river. By pure chance the slaughter stopped just before it was their turn to be killed. He escaped, and after the liberation of Hungary resumed his analytical work apparently untouched by his ordeals. But the poisonous after-effects of a long undiscovered attack of urosepsis, which a mechanically successful operation could not completely dispel, and the sudden and tragic loss of his wife finally succeeded in breaking his resistance and his optimism and started his final illness.

Istvan Hollos was one of the early practitioners of psycho-analysis and one of the earliest members of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. It was as an alienist in the first decade of this century that he became interested