Peter Tarjan

Transplanted Lives Peter Tarjan

This is an anthology of personal accounts about seeking freedom and escape from persecution. The majority of the protagonists had survived the Holocaust in Hungary and had written about their wartime experiences as children, and post-war experiences as teenagers in two earlier collections in 1992 and 1998. These are their recollections of escaping from Hungary, the land of their birth -- where they never had real roots - following the 1956 Uprising against communist rule. Most of the storytellers were around twenty years of age and eager to learn the language of their new home and complete their education to become professionals. They describe a mixture of hope and fear as refugees, the challenges with a new language, new customs and their struggle to earn a living, in many cases without the support of a family or friends in the land where they were accepted to settle down. Their family backgrounds represent a broad range and so does the spectrum of careers at the time of writing their stories more than a half century later. The subject seems to resonate at this time when millions of displaced persons seek a better life in freedom and security around the world.