LINHARDT Antal - Family Life

Antal II met his wife Erzsébet SIMON (aka Böske MOHOS) in a housing unit.^[7] Böske's father, Jakab SIMON, was also a printer and had similar labor-oriented politics. Around 1910, Jakab had moved his family into a housing unit in Wekerletelep in Kispest owned by Jakab's trade union. When Böske met Antal he was already secretary of the HSDP in Kispest and a member of the city council. Böske was also a HSDP party member and was doing volunteer office work and typing for an upcoming election when she met Antal. They had their engagement party on Christmas Eve 1926 and were engaged for 1 1/2 years.^[1]

Antal was a very serious man, very particular, very clean and very organized. He was a perfectionist. He taught Böske to love reading. He would give Böske a book to read and then afterwards ask her what part she liked the best. The first book he gave her was an HG Wells novel.^[1]

Böske & Antal were married on a Sunday at City Hall on April 6, 1927. The mayor of Kispest officiated the civil service on a Sunday. To avoid publicity, Antal & Böske took the street car on the way back from the ceremony and didn't stay in a hotel. While Antal was generally a stern and serious man, he must have been passionate that night as Böske reported they broke the planks of their bed on their wedding night.^[1]

Böske obviously had great respect for her husband who was clearly a man of great principle and a politician for the people. At the same time, he was a stern man who expected his wife to hand him is clothes while he got dressed in the morning.^[7]

On January 6, 1928 their daughter Eva was born. On August 24, 1931 their son, Antal III, was born in the very maturnity hospital in Kispest that Antal II had built in 1928. Years later, Antal III's son Peter was also born in the "Linhardt Surgery". The hospital was off the main street in Kispest which for many years was also named after Antal Linhardt II. Antal was also partially responsible for bringing electricity to Kispest.

While Böske was born Jewish, she was raised in a non-religious family. When she married Antal, she signed a paper saying that the children would be raised in the father's religion (Catholic). This arrangement must have been done for political reasons, as Antal was not a religious man. When their children grew to school age, to the dismay of their Catholic school, it became apparent that they were totally unfamiliar with basic Catholic rituals such as the catechism. Antal's relations with the Church grew strained when he refused to pay his tithe. Antal was furious with the nuns for telling his daughter Eva that she should love the Virgin Mary more than her own mother Böske. On January 7th, 1935, Antal converted his whole family to the liberal Protestant Unitarian religion.^[1]

The Social Democrat Party was a small party. The Communist Party was illegal, so many communists changed to the Social Democrat party. Antal was elected to the parliament, but then resigned to give his post to another in order to give the peasants representation. Also, he was member of city council and the legislative body of the county. He got in an argument with the head of the county, a Nazi who accused the Social Democratic Party of being a front for the communists. Antal responded that the Social Democratic Party was against any form of totalitarianism including the Communists and the Nazis. After the speech, he was beaten up and physically thrown out of the assembly. Because of his political stance, Antal was drafted to a forced labor camp on the eastern front.^[3]

Things were getting worse, there were quotas for how many Jews could be in various positions. Böske didn't consider herself as a Jew as she was married to a Christian. Antal became the editor of a political paper called "The Voice of the People". Because of the anti-Nazi stance of the paper, Antal was drafted to the army in 1942 even though he was over age and he had a hernia. The draft was to a work brigade taken unarmed out to the eastern front with the idea that the people in this brigade would never come back. On 3 May 1942, they loaded them up in cattle wagons and took them out to the front. Böske asked her husband if she should take the two children to see him in camp before he was taken away, but Antal didn't want his children to see him in such an undignified state. Most of the brigade workers were Jews and wore yellow arm bands. Antal wore a white arm band to signify that he was a polical prisoner.  A large percentage of this "extermination brigade" died.^[1][3]

On April 25, 1942 he was summoned to the #401 Special Penal Labor-Service Company, and against attempts to save him he was taken to the Eastern Front. After the Soviet attack against the 2nd Hungarian Army on January 12, 1943 Antal Linhardt II disappeared forever.

Istvan Kossa, Minister of Industry in the Communist Era of the 1940s & 50s was in the #401 Labor Brigade with Antal Linhardt.  He writes about the deplorable conditions in his memoirs "From the Danube to the Don".  The Don was the river where the Hungarian Second Army was smashed by the invading Soviet's Red Army in January 1943 marking the beginning of the end for Hungary.  

Mathematician Paul Turan writes about his friend Giza Grunbaum, another mathematician, who also was in the 401 Penal Company:

During the liberation of Budapest in 1945, we all became personally acquainted with death. As time went by, the facts started to come out. We learned that the labor service unit he served in was in fact a "death unit" made up of completely innocent "politically unreliable" people as punishment for an act of sabotage in the city of Győr. Within a few months the entire unit was executed except for five lucky survivors, among whom was Mr. István Kossa

Kossa didn't think much of Antal Linhardt and was critical of him in his book.  After the war, my father went to Klossa to ask him what happened to his father since Kossa had been the last person he knew who had seen his father alive.  According to Klossa, Antal had survived the "death unit" and was taken by the Red Army to a hospital in Russia to be treated for his ailments.

Some friends of my father Tony Antal making speeches on Kossuth Radio during the first half of 1943.  Kossuth Radio was a Hungarian language broadcast from Moscow similar to Voice of America.  This was confirmed by an article in the Arrow Cross (Hungarian Nazi) Daily Newspaper, Nyilas Keresztes sometime between the end of 1943 and the siege of Budapest in 1944.  My father heard that Antal had returned to Debrecen with the advancing liberating Russian Army and was on the committee to form a new Hungarian government.   According to the story, he refused to endorse the unification of the Communist and Social Democrat parties and was executed by the KGB.^[3]

During the Communist years, Antal was considered a persona non grata, practically a traitor to the cause. The street named after him was renamed after the Communist Poet Gabor Andor. Böske's widow's pension, equivalent to that of an undersecretary, was revoked. In the 1990's, Boske successfully fought to get her widow's pension restored. Even though the pension the Hungarian government finally offered was only a fraction of she should have been entitled to, it was a tacit acknowledgement that Antal died in the service of his country. On June 11, 1999, the Mayor of Kispest made Antal LINHARDT II an honorary citizen of Kispest thus officially recognizing his contribution 50 years after his death.^[3]

Antal LINHARDT Pages: Main | Nepszava Memorial | Biography | Family Life | #401 Penal Labor Brigade | Citizen of Kispest

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