Zoltán Jókay

My father was born in Munich in 1935.
His name was Zoltán Adolf Jókay.
Adolf after an uncle,
so the story goes.

Sometime after Hitler came to power, my grandfather moved back to Hungary with his family, his Bavarian wife Ortrud and his two sons Zoltán and Huba.

He should have been transferred to the Hungarian diplomatic mission in Berlin, which he supposedly refused because he didn't want to move to the capital of a country that was losing a war. This ended his career and he became a secondary school teacher.

He remained in Hungary for the rest of his life.

Grandfather never talked about politics.

My father actually wanted to study physics. But he wasn't allowed to because he didn't belong to the working class. Or because he was caught reading comics at the American consulate, the enemy.

So he studied electrical engineering. That worked.

In 1956, after the suppression of the Hungarian uprising, he fled Hungary and settled in Munich.

My mother later followed him on her own.
I don't know why they didn't leave the country together. I only have my assumptions.

My father made a career at Siemens.

He seems to have been talented in his field. I've heard that he rarely had to exert himself in his life.
Things were easy for him. Maybe that's why he never learned to make an effort. He was comfortable, I hear in cautious retrospect.