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worth 300 thousand HUF (roughly 1000$), although she did not
get back the mansion at Baracska. She used up 190 thousand to
buy a TV and a fridge. 110 thousand is still said to be flotsam
somewhere. If it turns up, we will use it up to make a tapestry
out of it, along with all the inflated money from the old days,
and those which lost their values in our hands due to the erratic
twists and turns of the ‘90s. We have a room named “partying
room”, a room for fun with a bar counter. In the room, among
many other things there is a “framed picture” of all the inflated
Hungarian paper bank notes of the last 100 years, which is quite
a sum. We could call them first class examples of the graphic
arts, and in spite of the series being incomplete; the size of the
“picture” is still remarkable.
I pitied the mansion, because we spent the summers
there, and we even had an old car at the time. When he could
have one, my father always had a car. This car was later
commandeered by the military. It became a military vehicle.
After that, the family used a motorcycle with a sidecar.
Baracska was a quiet, calm place, the distance between it and
Budapest seemed long at the time, but when my grandfather
bought the mansion at the end of the war, he believed that he
was buying it to live in and farm there in peace after he had left
politics behind. He firmly believed that there would be
democracy in Hungary after the war, and as such, he thought
that buying that small mansion was the deal of his life. He was
said to have been brilliantly sharp-minded in other issues. The
Gestapo was on his tail, because he defended Hungarian rights
firm as a rock. He was arrested after the war by the Soviets, and
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was sent to Andrássy út/Street 60 , where he cut his veins and
the doctor who treated him in the prison leaked out that Drozdy,
the MP, was still in Budapest. We thought by that time that he
was already in Amerika, residing at his friends, to whom he

6 Centre of the ÁVO/ÁVH (Államvédelmi Hatóság, „Authority of National Defence”)
during the era, which was the executive power at the time. Currently it resides the
museum House of Terrors Museum.

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