Chapter XVII: The Hungarian Convergence: Trained By History
What survival teaches about false coherence, and why that matters here.
By the final stages of this manuscript, a pattern had become impossible to ignore. Each time I believed the work was finished, it reopened. This was one of those moments. And this time, it came from Hungary.
Until then, the fact that both Matt and I had Hungarian heritage had been little more than a running joke. But when a critical contribution arrived from a Hungarian scientist living in Hungary, and proved essential, that stopped being dismissible. I found myself asking a question I hadn’t planned to ask: why had three people, working independently, converged on the same unresolved problem? One Hungarian living in Budapest. One with Hungarian heritage. One shaped by a traumatic Hungarian family history.
I didn’t experience this consciously as the work unfolded. But as I began to learn more about Hungarian history and intellectual culture, something clicked. The influence wasn’t sentimental. It showed up in how problems were approached, how structure was prioritized, and how conclusions were trusted only if they held under pressure.
Hungary has spent centuries inside other people’s empires. Conquest, occupation, and forced realignment weren’t interruptions, they were the norm. Living under those conditions teaches you something specific: systems can look intact long after they’ve failed, slogans lie, and only structure tells the truth. You learn to stop trusting appearances and start asking what actually holds.
For me, that explains MB’s singular, uncanny, and sophisticated ability to discern falsehood from truth. He carries that inheritance through his grandfather. I carry my heritage closer.
My father is from Hungary. My grandmother was Hungarian and Jewish, born into a wealthy family in Transylvania. Before the war, she studied in France. She spoke fluent French. She was educated, cultured, and fully expected to live a protected life.
In the 1920s, she married a poor Christian painter.
Her father disowned her. She went through with it anyway.
Then she did something even more unforgivable by the standards of the time: she divorced her husband (my grandfather) because he was cruel to her and to their child, my father. A wealthy Jewish woman marrying a poor Christian man was already social heresy. Leaving him afterward meant exile. She lost money, protection, family standing, and any expectation of forgiveness. There were no safety nets. No applause. Just consequences.
She accepted them.
She saw the situation clearly, chose the harder path, and carried the cost herself.
Soon after, she was deported to Auschwitz.
She survived.
After liberation by the Americans, barely alive, she made it to the house of a local Polish doctor. He and his family nursed her back from the edge. She returned to Transylvania to find my father, twelve years old, believing, like the rest of the town, that she was dead. She wasn’t.
