HONOUR AND DUTY – the memoirs of Countess Ilona Edelsheim Gyulai

Description

This publication will be of interest to anyone who:

Enjoys biographies.


Is interested in the Second World War and Eastern European/Hungarian history.

Is touched by the ending of an era and way of life that can 
never come again.


Wants to read a true story that combines glamour, 
romance, tragedy and danger.

Has an interest in the spiritual journey and its effect on a 
person’s life. 


SET AGAINST THE backdrop of World War II and the invasion of Hungary, the life of Countess Ilona Edelsheim Gyulai outstrips fiction in this story of romantic happiness, tragedy, abduction, conspiracy, imprisonment and eventual sanctuary.

When she marries Stephen Horthy – the son of Admiral Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary – Countess Ilona is swept to the very forefront of Hungarian society. After her husband, an outspoken critic of the Nazis, dies in an extremely suspicious plane crash, the young widow plays an increasingly important role as the Regent’s confidante. She gives an intimate insight into the characters of the Regent and his wife and sons: the depth of their love for their country and the deep sense of honour and duty they feel towards their people. Her eyewitness account of much of what happened at the very highest level of government in Hungary during the war years and under the German occupation is a unique contribution to understanding the truth of why Hungary became Germany’s ‘unwilling satellite’, and what part the Regent actually played in relation to the fate of Jewish and Polish people living in Hungary at that time.

Ilona’s story continues to fascinate, not only as one follows how her life moves from caring for her young son and her parents-in-law in post-war Germany and Portugal to remarriage and living through unsettled times in Iraq, but also because another theme, quietly under- pinning much of how she relates to circumstances in the first part of the book, now emerges as a keynote in her life. This is her finding of a deep and genuine spiritual fulfilment, which enables her to make connections with the truth inherent in both Christianity and Islam; a moving and life-enhancing awakening that is relevant to anyone conerned about the seemingly irreparable breach between these religions today.

When the original Hungarian editions of HONOUR AND DUTY came out in Hungary in 2001, they were immediate best sellers.

This English edition has a foreword by the noted historian and author John Lukács, which he concludes with the words: ‘This is a memoir of an extraordinary woman.’