Comrade Baron

This is a fascinating account of the arrest and deportation of almost all the Transylvanian aristocracy by the Romanian authorities on the night of 3rd March 1949 and their subsequent fate under the Romanian Communist regime. It’s a previously little documented and relatively unknown story and one which deserves attention. There are so many human stories behind the bare facts and the author has done much research to discover these stories, even managing to track down the last remaining survivors of the infamous episode. He spoke to many of the families who somehow managed to sustain a sense of group identity under Ceausescu in spite of being considered an underclass. How they survived makes for some riveting reading. The issue of restitution is now a major problem for the government, and what happens to the remaining estates, many of which have fallen into disrepair, means some very difficult decisions have to be made. I found the book very interesting indeed and was pleased to discover this to me previously unknown slice of history.

Scholten, a Dutch writer, married the daughter of a Hungarian aristocratic refugee, and in the 1990s, as the iron curtain lifted, became fascinated by the stories told by the family about their former properties and lives. When the opportunity presented itself to move the family to Hungary because of his wife's job opening a branch of a Dutch bank, he started seeking out surviving remnants of the old Hungarian and Romanian (Transylvanian, particularly) elite. My like Douglas Smith's Former People, about the crushing of the Russian aristocracy in the years after 1917, this is a chronicle of brutal expropriation and suppression, with few survivors and even fewer who managed to hang on to photos, jewels and land. These memories are mixed in with the attempts, up to the present, to sort out land possession and restore some of the castles (although now expensive white elephants) to their former owners.