István Deák

István Deák (11 May 1926 – 9 January 2023) was a Hungarian-born American historian, author and academic. He was a specialist in modern Europe, with special attention to Germany and Hungary.

Quotes

• To resist meant to leave the legal path and to act as a criminal. ... In order to be able to print and distribute illegal newspapers, one had to steal strictly controlled printing paper and machines and to forge or steal ration cards, banknotes, residence permits and identity cards. To fight the enemy the resisters needed to seize arms from military garrisons or from rival resisters. All this required the talents of a burglar, a forger and a thief.
  • Quoted in Charles Kaiser, "What Americans forget about French resistance", CNN (May 8, 2015)

• There were people who tried to get by under foreign occupation, who hoped to survive the war unscathed, and who wished to remain nonpolitical. For them, both collaboration and resistance were unwelcome, even threatening activities. For many if not most Europeans, the collaborator was a wild-eyed fanatic who tried to get your son to join the Waffen SS ... or to work in a German factory, while the resister was yet another fanatic, likely to be a ragged and unappetizing foreigner who sabotaged train travel and wanted your son to go to the forest and risk being killed there by the Germans.
  • Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution during World War II (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2015) introduction

External links

• Encyclopedic article on István Deák on Wikipedia