Gál Miklós följegyzései III.
Miklós Gál’s Notes III

Summary/Abstract: The memoirs of Dr. Miklós Gál (1889–1983), lawyer, lay president of the Unitarian Church (1938–1951), Member of Parliament, are published in 87 typed pages. Shortly before his death, Gál dedicated and gave his notes to his grandson Miklós Gál who then gave a photocopy to the historian Dr. Attila Gábor Hunyadi, who offered it to our journal for publication. The third and last part of the memoirs covers events from 1952 to 1977, including: the installation of the Communist regime in 1948, events right after WW II, inflation, the excesses of the communist regime against those citizens whom they considered the enemy, Miklós Gál’s struggles to provide his family as a retired man, etc. The state took away his pension on the pretext that he did not deserve it (!), so he was forced to find employment. He worked as a bricklayer, clerical worker for a notary, then for an engineer who surveyed the city of Nagyenyed (Aiud), assistant accountant at the GOSTAT (state holding), clerk at ComPetrol (state fuel distributor institute), seller in a cooperative shop, etc. The state forced Gál and his wife into public housing in Nagyenyed. They changed flats several times. The humiliation of their displacement was increased by mandatory reporting to the police station. In the late fifties Gál had to witness the demolition of part of his home in Torda (Turda) and its replacement by an apartment block. He did not get back his family home in Kövend (Plăiești). They managed to move back to Torda only in 1968.The Gáls twice became grandparents in the fifties, and great-grandparents in the seventies. Although Gál struggled financially in his late years, he followed world events closely (the 1956 revolution in Hungary, the Vietnam war, the conflict in Israel, the landing on the moon, the Czechoslovakian events in the spring of 1968, etc.). He wrote short analyses of the Hungarian minority in the Romanian Socialist Democracy.

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