"50 RELATIVES WORSE THAN YOURS"

   JUSTIN RACZ'S CHRISTMAS PRESENT

A real Christmas present is 50 Relatives Worse Than Yours around the Christmas tree, around the dinner table. If you have it, you are the lucky few. Even though you are one of Justin Racz's ridiculed fifty, you can be one of the lucky ones to make up the Fabulous Fifty, so long as you bring a present to be put under the Christmas tree. You may not know well the other Forty-Nine relatives, but eventually you become a Regular. Actually, if you behave, you get invited for next year. You never get replaced -- there is no institutional membership in the Club, the 50 Relatives is what you have. As Lyndon Johnson used to say, I am the only President you have got.

Justin Racz was both in September, 1974. His brother Gregory was five years old. In December, 1974, I testified in Congress on the legalization of gold. This was the year when President Nixon resigned. I had my two sons very much in mind when I said,

"I immigrated to America (1964) when people were happy, when Doris Day was still a star -- but I believe that the American Dream is not dead but alive."

Justin, who is my son, does not know about Christmas 1945. We had a very large family, dispersed in the Holocaust. One by one, some came back from Germany, from hiding in the villages, from Poland. Justin's grandfather, who disappeared in Auschwitz, never came back.

Christmas 1945. We contacted the relatives. There were about thirty. Uncle Mikos who lost a brother assumed the support of his parents, his sister and two children. Professor German, the husband of the great actress Bajor Gizi was a family of two. Actually the Professor's sister Mrs. Rigla stayed in London and rented a house to Peter Thorncroft, the future Chancellor of the Exchequer, in Eaton Square.

There were about thirty relatives left.

I survived with real substitute parents, the best I ever had. I went to high school in Budapest. In the year 2006, about twenty former classmates of mine are in the Western world. We are now the Relatives. We talk, we comment on the Internet and meet once a year. Each of us probably say, I have the twenty worst classmates we ever had. However, they are the Best Relatives I ever had.

I sent each of my Hungarian classmates a copy of Justin's 50 Relatives. Slowly we realized that this Manhattan-born 31-year-old young writer brought together our whole life from the time we had hardly any relatives in 1945 to the time we each had 50 Relatives again.

Unintentionally, a well meaning, talented New York writer created a bridge -- a human bridge of 60 years. My friends are all immigrants and each have grandchildren, and we all miss the relatives we left behind forever in the Holocaust.

Actually, at our next Class Reunion, scheduled for 2006 in Budapest

Justin Racz

will be nominated as the first junior member of The Club.

Andrew Racz
A father worse than yours

November 14, 2005

(Article 13 - posted November 14, 2005)

e-mail: mlikar@aol.com

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