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A Hungarian Child Survivor Looks Back and Looks Forward
Michael Pinto-Duschinsky
80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz...
January 1945: our family's battle for life continues
January 1995: the still-unresolved Flick Affair
January 2025: survivor welfare - our prime responsibility
Michael has had three distinct lives.
On 4 May 1944, Michael was smuggled out of the ghetto in Munkacs, then part of Hungary and now in Ukraine; on 8 July 1944 he
was one of under a hundred out of some 11,000 Jews saved from deportation from Budakalasz [near Budapest] to Auschwitz in a rightly controversial side-deal between the Jewish Vaada [relief committee] and Adolf Eichmann. He arrived in London in May 1948.
He is a political scientist and former fellow of Merton
College, Oxford, Pembroke College, Oxford, and Brunel University. Michael is internationally known for his work on the funding of political parties and elections, corruption, human rights and democratisation. He has advised governments, international organisations and public bodies in some 25 countries, and was the only non-lawyer appointed by Prime Minister Cameron to the UK Commission on a Bill of Rights.
Following the Flick Affair in Oxford in 1995-6, Michael was asked by the London-based survivor group Claims for Jewish Slave Labour Compensation to act as its honorary academic advisor. He negotiated with multiple German ambassadors and ministers in the still unsuccessful demand that Germany should recognise that slave labour in Auschwitz and
thousands of Nazi camps was illegal and that compensation should be offered on that basis.
