György Harag (June 4, 1925, Marghita, Kingdom of Romania – July 7, 1985, Târgu Mureș, Socialist Republic of Romania) was a Hungarian director and actor from Transylvania, Romania.
Life
Early life
György Harag was born on June 4, 1925, at Marghita in a Hungarian Jewish family. He was the son of Kádár Magda and Harag Jenő, timber-merchant. He started his elemental schools on Marghita, but finished it in Tășnad. Made his high-school studies on Oradea Mare, first at Emanoil Gojdu High School, then at Jewish High School of Oradea Mare, finally he sat his school examinations in Szent László High School. After graduation he worked for a year as an apprentice, learning ceramics making in Budapest.
He shows close ties to theater from his earliest childhood. He faced, first, at Tășnad, some itinerant theaters (being mentioned by he himself the itinerant companies of Károly Jódi, Ernő Víg and Lajos Antal) that had a significant influence on his future development:
"There were coming these companies, and I always joint them. I was astonished and amazed. They were poor and had a very bitterly life. I was always in contact with them, but I was not willing to become one of them. I was sixteen when somebody asked me in Oradea Mare: what you want to be? Director – I answered. (...) Well, just like that, after all I have told. And to support my statement, I have started directing my schoolmates..."
During the years spent in Oradea Mare, he had the opportunity to capture the work of the most considerable artists, even if these were not their best stagings: theater started to become just a source of delight. Later, he remembers this period:
"Of course, I was day by day in theater at Oradea Mare. Although the company was a good one, the period between 1940 and 1944 was very difficult for the theater. It was headed by an exceptional director, namely Bálint Putnik. There were very popular the playful performances, because they brought the survival. Putnik, however, tried to raise the standards introducing classical plays, of course, within the limits of material resources."
By the regular invitation of guest artists' the audience (including György Harag) might have got acquainted with the most important artists like Pál Jávor, Margit Dajka, Ferenc Kiss, Antal Páger and Klári Tolnay, but also to those of Transylvania as Ernő Szabó, Luci Hamvay, Ferenc Delly, Juci Komlós.
György Harag and his family were deported in 1944. From the brick-works ghetto of Szilágysomlyó, he is carried to Auschwitz, Mauthausen and then to Ebensee. He is the only survivor of his entire family, losing both his parents and brothers.
"I think I’m a strange natured man - or maybe I was too young to realize the facts can we passed – because the agonies I have passed, did not traumatized me for a lifetime, as happened to many other survivors. We have passed through terrible agonies, dressed only in shirt, we have worked for months, in a cold of minus twenty degrees. (...) I was the only survivor of a consignment of 1,500 people. I’ve got sick. (...) I got twenty-five strokes whose bloody traces were infected. I was operated several times, without any anaesthesia and medicine. But it's quite possible that I have survived just because of that. It brought me the opportunity to spend the whole winter wrapped on a hospital bed. I had already left with sequelae of malnutrition. I can say that before the release, I was practically laying next to dead men, just like the old age end weakenings. Half-aware, I have heard - or maybe I just thought I have heard - that doctors disagreed over my fate: Does we give him the last drop of vitamin-C? Its no use, he anyway dies. Then I heard another voice: - He is the youngest, let’s manage him... And then I’ve got the secret portion of vitamin -C mixed with Salvarsan and bizmut. That 's how I survived. (...) I tried to find my rescuer long time afret the war, but in vane. (...)After a few years I returned to Ebensee. The ruins of the camp were rested, while there were built a coluple of flats next to them. I felt strange seeing that huge houses very next to the place where countless people had been destroyed."
Very ill, he returns to Tasnád in 1945. After a long period of convalescence, he enrolled at the Hungarian Academy of Music and Theatre in Cluj.