Gabor Boritt is a humble and outgoing Gettysburg resident. Someone meeting him for the first time might not realize that he is also a noted Lincoln scholar and internationally acclaimed author on the 16th President and the American Civil War. He rubs elbows with Presidents and other dignitaries on a regular basis. Dr. Boritt recently received The National Endowment for the Humanities Award in the East Room of the White House. President Bush selected the Gettysburg College professor, along with eight other Americans, for the renowned humanities medal. The year’s other recipients were Lincoln historian and author Harold Holzer, philanthropists Robert H. Smith, Thomas Saunders III and Jordan Saunders; biographer Richard Brookhiser, journalist Myron Magnet, children’s book author Albert Marrin, and radio show host Milton Rosenberg. The John Templeton Foundation and the Norman Rockwell Museum were also honored with the 2008 award.
Gabor has met President Bush several times before – in September he had the opportunity of giving the President and First Lady, along with about 20 of their friends and colleagues (including Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Alberto Gonzalez), a private tour of Gettysburg. President Bush, who enjoys a keen interest in American history, remarked that getting a battlefield tour from Dr. Boritt is like “getting a golf lesson from Tiger Woods.” Both men share an admiration for Lincoln, and the nation that the Great Emancipator has helped to perpetuate.
Dr. Boritt has been interested in our 16th President since he came to America in the late 1950s. A Hungarian refugee who has seen terrible barbarity and devastation from both the invading Nazis and the Soviets, Gabor prefers not to dwell on the past. In this, he shares the same opinion with Abraham Lincoln, who, when asked about his early life replied that it was like a poem from Gray’s Elegy: “the short and simple annals of the poor.”
Professor Boritt arrived in New York with just one dollar in his pocket. He headed west and attended Yankton College in South Dakota, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1962. In 1963 he earned his Masters at the University of South Dakota, and then obtained his PhD in American History from Boston University in 1968. He met his wife, the former Liz Norseen, in Boston. The couple married in 1968. They settled in Gettysburg with their three sons in 1981, and raised them on their farm, the John Crawford Farm, that is beautifully situated on the banks of historic Marsh Creek. Their eldest son, Beowulf, is a set designer for Broadway and Off-Broadway productions in New York. Their middle son, Jake, is a film maker and writer who lives in Harlem; and youngest son, Daniel, is a biologist at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. The continuing success of the three Boritt sons mirrors the depth and dedication of their parents to living the American dream.
It was Jake who urged his father to explore the painful past of his early years in Hungary from World War II through the Hungarian Communist revolution in 1956. Since Jake is already a noted documentarian who shares a love of Gettysburg and history with his father, he convinced Gabor to make a film about his early life. “I objected to the film at first,” Dr. Boritt said, “because as a child I was a happy guy. To point out all the negativity of that time would not be honest.” He finally agreed because of love and trust for his son. The result is an amazing film, entitled “From Budapest to Gettysburg”, which was shown for the first time in Gettysburg in June 2007, and released on DVD earlier this year.
Anyone who has read Night by Elie Wiesel can sympathize with Gabor Boritt, who grew up in a Jewish household in Hungary during the Nazi occupation. Family members from his mother’s side were hauled away to Auschwitz and subsequently murdered. His mother never recovered from the loss, dying from a broken heart in 1949, when Gabor was just nine years old. Gabor’s father, who survived the onslaught of atrocities, was a true freedom fighter. He tirelessly railed against the Nazis, and Stalin’s Communists after them, at the risk of his own life.
“My dad was an amazing guy,” Dr. Boritt averred. “He somehow got a leather overcoat that the Nazis wore and impersonated a Nazi official. He went up to the Hungarian police and pulled people, mostly women, off the trains that were heading to the concentration camps. I don’t know how many lives he saved.” The local police, he explained, were little more than boys, and easily intimidated. “Had he been found out, he would have been shot,” Gabor said. “He was gutsy.”
The beautiful old city of Budapest is actually two cities – Buda and Pest – separated by the River Danube. The Boritts lived comfortably in a spacious home in the hills of Buda until the Nazis forced them out and sent them to the ghetto. They lived in conditions that Gabor described as “horrendous” in an old hospital. He remembered seeing the dead in piles “like sacks of corn” and played on bloodstained floors. The Hungarians were glad when the Americans joined in the war effort, and looked to them as liberators. “We loved the Americans,” Dr. Boritt said. “But I was scared of their planes and bombs as a boy. If a bomb lands on you, you are just as dead, whether it is an American bomb or a Nazi one.” One day a shell exploded through the window of their room, killing a couple nearby. The Boritts, who were in another part of the room, were unhurt.
There were many times that death narrowly missed Gabor Boritt. The memories of those dreadful days and nights, according to Gettysburg’s favorite professor, are part of the reason he would rather look ahead. “That is why I prefer not to talk about any of this,” he explained. “The soldiers who fought in D-Day and Iwo Jima never talk about it either. They just don’t want to remember.”
When Hitler’s nightmarish experiment in human terror ended, it was then Stalin’s turn. “We came on hard times,” Gabor said of the Soviet invasion. His mother had died, and his father was arrested for fighting the Communists. With his father and elder brother, Adam, in jail, Gabor was sent to an orphanage. “My family fell apart at that point. It was the last time I had a home. I remember at times there was nothing to eat.”
Like his father, Gabor simply wanted to be free and refused to submit to the pressure of the Communist regime. He detested those who encroached upon his country. “They commit mass murder and make people’s lives miserable, all in the name of some high ideal,” he said. “I wanted to choose my own ideal.”
When Stalin died in 1953, there was a loosening of the Soviet grip. It sparked what became the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Gabor, who was then just 16 years old, joined in the demonstrations and participated in the destruction of the massive Stalin statue in Budapest. “I thought we were going to gain freedom,” he said. “Happiness was in the air.” Finally, he recalled, people believed that Hungary would be a democracy and the people would be free.
Their exhilaration was short lived. “We never had a chance,” Gabor said quietly. “But we didn’t know it.” Three thousand tanks moved into the city, and they “shot the place up. There was shooting all the time, people were dead all over.” Gabor’s brother, Adam, escaped to Austria. Gabor’s father told his two remaining children, Gabor and his sister, Judy, that it was time for them to go too.
Gabor and Judy secretly embarked on their journey and followed their brother to Vienna. Their voyage, Gabor recalled, was “a great adventure.” In Vienna, the Boritt children got their first taste of freedom. After a few years, they managed to obtain passage to America.
Today, Dr. Boritt is preparing to retire from Gettysburg College. He hopes to continue working with the Civil War Institute (the educational organization he established in 1983) and with the Gettysburg Foundation. An advocate for humanitarian work and for perpetuating education for all ages, Dr. Boritt will still be a central figure in Gettysburg and the nation.
He loves teaching the American Civil War. “I like it because I can hold it at arm’s length,” he said. “I can be objective. “ He prefers not to discuss the war he survived because “I can’t be objective. I will take sides almost immediately. I know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.”
Through the insight and perseverance of Jake Boritt, an important piece of history has been preserved. For what is history but a conglomeration of biography, of individual lives who endure significant events? We all have to fight our own battles and we don’t know but that one or more of them will be of historic proportions. Gabor Boritt, whose own saga is nothing short of epic, modestly explained, “I didn’t think my life was all that interesting.”
Nine hundred people who first saw “From Budapest to Gettysburg” in June 2007 at Gettysburg’s Majestic Theater thought otherwise. After viewing the documentary, they gave an enthusiastic standing ovation that lasted for ten minutes. Gabor believed the applause was for his son, but Jake thought the overwhelming response was for his father.
It was most likely, as it deserved to be, for both.
Jake’s latest project is a film about Boy Scout Troop #759. The Boy Scouts, an organization that will celebrate its centennial in September 2009, has become a notable world-wide phenomenon. Troop #759 is in Harlem, and it is led by an 80-year-old Scoutmaster from Ghana, Mr. Sowah. When asked about the film, Jake explained that the documentary is “a classic American story, about individual leaders in an inner city area. It takes place in an American multicultural setting.” Following a new scout joining the troop and watching him grow through the leadership of Mr. Sowah, the film is, in the film maker’s own words, “a sweet story.” The film will premiere in Harlem in the Spring of 2009, and then will be shown in selected locations around the country.
Jake also shot a film in Harlem on Election Day, along with several other film makers, to document the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States. “It was amazing to me to see how the election of a black American has changed America,” he said. “We have changed culturally in this country, because not just minorities elected him.” He added, “It takes all kinds of people to make it [democracy] work.”
It is a far cry, thankfully, from the days that a four-year-old boy in Budapest played on bloodstained floors. “America, to me, is freedom,” Dr. Boritt claims. “It means opportunity, a good life. I’ve had an amazingly good life.”
Because of the persistence of an insightful son and the recognition of a President, a goodly portion of that life has been noted and documented. And, trusting in kind Providence, there are still many more years ahead to add to that amazing life for Gettysburg’s honored professor.
The National Award for the Humanities has been honoring Americans since 1989. Some of Dr. Boritt’s favorite people have received the medal over the years. They include: Robert Ballard, PhD, the deep sea explorer who discovered the sunken Titanic in 1985; Joan Ganz Cooney, one of the creators of The Children’s Television Network; Steven Spielberg, the Academy Award winning producer and director; radio host and humorist Garrison Keillor, journalist and news anchor Jim Lehrer, and author Toni Morrison, who has won the Nobel Prize for literature. Her novels are world famous, depicting the lives of African Americans.
The sources for this article and many of the quotes used herein were provided by Gabor and Jake Boritt, during an interview at the Boritt home on December 11, 2008. Other sources and quotes have been taken, with Jake Boritt’s permission, from his film “From Budapest to Gettysburg”, which is available at boritt.com. The DVD is also available for purchase at the American Wax Museum and Gift Center at 297 Steinwehr Avenue, and the Gettysburg College Bookstore. The film is visually striking, highly educational, and emotionally moving.
The Lincoln quote used in the article can be found in Herndon, William and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln. Chicago and Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006 (reprint, originally published in 1889), page 15.
Dr. Boritt’s latest book is entitled The Gettysburg Gospel and is available at most area bookstores.
Next month: Gabor and Jake Boritt share some of their personal views on Abraham Lincoln, in honor of the 200th anniversary of his birth.
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