Árpád Göncz was born on 10 February 1922 in Budapest into a petty bourgeois family of noble origin as the son of Lajos Göncz de Gönc (1887–1974), who worked as a post officer, and Ilona Haimann (b. 1892). The Roman Catholic Göncz family originated from Csáktornya, Zala County (today Čakovec, Croatia), where Göncz's great-grandfather, Lajos Göncz, Sr. was a pharmacist. He later participated in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 and following the defeat, he was sentenced to nine years in prison. Árpád Göncz's father, Lajos Göncz was also a successful tennis player, who participated in the 1924 Summer Olympics, where he was defeated by René Lacoste in men's singles in the second round. Árpád Göncz's parents divorced when he was six years old, thus his relationship with his father became tense in the following years. Göncz's mother, who was a Unitarian, was born in Transylvania, she had Jewish and Székely roots. She became an orphan as a child and after a brief spell in an orphanage, she was raised by the merchant Báthy family from Budapest.