Title: The right path
First published: 1994
Description: Ed Mandel lived through harrowing times. He was a young Jew who was born in Hungary, who loved soccer more than religion. During World War II Ed was forced to serve in a Jewish labor battalion in Eastern Europe and the Ukraine. Near the end of the war, Ed escaped the labor battalion and sought out the partisans. He eventually walked home from the Eastern Front to find that the entire Jewish population of Kecskemet, his home town, had been part of the Final Solution.

Ed built a new life during the Soviet rule of Hungary until endangered by his capitalistic success. He left Kecskemet and once again he started a new life in Budapest. In 1956, Ed participated in the Hungarian Revolution. He and his family eventually escaped Hungary in a harrowing night crossing into Austria. From Austria he migrated to the United States and became an American citizen.

As Ed would always say, "Only someone who dreamed to live in America can truly appreciate its greatness." In America, Ed became a successful businessman and pursued his love of soccer by coaching. He made full circle and eventually brought his American youth team to play Hungarians on Hungarian soil in 1985.

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Although Ed's stories are filled with an incredible sense of history, that is not why they are transforming. His stories are of ordinary people who turn extraordinary because of events.

The best of man and the worst of man are seen in the simplest of relationships: from the men who worked on the railroads and looked with blind eyes through the people transported in the trains like cattle; to the Christian captain who visited the Jewish households to collect more warm clothes for his Jewish workers in the battalion; to the drunken brutality of the guards who enjoyed degrading, tormenting and abusing. Through all of it there is a moral center, the storyteller Ed, who tells the truth without compromise and refuses to make grand generalizations.

This book brings light and honor to all who travelled with him on the Right Path.
Subjects: Biography, Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), Jews, Personal narratives, Hungarian Americans
Places: Hungary, Hungarian Americans
People: Edmund Mandel
LC classification: DS135.H9 M348 1994