Painted Pebbles

An eye-witness account of watershed moments in modern European history. In 1983 librarian Peter Stangl took his teenaged son and daughter to Budapest, to show them the city and the land where he had grown up. He wrote an account of that trip, which he titled “Pebbles, ” because a surprise encounter with some stones his mother had painted stirred up such strong memories of his boyhood. In time, Mr. Stangl expanded his memoir into a saga of memories of world-shaking events that he had witnessed as a boy and young man in Hungary: the rise of Naziism, the violence of World War II, the subsequent Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Interspersed with these accounts of history in the making, the author gives a fond anecdotal chronicle of his family. After his hair-raising escape from Hungary, Peter Stangl landed in New York, via Vienna. The story ends with his assimilation into Yale University and a reunion with family in Paris.