lit a candle 8 Sept 202695 years old. Long life after what he went through.
Their story
Ivan Tibor Berend was a Hungarian historian of modern European economic and social life, and one of the few scholars who could write that history as a participant as well as a professor. He was born in Budapest on 11 December 1930, during the Great Depression, into a lower-middle-class Jewish…
Ivan Tibor Berend was a Hungarian historian of modern European economic and social life, and one of the few scholars who could write that history as a participant as well as a professor. He was born in Budapest on 11 December 1930, during the Great Depression, into a lower-middle-class Jewish family that was not highly educated. English Wikipedia, drawing on his memoir, places his childhood at 36 Akacfa utca in Budapest's 7th district, a strongly Jewish neighbourhood. Hungarian Wikipedia names his parents as the teacher Berkovics Armin Mihaly and Elvira Gellei, and gives his full name as Berend Tibor Ivan. Hungarian public usage is Berend T. Ivan. This memorial uses the form Ivan T Berend, without a period after the middle initial.
He entered the Jewish Gymnasium in Budapest in 1941. He was nine when the Second World War began for Hungary's wider region, and fourteen when the Holocaust reached his own street. From June 1944 anti-Jewish laws closed in. A large yellow Star of David was fixed to the door of the building, marking it a "Jewish house." On 25 June a curfew let the family leave for only two hours in the morning. His father was sent to a labour battalion. His brother Ervin, sent to the Transdanubian region, was killed by Hungarian fascists.
On 15 October 1944 labour service was extended to men aged 16 to 60. On 31 October German soldiers and Hungarian Arrow Cross militia, including a former friend, took him from the building. He was moved through Lepsény and Veszprém to the Csillagerőd prison at Komárom, where he turned 14, then to Dachau, Block 23. On 27 April, English Wikipedia records, he and others from that block were evacuated toward the Alps by SS guards, escaped, and hid in the forest. American soldiers later helped them at the mountain-troops school named in that account as Mittanwald, and he recovered at Feldafing in the summer of 1945. He reached Budapest on 31 August 1945 and was reunited with his parents. UCLA's 2015 retirement notice described 29 April 1945 as the date of his liberation. Those two accounts sit side by side in the public record. The exact hour of liberation is not restated as a single official finding here.
After the war he briefly joined a Zionist youth group, then left it to concentrate on Hungary. At 16, after his father joined the Communist Party in 1945, he followed. The family left religious practice. Poverty and the housing crisis pressed them. In 1953 he married, which, his memoir account says, spared the household from having to share the apartment, though he still lived with his parents for several years. English Wikipedia does not name that first wife. Hungarian Wikipedia names her as Rozsa Berger, later principal of the Anne Frank Gymnasium from 1989 to 1998.
He studied at the University of Economics and at Eotvos Lorand University from 1949 to 1953, under a Stalinist curriculum, and was drawn into archive work by his teacher Zsigmond Pal Pach alongside his schoolmate and lifelong collaborator Gyorgy Ranki. In 1955 they published their first book, on Hungarian industry before the First World War. He took a doctorate in economics in 1957, became a candidate of historical sciences the same year, and a Doctor of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1962.
From 1953 he taught economic history at the Budapest University of Economics, later called Karl Marx University of Economics and now Corvinus. He was assistant professor, associate professor in 1960, professor from 1964, department head from 1967, and rector from 1973 to 1979. During the 1956 revolution he took part in anti-Stalinist circles, including the Petofi Circle, and supported the return of Imre Nagy, a former professor. From 1960, when Hungary opened a little, he went to the International Historical Congress in Stockholm and began a Western scholarly life that never cancelled the Hungarian one. With Ranki he wrote the standard surveys of Hungarian industry, of Hungary inside Nazi Germany's living space, and of Central and Eastern Europe's economic development.
He was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1973 and a full member in 1979. From 10 May 1985 to 24 May 1990 he was the academy's president, the last before the change of system. He sat on the last Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party in 1988-1989, co-chaired the MTA-Soros Foundation, chaired Miklos Nemeth's advisory body beside the Council of Ministers, and in January 1989 chaired the historians' working group that began to reverse the official condemnation of 1956. In 1988 a group under him drafted a three-year plan for market reform and privatisation. He was also, 24.hu reported, offered a foreign-service post in the 1960s, the education ministry in the mid-1980s, and a place on the Socialist Party list in 1990. He said no each time. "He never became a politician, although he had the chance more than once," 24.hu wrote.
In 1990, after the new government made clear he did not belong and burdened him with lawsuits, he left with his second wife, Katalin Radics, for Los Angeles. He later said that for him America meant the UCLA Department of History, where he felt at home. He taught there from 1990 until May 2015, directed the Center for European and Eurasian Studies from 1993 to 2005, and published the books English readers know him by: Central and Eastern Europe, 1944-1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (1996), Decades of Crisis (1998), History Derailed (2003), An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Europe (2006), From the Soviet Bloc to the European Union (2009), History in My Life: A Memoir in Three Eras (2009), Europe in Crisis (2013), and A Century of Populist Demagogues (2020). In 2015, at 85, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and retired from teaching after 25 years at UCLA, on top of about four decades in Budapest. A 2025 interview quoted him: he had been lucky to stay healthy, and because he began teaching in the United States only at 60, he kept going as long as he enjoyed it.
His last public writing faced death without a medical communique. On 22 August 2026, Blikk reported, he posted on his Substack that two great journeys already lay behind him, the 1944 deportation from Komárom to Dachau in a sealed cattle car over six days, and the 1990 move to Los Angeles. A third journey was ahead. He wrote that he was ill and weak, and that a serious illness and his weakened state would not let him go on writing. He promised, with a last dry joke, that once he was there he would send a short blog post, either from heaven or from hell. No disease name and no official cause of death have been made public.
He died at his Los Angeles home on 30 August 2026, aged 95. His widow, Katalin Radics, announced the death the next day. She named their mourning with daughters Zsuzsa, Nora, and Dora, and grandchildren Benjamin, Daniel, Eszter, and Rebeka. Hungarian Wikipedia documents two daughters of the first marriage: Zsuzsa Berend (born 1954), a sociologist at UCLA, and Nora Berend (born 1966), a historian at the University of Cambridge. Dora is named in the widow's announcement. Her birth year and mother are not stated in the sources used here. A resting place was not made public. The family asked that gifts go to the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies. He should not be confused with the Hungarian painter of a similar name who appears in search noise.
Biography adapted from EN/HU Wikipedia; Katalin Radics via Substack, quoted by 24.hu and 444.hu; UCLA History; Academia Europaea; UCLA Newsroom 2015; Hungchester 2025.. Wikipedia ↗
In their own words
“There is, however, still a third great journey ahead of me, and it is time to get my bearings about my future.”
His last Substack note, 22 August 2026, as quoted by Blikk, from the post Two 'great journeys' of mine, and the third. He then wrote that he was ill and weak, and that a serious illness and his weakened condition would not let him go on writing.
“I say goodbye with love. I promise, though, that once I am there I will send word, either from heaven or from hell, in a short blog post.”
Same 22 August 2026 farewell, quoted by Blikk. A last joke about the third journey.
“We did not retreat into an ivory tower, but sought to be part of everyday struggles, taking on a kind of governmental advisory role.”
Asked, as former president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which decisions he was proudest of. English translation published by Hungchester, 16 August 2025, interview by Istvan Szarvas.
“Since I only began teaching in the U.S. at the age of 60, I continued as long as it went well and I enjoyed it. Out of this came 25 years of teaching in the U.S., following 41 years of teaching in Hungary.”
Asked the secret of teaching until 85. Same 2025 Hungchester interview. He also said the American system has no mandatory retirement age, and that he had been lucky to stay healthy.
“In America, I was fortunate to join a wonderful departmental and university community. For me, America meant the UCLA Department of History, where I felt at home.”
Asked in which country he felt more at home. Same 2025 interview. He said he had felt at home in Hungary until, after the change of system, the new government made clear he did not belong.
“Dear friends. Let me begin by saying that it will not be easy for me to speak now. I am not a weepy old man, but what you have said has moved me deeply. Thank you for everything, thank you for your friendship.”
Opening of his keynote at the online conference for his 90th birthday, Corvinus University, December 2020, as recorded in the Hungarian conference report published in Koz-gazdasag (RET P, 2021). He then said that after 30 years and ten thousand kilometres they had brought him home to the university
Photos
1Ivan T Berend (Berend T. Ivan), Hungarian historian, in the portrait published with the 24.hu death report of 31 August 2026. Filename ivantberend. This is the historian, not the painter of a similar name.
by People Forever
Which book? I want to read it now.