The most important news agencies and newspapers in the English-speaking world published obituaries of the 95-year-old poet, who became a legend in his own lifetime. They wrote about his rise to fame as an interpreter of the French poet Francois Villon, the threat he and his family, as Jews, were placed under during Nazism, his time in the infamous Recsk labour camp as a political prisoner after WWII, and his flight after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
?Like fellow-Hungarian anti-communist writer Arthur Koestler, Faludy wandered the world, living in France, Algeria, the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy,? news agency Reuters wrote.
The Reuters report called Faludy ?a legend of resistance to the rise of Nazism and Communism.?
?His face framed by long gray hair often appeared on Hungarian television screens as a symbol of a country leaving behind a century of dictatorships and entering a new era as a European Union member,? the report said.
The Associated Press news agency recalled Faludy?s autobiographical account of political oppression entitled ?My Happy Days in Hell? in the English-speaking world in 1962. The agency wrote that ?the book was considered a precursor to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's accounts of the Soviet concentration camps.?
The book was banned in Hungary until after the fall of Communism.
Reuters noted that the city of Toronto, where Faludy lived for more than 20 years, would rename a square near his former home there after him on October 3.
Reports of Faludy?s death were published as far away as India and the United Arab Emirates.
Source: Reuters / Associated Press (AP) / Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
