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About the Book Cover

The main title of the book, “From Darkness into Light”, is a metaphor for the life-altering journey of a Jewish boy’s escape from oppressive regimes of fascism, Nazism, and communism to a new life in the free world.

The flags are the graphic illustrations of the various regimes and political systems the author lived through during the first twenty-six years of his life.

The subtitle, “My Journey Through Nazism, Fascism, and Communism to Freedom” refers to the author’s eyewitness account of events captured in five chronological stories. The journey begins at his birth in 1938 in Budapest, Hungary, and ends in 1964 in the United States, where he is a married man with a child, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ready to embark on living the American dream.

Even though almost all Hungarian Jews had German last names the author officially changed his family name of Reichmann to Rátonyi when he graduated from high school in the spring of 1956. His rationale to Hungarianize his name is described in detail in the book. Little did he suspect that six months later he would end up as a refugee in German-speaking Austria. Since most of his stories take place in Hungary, the author thought it appropriate to include his original name—Reichmann—on the cover of the book.

Robert Ratonyi’s book is an amalgamation of a memoir, historic narrative, and lessons on surviving life-threatening events as a child such as the Holocaust, on growing up in poverty and not feeling poor, on taking risks to escape from a brutal dictatorship, and on becoming a self-made, educated, and productive member of society in his mid-twenties in America.