As a Jewish teenager in Romania in the 1930s, Egon Balas was curious about math, physics and girls. Politics were of scant interest. With the rise of Nazism and the onset of World War II, however, he was open to explanations about what had gone wrong with the world.
He found one in Marxism, introduced by a classmate's brother.
“I came to believe that capitalism breeds oppression, inequality, greed, exploitation, hatreds of all kinds: nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism,” he wrote six decades later in his memoir, “Will to Freedom.”
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