If you can find it at a reasonable price Pal Benko: My Life, Games, and Compositions is fascinating reading...I can’t imagine anybody paying the ridiculous $109.50 I saw it advertised for on Amazon though!
Pal Benko (July 15, 1928 – August 26, 2019) was born at Amiens in northern France to Hungarian parents who returned to Budapest shortly after his birth and that’s where he grew up. In 1938, at the age of nine Benko learned chess from his father, who owned a machine parts factory. His first chess book was a collection of Capablanca's chess games, written by Ferenc Chalupetzk and Laszlo Toth.
In 1940, Benko started taking chess seriously and in 1941 he became interested in chess problems and began composing them. Owing to a lot of chess activity in Hungary, Benko’s progress was rapid. In 1943, he was leading in his first local tournament when it was canceled because most of the players began getting drafted into the Hungarian Army.
December 1943 saw Benko's father arrested by the Hungarian government and sentenced to hard labor for refusing to join the Hungarian Army. Hungary was on the side of the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan.
While waging war against the Soviet Union, Hungary engaged in armistice negotiations with the United States and the United Kingdom and when Hitler discovered this betrayal, in March 1944, German forces occupied Hungary and Prime Minister Miklos Kallay was deposed and soon mass deportations of Jews to German death camps in occupied Poland began. Benko’s father was released from prison in March because he Nazis mistakenly thought he was locked up for being pro-Nazi.
In July 1944, Pal Benko was drafted in the Hungarian army and was ordered to the front. He deserted but was later caught by the Russians, but managed to escape and make it back to Budapest only to find his apartment bombed out and his father and brother gone.
In December 1944, the Soviet army besieged Budapest in a 50-day-long siege in which over 50,000 people were killed. The Soviets considered Benko’s father and older brother POWs and in January 1945, shipped them to Russia as slave laborers.
In June 1945, Benko played, and won, his first major chess tournament in Budapest and with it the title of Hungarian Master. The following month his mother died at the age of 41 leaving him alone to care his little sister. In late 1945, he moved to Szeged, Hungary and his father was let out of the Soviet prison and soon defected to the United States.
In 1947, Benko majored in economics at the University of Economic. After the war he competed in a number of international tournaments and in March of 1952, while playing in a team match in Goerlitz, East Germany when he and his friend, Geza Fuster (1910-1990), were thinking of defecting to the West.
To do that they had to reach the American embassy in West Berlin. They went East Berlin where Fuster, who later settled in Canada, managed to run across the border. Benko was caught, arrested and taken to prison where he was accused of being an American spy. The Hungarian Secret Police thought that his correspondence game chess notation found in his letters and postcards was some kind of secret code.
In prison, he was sleep-deprived and tortured before being sent to a concentration camp without a trial. The year 1953 saw Benko starving in the concentration camp but after Stalin died authorities considered releasing him. The Hungarian president Imre Nagy gave amnesty to most prisoners in Hungary and Benko was released in October 1953.
A few years later in late October of 1956, the Hungarian Revolt began as a student protest which attracted thousands as they marched through Budapest to the Hungarian Parliament building, broadcasting on the streets using a van with loudspeakers. A student delegation entered the radio building to try to broadcast their demands, but got arrested. When protesters demanded the delegation be released they were fired upon by the State Security Police, known as the AVH (Allamvedelmi Hatosag, literally State Protection Authority). One student was killed and as the news spread, disorder and violence erupted throughout the city.
The revolt spread quickly and the government collapsed as thousands organized into militias to fight the AVH and Soviet troops. It was crazy...some local leaders and AVH members were lynched and former political prisoners were freed and armed. Radical workers seized control and demanded political change.
Imre Nagy’s new government disbanded the AVH and declared its intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and establish free elections. By the end of October, fighting had almost stopped, and normality began to return.
Then in November the Soviets struck. A large Soviet force invaded Budapest and other regions of the country resulting in the deaths of over 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops and 200,000 Hungarians fled as refugees. Mass arrests and denunciations continued and by January 1957, the new Soviet-installed government had suppressed all opposition. Pal Benko was part of the uprising, but he was never discovered.
In 1957, in Reykjavik, Benko was playing on board 1 for the Hungarian Olympic team and on July 26th he walked into the American embassy in Reykjavik and asked for asylum. The American embassy officials arranged a press conference for Benko to explain why he did not want to return to Hungary.
He was granted asylum, but had to wait on a preferential visa which he obtained on October 11, 1957 whereupon he flew to New York only to find out that Hungarian refugees were not allowed in the US as the refugee limit had reached. Fortunately, having been born in France, he was allowed in on a French passport.
Benko, who couldn’t speak a word of English and having only a few dollars in his pocket, ended up with his father in Cleveland, Ohio. He wanted to find employment as a club professional for one of several chess clubs that were in Cleveland at the time, but unlike in Europe, such a position didn’t exist and nobody would hire him. According to one person I talked to who knew Benko in those days, he left Cleveland in a huff and moved to New York City where he remained.
Visit Chessbase for what is described as one of the most elegant chess problems the article’s author has ever seen. It was composed by Benko when he was 15 and even Bobby Fischer couldn’t solve it in half an hour...see the PROBLEM.
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