When we boarded our train from Berlin to Prague, it was jam-packed, and hard to find seats. After standing up and waiting for a bit to find a seat, a middle-aged gentleman offers me a seat that is vacant, next to him. It turns out that he is Arpad Szoczi, a Canadian-born journalist, activist, author, former-lobbyist, and documentary filmmaker, of Hungarian descent. His forte of knowledge was the Romanian Revolution, and genocide of the Hungarian minority within Transylvania in the 1980's. In his research and time spent interviewing political members, spies, and activists within Romania and Hungary during this time, he has had access to police files, been spied on, and had to sneak cameras into these countries to get ground-shattering interviews. The Romanian Revolution was against the regime of Ceausescu, a harsh Communist tyrant, who had brutally murdered many of his people for decades. This inevitably resulted in his own people capturing him, and having a firing squad kill him and his family on Christmas Day, after a trial that was so brief it could be considered a joke. Szoczi is currently working on a book called: Timisoara: The Real Story Behind the Romanian Revolution. I hope to one day pick up a copy of the book when it comes out in English, in a few months time, Szoczi told me.
Later on on our trip, we found ourselves in Mainz, the birthplace of Gutenberg, the man behind the first printing press in Western Civilization. Interestingly enough, the Germans had forgotten about Gutenberg by the time of Napoleon's conquest of Europe. When Napoleon had Mainz occupied, it was he who ordered the placing of the first statue of Gutenberg in the town, because the French had known all about Gutenberg and held a great respect for him. There, in Mainz, our guide showed us how an original Gutenberg printing press operated, by printing us a sheet from a Gutenberg Bible.
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