Editors’ Note: This feature appears as it was published in the winter 2019 edition of UT Dallas Magazine. Titles or faculty members listed may have changed since that time.
Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth has an endless supply of stories to tell. Some are heartbreaking, and others are full of mirth. This is one of the latter.
The tale begins in 1962 when Ozsváth and her late husband, Dr. Istvan Ozsváth, stepped out for supper with some friends in Hamburg, Germany.
When they arrived at the establishment, the group noticed that many of the tables and chairs were stacked to the side. The room, uncrowded when they arrived, swelled with more and more people as the evening went on.
“Suddenly four guys came up on stage,” Ozsváth recalled. “They didn’t look very clever.”
To Ozsváth, a classically trained pianist, the band’s rock ’n’ roll style was like oil is to water. The dinner party soon left in search of a quieter place.
“We were having such a wonderful discussion,” she said, “but we couldn’t talk, and we couldn’t hear one another because of the unbearable music that was playing.”
Fast forward a few years.
“We had just bought a television. I was in the other room and suddenly Pista [her husband] calls me in to see a band playing on a program,” Ozsváth said. “It was the band we saw at the restaurant.”
A guest soon arrived for coffee and conversation, and Ozsváth asked about the band playing. The friend paused and said, “Well, they’re the Beatles.”
Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, the Leah and Paul Lewis Chair of Holocaust Studies, is founder and director of the Holocaust Studies Program.
As a Jewish child growing up in Hungary, she and her family survived the Holocaust only to face hardships under the country’s communist post-war government.
In 1963 Ozsváth’s late husband, Dr. Istvan Ozsváth, joined the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest — the precursor institution to UT Dallas. Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth became a member of the faculty in 1983.
In the years since, as a professor of literature and history, she has taught, undertaken various translation projects and worked on Holocaust studies, among other scholastic ventures.
In 2010 she published a memoir, When the Danube Ran Red, which describes the experiences of her childhood.
