Ivan Brody

Ivan Thomas Brody-Solt

I'd like to talk about my paternal Grandfather Ivan.

We all called him Papa, not grandad. He was Hungarian. He was from Hungary and he spoke fluent Hungarian. I think he was part Jewish as well. His family switched their name from Spiegel to Solt when he was young.

His first wife (my Nana, Carol) is from Wales. His second wife was from Hungary. He had six children. Four from his first marriage. Two from his second.

Papa and his sister and parents all had to leave Hungary in 1956 after the failed Hungarian Uprising (see Wikipedia). He was in his early 20s at the time. They left in the night, taking nothing but what they could carry. They wore gray because it stands out less on the horizon. And they took a bunch of bottles of vodka in case they needed to bribe the border guards with it. In Hungary they were wealthy. After leaving, they were poor. I think Ivan worked as a taxi driver in NZ for a while, and later sold welding rods as a job. He worked a few jobs. Their country tried to have a revolution against the ussr (sort of), which failed, and then he has to flee. The situation was actually a lot more complicated than that. But you can read about it in Wikipedia.

He was a bit eccentric, but otherwise okay. He was very smart, he was good at chess, he was very strong when he was young. He also ate too much and was kind of loud.

As an adult, Aunty Monica (his daughter) made false accusations of childhood molestation against my Papa. She claimed that when she was a child he used to come into her room to do xyzabc. My understanding is that these were false accusations and that perhaps his ex wife encouraged Monica to do it. There was a big court case. It was an incident of massive injustice against him.

There were other steps taken to discredit him as well.

At one point he ran for a local government seat on the national party affiliated citizens’ ticket. Southern ward, Wellington. Link.

Note: it was a massive family conspiracy against Ivan. Even my father was a part of it, and still maintained a relationship with Nana after it! I am eternally appalled by it. They made false accusations of pedophilia against him, and dragged him into court, and I think they drugged him too, afterwards (the doctors medicated him and he had to pretend to have alzheimers). And so if Chinese people are worried about harm to one’s own father, then this is a prime example. This is what my family is like! They are bad people.