Christine arnothy wikipedia

The French writer Christine Arnothy was born in Budapest in 1930, daughter of an Austro-Hungarian father and a German-Polish mother. From her earliest childhood, she was faced with three languages, German, French, and Hungarian.

The Francophile atmosphere of the family home was such that by the time she was an adolescent, she had become attached to France; the choice of the French language for her writing, adopted in a symbolic sense as the "mother tongue", was analyzed for the first time in her later autobiographical work Embrasser la vie.

During the siege of Budapest (occupied by the Germans and encircled by the Soviet army), she hid with her parents in the basement of their building, and kept a daily journal of this battle for the city, some of whose neighborhoods were reduced to total ruins after two and a half months.

Following her clandestine depature from Hungary with her parents, Christine Arnothy took refuge in Belgium. In 1954, she won, for her war journal, an i