Retouching Stalin's Moustache

About the Book

What makes Tom Muhl’s story different from some Holocaust-dominated memoirs is that he does not focus primarily on the crushing misery of so many people during the worst stages of government sponsored brutality. His prose is often sardonic as he describes his attempts to fit into the world of advertising in the United States and Europe during the latter half of the century. He did see the Nazis in action as a child and his mixed-married family suffered directly. But he escaped early enough as a young adult to reach our shores relatively unscathed.

If the times we are living in had been different, he could probably have lived a peaceful and productive life as a serious artist either in Europe or in America. But instead of utilizing his innate talent in peace, he has been going through a picaresque career of grinding-down processes, a series of events that he relates with irony and acutely observed detail. His accounts of failed romances along the way and of his sometime successes in hard-bitten business reality will tell you something you may not have seen before but will certainly recognize as the sad and comic truth about our present-day world.

“I was an artist. My job in the Hungarian army of the 1950’s was to paint larger-than-life portraits of Lenin and Stalin. That wasn’t so bad. In fact I was almost content with my lot. But then the revolution broke out in 1956 and all of us were transformed into legitimate prey instead of docile subjects of the occupiers. I soon found it necessary to spend time painting lifelike sores on the face of my wife to save her from the constant danger of rape by the Russian soldiers. It was then that we decided that we must make an attempt to escape.”

RETOUCHING STALIN’S MOUSTACHE, the title, refers to the period when I was serving as a private in the so-called Hungarian army. I had managed to wangle an assignment to the Art Studio of that command. I was painting larger than life portraits of Lenin, Stalin and other notables in Bolshevik history for propaganda purposes. I had already learned that I would need to struggle to survive as well as to find an artistic balance in a mostly hostile universe.

I was born before the war and lived through the Holocaust period as a child in Hungary. In the process of what had been intended as an education in the fine arts, I spent my adolescent years there under Communism. My wife, Andrea, was twenty and I was twenty-two when we managed to escape. After a year in England we settled in the United States and became citizens. Andrea began to prepare for a career as a graphic designer and I began to work as an art director in the field of advertising.

Beginning with the enormous and shattering frustration of my creative urges by the fathead officers in the Hungarian Army Studio in early 1956, I tell the rest of the story with a series of jumps and flashbacks. I believe that most people who have lived through experiences similar to mine will continue to find themselves doing the same thing, readjusting as we move along from one event to the next and then going back again in time to pick up the pieces and continuing to fight off letting such things recycle more than they must.

The war years found me as a child confined to the Budapest Ghetto with my Jewish mother, witnessing the atrocities committed by the Hungarian Nazis. My father, a classically trained musician, was serving in the Hungarian army at the time. He used a daring bluff to rescue us only days before the full-scale transports from the Ghetto to the death camps were to begin. We all three began to live totally in hiding, trying to avoid being discovered and killed as a family of deserters.

One near-death experience from that period still haunts me even now. Russian soldiers were grabbing Hungarians to dismantle the street barricades, many of them booby-trapped with land-

About the Author

Painter, Writer, Adman, Tom Muhl was born in Budapest, Hungary. Following the collapse of the 1956 revolution he left his native land, and in 1958 emmigrated to the United States. He worked as an award-winning artist and Creative Director for Advertising Agencies, including Y&R, J.Walter Thompson and Bates, Saatchi & Saatchi, on both sides of the Atlantic for over three decades. He has written film scripts for documentaries, television and print ads. Currently living in South Florida, he is dedicated to depicting the beauty and richness of his tropical environment.