Dr Agnes Kaposi
Dr Agnes Kaposi, MBE, FREng is a Hungarian-born British engineer, educator and author. In 1971, Dr Kaposi obtained her PhD in Computer Aided Design. As a Churchill Fellow, she studied the role of women engineers in Communist and Western countries and was the third woman to have been elected as Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She has worked in research and education, and as a consultant to industrial organisations and universities in the UK and globally.
Dr Kaposi was born in 1932 to Hungarian-Jewish and socialist parents. Her family suffered from political and racial oppression, but only in the final year of the war did the Holocaust reach Hungary. Over the course of only two months, aided by the Hungarian gendarmerie, the Nazis murdered almost half a million Hungarian Jews. She was there, witnessing the events. As a young girl she survived the Debrecen ghetto and worked as a child labourer in the camps of Austria. She lost half her family in the Holocaust.
Liberated from the camps by the Soviet army, Dr Kaposi returned to Hungary where a Stalinist regime followed. In 1956, she graduated from the Technical University of Budapest with a degree in electrical/electronic engineering, contributing to the development of the Hungarian TV broadcasting infrastructure. After the 1956 Uprising against Communist rule, she escaped her native Hungary and obtained a labour permit to work in England as an industrial researcher in the Telecommunication and Computer industries.
She has written several books on systems theory and engineering, including:
- Agnes Kaposi, Margaret Myers: Systems for All, Imperial College Press and
- Agnes Kaposi, Margaret Myers: Systems, Models and Measures, Springer Verlag Press.
In 2020, at the age of 88, Dr Kaposi published her autobiography Yellow Star-Red Star, underscored by comments by the Hungarian historian Dr László Csősz. The memoir is a candid account of life in Hungary during and after the Second World War. Her recent monograph Women at Work reports on her experiences of transforming a traditional electrical engineering department in the late 1970s into one of the U.K.’s largest academic institutions of systems engineering in the digital era. She is now Senior Research Fellow at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She is writing a book, Harmage and Hope: (An)ecdotes on Exclusion, Prejudice, and Harm, with Professor Dr Anja Ballis of LMU. Harmage and Hope will be published in late 2025 by Springer Verlag Press.
In December 2021, Dr Kaposi was granted an MBE for Services to Holocaust Education and Awareness by Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Dr Kaposi is an advocate for social justice, anti-prejudice and equality. She continues to be active in numerous human rights organisations and universities and schools, addressing scholarly and public audiences – a testament to her passion for knowledge-sharing and education.
Yellow Star-Red Star
Yellow Star-Red Star is the poignant memoir of Dr Agnes Kaposi, a Hungarian-born British engineer, educator, author and Holocaust survivor.
Dr Agnes Kaposi was born in Hungary in 1932, a year before Hitler came to power. She started school at the outbreak of World War II. Many of her family and friends were murdered in the Holocaust, together with half a million other Hungarian Jews, but a series of miracles and coincidences allowed her to survive. She worked as a child labourer in the agricultural and armament camps of Austria and was liberated by a rampaging Soviet Army.
She struggled through post-war hardship to re-enter Hungarian society, only to be caught up for a decade in the vice of Stalinism. In 1956, the Hungarian revolution offered the opportunity to escape. Entering Britain as a graduate engineer, she started a family and built a career as a researcher, educator and consultant. She was the third woman to become a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Her memoir is thoroughly researched and written with compassion and optimism, without self-pity. The tone is light and there is plenty of irony and even humour.
The narrative is underscored by the historian Dr László Csősz and illustrated by maps, documents, archival images and family photographs.
This book goes beyond the recollections of a survivor – it is an appeal to all of us to fight against prejudice and for human rights.
Dr László Csősz
is a senior archivist and historian at the National Archives of Hungary and Claims Conference University Partnership in Holocaust Studies Lecturer at the ELTE University in Budapest. He is the co-author of (with Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági) The Holocaust in Hungary. Evolution of a Genocide (Washington, DC: USHMM, 2013).
Praise for Yellow Star-Red Star
Excerpts From the Book
Many fainted during this routine [registration process upon arriving at Strasshof camp]. I was in haze, my high temperature duly recorded. In my feverish state naked old women with wrinkled faces, sagging breasts and bloated bellies appeared as terrifying witches. They haunted my dreams for years. Whatever caused my fever, by the next morning it was gone. Throughout our camp days I was briefly ill on this and on two other occasions.
The [registration] process was brutal but it was sensible. After our nightmare journey we were filthy, perhaps even diseased. We needed to be examined, our bodies and clothes washed and disinfected. Arriving in a country of which we were not citizens, we had to be registered and our details recorded. If only women had administered to us rather than uniformed men; if only they treated us as human beings.
At sunrise it was all over. At the last barracks our disinfected clothes were waiting in neat bundles. When the doors opened, there stood our men. My father had been almost out of his mind. Years later he told me that through his secret contacts with socialists, he had known about the extermination camps, and thought he would never see us again.
Page 124.
How many Hungarian Jews fell victim of World War II? We shall never know for sure. Stark [ref] provides the first estimate which appeared in February 1945, while most of the country was still at war. Numbers continue to be updated and are debated by historians. The figure or 600,000 Hungarians Holocaust victims has become ‘fixed in the public mind’, while currently historians consider a number between 500,000 and 550,000. If we set any such number against the 760-780,000 Hungarian Jews recorded in the 1941 census, then the loss is about two-thirds. Most survivors are Budapest Jews. Most of the victims are provincial Jews who perished in Auschwitz, and I include two of my pictures in their memory.
By luck or by miracle, many of the 15,011 provincial Jews deported to Austria survived, among them members of my family. Each survivor suffered. All of us were damaged. Nobody came through the Holocaust unscathed: not the victims, not the perpetrators, not even the descendants.
P 81
[escape after the 1956 Uprising]
What to do? Should we breach the curfew, go with a complete stranger, without papers, to a region we did not know, and where we had no permission to be? Should we leave without preparation, without saying goodbye to Jancsi’s [husband’s] parents? Or should we decline the one chance we had had in all these years to escape from this accursed country?
My father had no doubts. He was not just providing us with the opportunity, he was positively pushing us out. My mother was hysterical. She would never see her child her children again- how could my father be so callous, so cruel?
P262
Yellow Star-Red Star
is available from the following:
March of the Living:
Signed copy available: March of the Living
Amazon UK, including Kindle:
Amazon U.S., including Kindle:
Woman at Work
The monograph Women at Work is Dr Kaposi’s story in her own words of leading a major engineering university and polytechnic department in the UK during the 1970s and 1980s, a time when women were very rarely present in universities, engineering schools, or in the field of engineering itself. The monograph is highly personal, moving, and at times infuriating as we learn about what it meant to be a woman in academia and engineering in those times. Have things changed? Yes. Are there challenges remaining? Yes.
Excerpt From the Book
From Page One of the Monograph: Was it called Borough Polytechnic or South Bank Polytechnic? It was founded in 1892 as Borough Polytechnic Institute, with the aim “to promote the industrial skills, general knowledge, health, and well-being of young men and women”. It is now the London South Bank University. The name of the institution kept changing, but whatever it was called at the time, in the middle of the 1977-78 academic year I was offered a job in it. I was in mid-career, 45 years old, a woman from an immigrant background, with a degree from a famous university, a PhD with eight years of research experience in the telephone and computer industries, and 13 years of service in engineering higher education, a Chartered Engineer, a Churchill Fellow. I was a rarity, some even said a freak, an unnatural mother, working full time. Mine was a lonely existence: I neither fitted the company of my colleagues, nor of their wives. I was slim and young-looking, often the only woman on the scene, more than once mistaken for a tea lady or for my own secretary. Attempting to cultivate a dignified stance and pulling myself up to my full height of 5 ft 2, I tried to perfect strategies for repelling the unwanted attention of my colleagues and students, almost all of them male. I was hardworking and I loved my profession but would never have been able to progress in my career without the support of my generous husband and my youthful mother. So here I was at South Bank, appointed in 1977 as Head of Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Three things recommended me to the post: my industrial background, my PhD, and the successful Computer Aided Design Master’s Degree course I pioneered at Kingston Polytechnic, my previous place of work. The Master’s course had been popular, innovative in style and content, catering for an exceptional student population. The course demanded my attention until the end of that academic year. I accepted the South Bank post on the condition that in the initial period of my tenure as Head I would divide my time: mornings in my previous post, afternoons in the new, each task a full-time job.
Harmage and Hope
(An)ecdotes on Exclusion, Prejudice, and Harm: A book by Agnes Kaposi, Anja Ballis, with Ian Pyle
This book will bring together expertise from different disciplines to explore how prejudice and exclusion shape societies. Their collaboration, inspired by C. P. Snow’s call for integrating science and the humanities, aims to broaden the scope of Holocaust education to address contemporary societal challenges, among them islamophobia, antisemitism, and homophobia.
Central to their work is the concept of “harmage,” a new word which conveys cumulative harm and systemic injustice. Harmage highlights how discrimination, whether subtle or overt, compounds over time, affecting individuals and communities alike.
Complementing this is the term “(an)ecdote,” which extends beyond personal storytelling. The book offers firsthand narratives, drawn from the everyday life of many different people which serve as powerful tools to expose characteristics shared by a variety of instances of harmage. By framing personal suffering within a broader societal and historical context, “(an)ecdotes” reveal universal patterns of prejudice and injustice, and underscore the potential for recognition, reflection, and change.
This project integrates perspectives from science, engineering, and literary education into an interdisciplinary framework. It analyzes personal narratives to illustrate mechanisms of exclusion and demonstrate how harmage operates across different contexts. The book puts forward a generic model of harmage which provides a structured approach to understanding its causes and consequences. The book offers a lens for examining group dynamics and biases.
Beyond analysis, the project develops practical educational resources for use in both formal and non-formal settings. These materials promote a dialogical, question-driven approach, encouraging learners to assess critically their assumptions and engage in meaningful discussions. The goal is not just to impartknowledge but to create spaces for reflection and active participation in addressing harmage.
At its core, this work is driven by a commitment to hope—not as a passive sentiment but as a call to action. The authors argue that fostering empathy through storytelling and dialogue builds links between groups suffering from different forms of harmage and opens opportunities for real social change. By connecting past and present through personal experiences, the book equips learners with the tools to challenge harmage and act as agents of change.
Ian Pyle’s commentary provides a scientific and ethical perspective, deepening the analysis withinsights from
computing into how, when biases take root and persist, harm is caused but may be prevented.
Agnes Kaposi
Dr Agnes Kaposi, MBE, FREng, is a Hungarian-born British engineer.
One of the pioneers of the digital era, Dr Kaposi worked in research, education, and as consultant to industrial and academic organisations in the UK and overseas. She was the third woman to be elected aFellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. As a Churchill Fellow, she investigated the position of women engineers in eastern and western societies. In recognition of her work as a Holocaust educator, she was awarded the MBE in December 2021.
Dr Kaposi’s autobiography Yellow Star-Red Star is an illustrated narrative underscored by historian Dr László Csősz. Her recent monograph Women at Work reports on her experiences of transforming a traditional electrical engineering department in the late 1970s into one of the U.K.’s largest academic institutions of systems engineering in the digital era. She is now Senior Research Fellow at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Anja Ballis
Anja Ballis is a professor and head of department of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where she works as researcher and trains students in German as a first and second language and maintains close connections with them.
Her research is shaped both by future teachers and the social dynamics in schools. Her work focuses onlearning
with digital media, Holocaust education, and critical approaches to discrimination in and through education.
She has been deeply interested in the Holocaust and Germany’s relationship with this history since theage of twelve.
Ian Pyle
Ian Pyle received his PhD in Theoretical Physics. He worked at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, using computers for the development of nuclear reactors and scientificresearch, leading to industrial applications of automation.
As Professor of Computer Science at the University of York, he pioneered the new subject of Software Engineering. The work involved interacting with professional institutions, including the Institute of Electrical Engineers, in which he met and worked with Dr Agnes Kaposi.
In 1986, he left the University to work in the computing industry, later returning to academia at theUniversity of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is Emeritus Professor of the University of Aberystwyth (Athro Emeritws Prifysgol Aberystwyth).
Harmage and Hope, published by Springer Verlag, will be launched at an international conference for educators in Munster, Germany in November 2025. For more information about the conference, preordering the book or inviting Dr Kaposi and Professor Ballis to speak or be interviewed, please contact Robin Heller, President of The Athena Advisors, at robin@theathenaadvisors.com
Presentations and Bookings
Dr Kaposi has given many public and private talks to various groups since her memoir,Yellow Star Red Star, was published in 2020.
Dr Kaposi speaks on such topics as:
- The lessons from the Holocaust for contemporary genocides and mass atrocities;
- The ethics of testimony and AI;
- Women working in contemporary society;
- Studying and working in a Communist society (post-war Hungary);
- Countering prejudice and acting as an ally to those facing hatred in modern society.
She has addressed a variety of audiences including:
Universities such as
-
- Nottingham University (UK)
- University College London (UK)
- Ludwig Maximilius Universitats (Munich)
- LZR Supercomputing University (Munich)
- Florida State University
- Northeastern University (US)
- University of Alberta/Edmonton (Canada)
UK Government officials such as:
-
- Cabinet Office
- Department of Transportation
- Department of Health and Social Care
- Brent Council
Schools such as:
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- Christ College, Finchley (UK)
- Immanuel College (UK)
- International School (Geneva)
Corporations such as:
-
- McKinsey and Co (UK)
- Oaklyn Consulting (UK)
- Inside Ideas Consulting (UK)
- Hawthorn Consulting (UK)
Museums and Civic Organizations such as:
-
- National Computing Museum, Milton Keynes (UK)
- RAF Conference on Engineering and Cybersecurity (UK)
- JW3 (UK)
- Ilfracombe History Museum (UK)
- Wiener Holocaust Library (UK)
- Oxford-Cambridge Club (UK)
UK-based synagogues and related groups such as:
-
- Western Marble Arch
- Finchley Progressive
- Camp Habonim
- Richmond Synagogue
- Jewish Book Week
- Reshet Conference
- Limmud Conference
- She has recorded “interactive testimony” for both Beth Shalom/National Holocaust Centre, Nottingham, UK and USC Shoah Foundation (in Hungarian).
- She spoke at the Mortenson Lecture on Peace and Libraries, through University of Illinois (US).
For information on scheduling a talk, please contact Robin Heller, The Athena Advisors, at robin@theathenaadvisors.com
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did you decide to write a book about your life?
I try never to refuse answering a child. My granddaughter, Tabitha, prompted me to start writing, and I continued because I thought that my story might teach people to respect each other and see others as their equal.
To live through what you endured required a lot of strength. Where did you find this strength?
In camp times I was a child, but circumstances were such that I had responsibilities for the welfare of others. I was particularly aware of the need to look after my two little cousins. I do think that responsibility and dedication were vital sources of strength, my inspirations for survival.
Has your faith been affected by your experiences?
There was no religion in my family, we did not believe in faith. However, my family lived by a strict moral code of fairness, loyalty, respect for all, and of course a strong work ethic. My experiences did not make me turn to religion, but they reinforced my moral code.
What do you consider to be the hardest part of your life journey?
It was hardest always being an outsider. I was a Jew among Aryans, an outcast among Hungarians, a woman in a male-dominated profession, a professional woman in traditional England where women were meant to be mothers and homemakers. Only in the very last period of my life have I felt accepted.
What was your worst experience in the Holocaust?
The train journey which stripped away our humanity. They did not tell us where we were going or why. Conditions on the train were unbearable. Several people went mad and some died.
Do you believe forgiveness is possible?
It is difficult to forgive the outrages I experienced in my life, and yet, I came to realise that forgiveness is not just possible, it is necessary. Resentment harms the victim, not the perpetrator, it imprisons the spirit, locks it in the past. Only forgiveness can open the path to the future.
Did your family manage to rebuild a home after arriving back in Hungary?
It was a losing battle. On our return, we expected to be reunited with our menfolk and establish a normal life. Instead, our men were dead, our home had been taken away from us, and we were hated outcasts, just as before. We never managed to create a home. Our only option was to escape.
What lead you to train as an engineer?
I am pleased and proud to be an engineer, it is a wonderful profession, but it was not my choice. I wanted to study Physics to become a meteorologist, but in a communist regime decisions are made by the state, not by the individual. Iwas told to study engineering or not go to university at all.
What are the messages you most want people to take away from your life story?
My story demonstrates what happens when those in power don’t understand that life is precious, that people are equal, that all people matter, and that everyone is entitled to dignity. My life story teaches the lesson that everyone must be treated with respect, even children.
What have you learned that you most want to share?
I have learned to value people who are honourable – honest, fair, loyal, dependable, a credit to society, what the Yiddish call a Mensch. I learned that such qualities do not depend on age, race, sex, education or religious belief. Some of the people I most admire, and some of my dearest friends, differ from me in some or all of these particulars.
Why did you settle in the UK?
After the 1956 Hungarian uprising we had a free choice to settle almost anywhere in the world. We chose the UK because we understood it to be a civilised country, a liberal democracy where working people are treated fairly and with respect.
Do you perceive any parallels between the Holocaust and the treatment of other people today, such as the Uighur Muslims in China?
Yes, I see strong parallels. I write in my book that tyrannical regimes may have different ideologies and methods, but they have fundamental similarities. They are all counter to everything I hold dear, everything I worked for all my life.
How has your life changed since you retired from engineering activities?
I have always been a problem solver and educator. As a researcher and consultant, my task was to develop methods and tools which enabled my students and clients to solve their own problems. My aims and principles are still the same, but the problems I tackle shifted from engineering to the human domain.
Could you tell us a little bit about yourself in this moment?
I am meant to be retired, but I am busier than ever. I spend my time writing, lecturing, partaking in debates, listening to good music, playing bridge, and most of all, learning new things every day. I am rich: my wonderful family, my five grandchildren allow me to share in their life and interests, and I have a wide circle of friends, young and old, in this country and abroad. A full life.
Media
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