If the Korda brothers believed deeply in anything, it was the value of education. The Austro-Hungarian Empire might have been a ramshackle house of cards, but it had had a remarkably efficient educational system, with perhaps the highest standards in Europe. Even though they were Jewish, Alex, Zoli, and Vincent had had mathematics, ancient and modern history, foreign languages, and Latin beaten into them, like every other boy who attended the Gymnasium. These lessons were not forgotten, if only because of the blows that accompanied them. Nothing one learned was ever truly useless, my father liked to say—however nonsensical it seemed when one was young, it would sooner or later come in handy.