It's the tragedy of Eastern Europe in a single life - with a redemptive coda thrown in. Csanad Szegedi is the towering 31-year-old Hungarian whose career as an extremist politician, MEP and deputy leader of the notoriously anti-Semitic Jobbik party, was brought to a crashing halt when it emerged that he was Jewish.
A history graduate from a university in Budapest, Szegedi was politicised as a student when the Communists returned to government.
Searching for an anchor for his identity, he was a founding member of the radical nationalist party which took a hard line against Gypsies and Jews.
Jobbik specialises in garish, violent rhetoric and simple solutions to knotty problems. Szegedi was seen, approvingly, as the "fist" of a party which dreamed of returning to the nationalistic rule of Miklos Horthy, who in 1944 helped the occupying Nazis send 400,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in a mere eight weeks. Although Jews were a tiny minority in post-war Hungary, the community was one of Jobbik's favourite targets, blamed for plundering the country and allying with Gypsies to turn "pure" Hungarians into a minority.
But the Szegedi family nursed a secret, about which the young politician knew nothing, and Szegedi's undoing was his precocious political success. He excited envy among some of his comrades, including an acquaintance called Zoltan Ambrus, who had served time in prison for possession of a pistol and explosives.