[1] Pauk's father was taken away by the Hungarian SS in 1942 and starved to death in a labour camp in Ukraine; his mother met the same fate two years later.
[1] Pauk was raised in poverty by his grandmother in the Budapest ghetto under the protection of a Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, and his chief memory was of hunger.
[3][4] He made his debut in a Beethoven sonata accompanied by Peter Frankl, and at the age of fourteen he performed Kabalevsky's Violin Concerto.
[1] During a solo performance in Nandor Zsolt's Valse Caprice he broke his E-string but continued by playing the higher passages on the A-string.
[6] In December 1961 he stepped in at short notice to perform Beethoven's Violin Concerto at the Royal Festival Hall with the London Mozart Players under Harry Blech.
In 1962 he made the first of many appearances at London's Wigmore Hall, where he performed with pianists including Frankl, Geoffrey Parsons and Roger Vignoles.
[1] With the encouragement of pianist Annie Fischer, who said he should show the music lovers of Hungary what he had achieved, Pauk returned to perform in Budapest in 1973.
[20] He regularly visited the United States, giving master classes in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oberlin College and the Juilliard School of Music.
In 1959 Pauk married ZsuZsa (Susie) Mautner, a Hungarian chemistry student who was working at the Heineken Beer company.