Robert Fisch completes his entire history in the concentration camps in a very thin book. With beautiful pictures and heartfelt words, it becomes easy to see into this man's past and be both shocked and enlightened to what really happened behind those walls.

Reviewed by Johanna Granville, Clemson University, Clemson, SC USA. Sandor Marai's Memoir of Hungary (1944-1948) provides an interesting glimpse of post World War II Hungary under Soviet occupation. Like other memoirs by Hungarian writers and statesmen, it was first published in the West, because it could not be published in the Hungary of the post-1956 Kadar era.[1]Marai authored forty-six books, mostly novels, and was considered one of Hungary's most influential representatives of middle class literature between the two world wars by literary critics. He sought his true identity both in his profession and through a geographic attachment: first to Hungary, then to Europe, and finally to the West. He decided to leave his homeland in September 1948. The English version of the memoir was published posthumously; Marai took his own life in 1989, the same year that he was awarded the prestigious Kossuth Prize, Hungary's highest award for literature.[2] Whether or not Marai intended it, this memoir makes the reader wonder what influenced Marai to commit suicide, despite his literary success. Was it due to the bleak environment of Soviet-occupied Hungary, emigration from his homeland, or the inner dreams of a sensitive and expressive man? Written in the first person, this book has certain strengths that are absent from secondary works. Marai gives the reader a keen sense of the humiliation Hungarians felt in living under Nazi and then Soviet domination. Marai also entertains as a diarist, and later generalizes about his experiences in a way that endears him to his readers. Like a good playwright, he engages the audience on several levels, but none better than the homesick artist who, ironically, had grown sick of home. These strengths make the volume an excellent choice for undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of the central European region. On the other hand, Marai's memoir does not provide a dispassionate, critical defense of a central argument with supporting evidence and dissenting opinions. Precisely because it is a diary, the book lacks a single thesis, containing several competing themes instead. One gets the impression that Marai is writing more out of an inner need to articulate his thoughts for himself, rather than to persuade or impress an audience. Thus it would be inappropriate to evaluate this work as one would a scholarly argument. Development of thesis and selection of sources are irrelevant here. Marai's ideas are original and spring from his own experiences. While he cleverly incorporates quotations from great writers and poets, both Hungarians and foreigners, these are simply tools for expressing his own thoughts. In addition, the title of this memoir is a bit of a misnomer, since the book does not discuss in much detail Hungarian politics in the 1944-1948 period. Marai never mentions such public figures as Horthy, Rakosi, or Revai. Only in a couple of places does he refer to the "returned Hungarian communists," the Muscovites. As a subjective diary, it often digresses. One whole section provides details about the daily habits of his wife Lola's grandmother; no larger interpretation accompanies the section. As traumatic as wartime Hungary must have been, Marai found it in some ways preferable to living there after 1945. According to Marai, World War II fostered a sense of human collectivity. People felt closer to each other during the siege because their lives were threatened. After the war, however, people focused on the retrieval of their material possessions, and the spirit of cooperation and unity disappeared. Marai and his wife had been forced to flee their home in Budapest for a small house in a village. There he lacked everything a writer needed: good lighting, quiet, and privacy. There was no electricity, and candles were scarce. Marai lived there with escapees and refugees from the war. After the Soviet occupation in September 1944, random groups of Russian soldiers stopped by Marai's village house, often in the middle of the night, without knocking. They stole scarce food and supplies. Others stayed for longer periods of time. Once a group of Russian soldiers set up a repair shop in his house. Noise was continuous; tools banged and a record of Ukrainian children's choir played around the clock. Marai had to sleep in one room with the others in the household. He also had to witness atrocities. Once a group of Russian soldiers shot the husband of a woman they were abusing. Marai's opinion of the Russians did not improve with this close contact, to say the least. He writes: "We lived for weeks with the thirty men like animals in a cage, slept on the same straw, did their laundry, cooked their meals and helped them with their work" (p. 85). At the same time, it would be incorrect to say that Marai despised the Russians. Instead he was curious about them, and he often pitied them. Despite these intimate living arrangements, Marai continued to find the Russians very strange. The Russians, he writes, "brought Cyrillic letters and all that 'difference,' that mysterious strangeness which Western man never understands and which even this compulsory and very intimate living together could not dispel" (p. 85). While he admired the Soviet military for defeating the Nazis at Stalingrad ("turning around the wagon shaft of world history"), he also knew that the source of Soviet military power was its inexhaustible reserves, not its organizational and technical skills (p. 36). "This Eastern army," he writes in almost Churchillian fashion, "gave the impression of some instinctive biological power--human variants of ants or termites--that had assumed a military shape" (p. 80). Unlike many Hungarians at the time, Marai knew these Russian were not liberators; they could not bring freedom because they lacked it themselves. They merely continued the thieving and murdering that the Nazis had begun. Indeed, this memoir bears similarities to the memoirs of Jewish writers persecuted by the Nazis, in particular to the recently published diary of Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of Romance languages in Dresden during World War II.[3] Both writers use their journals partly to substitute for their emotions, partly to maintain their sanity. Both know that if their journals are found by the wrong people, it could mean imprisonment or death. But both also sense in their Nazi or Soviet oppressors a concealed awe of writers. The dangers of journal-keeping are brought home to the reader when Marai tells the story of his friend Poldi Krausz, who in 1944 suddenly showed up outside Marai's door (in Budapest), asking Marai to safeguard his personal album. Krausz knew the Nazis would soon arrest him. Marai advised his friend to ask someone else, because his house would not be any safer than Krausz's. Indeed, literally the next day, Marai and his wife were forced to abandon their house. When they returned years later, after the siege, the house lay in ruins. Marai realizes that the Soviet military was no less ruthless than the Nazi military. Like the Soviet political system as a whole, it was not a meritocracy. Outstanding performance was not rewarded. Instead, Marai writes, "what always counted in the Soviet system was whether it could use a human being, the raw material, today, Thursday, at 4:30 p.m." (p. 83). The system subsisted primarily on forced labor. Moreover, Marai is struck by the Russians' frenzied looting, which he views as the manifestation of "some blind, biological instinct." He noted that the Soviet soldiers "pounced" on a village, a house, a family, and destroyed everything they needed or did not need. Thus "for years and years on barges, trucks, and trains, they hauled away from these rich lands the wheat, iron, coal, oil, and lard, and also human resources, German technicians and Baltic workers" (p. 69). In response, the Hungarian peasants--"just as in the time of the Turks"--took the cows into the woods, buried the potatoes in pits, and hid the women. This looting also explained Soviet military power, Marai claims, since "without the domestic and kidnaped scientists, spies, forced labor of an entire Russian generation," and American aid, "Soviet industry could not have built ballistic missiles, new airplanes, the atom bomb, and a navy" (p. 81). Indeed, Marai concludes that Soviet soldiers plundered so zealously, including property they did not need, because of the abject poverty they had endured for decades. Poverty--not ideology--motivated them, since they robbed both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie indiscriminately. Poverty also engendered corruption. Marai saw how Russians would sell a healthy horse for just one liter of brandy. For Marai the factors he notes in individual Russians' behavior--the lack of freedom, submission to compulsory labor, indiscriminate looting--help to explain Soviet behavior in world politics. For example, the Soviet leaders relied on compulsory solutions

I do not wish to write a review. I merely wish to point out to you that the book is distributed by Columbia University Press, and is available from the Press for 44 dollars. Your price is an unheard of 260 dollars! Somebody must have goofed in your organization when he or she set your price, which should be less than Columbia's!

If you are looking for a bit of fluff about this period of the Holy Roman Empire, this is not the book for you. It is instead a factual reporting of the history of these royal figures. This is a favorite period of history for me and having studied in Vienna there are many pleasant memories of the places mentioned in the book. There is no converation in this book. It really is a history book but a history book that holds your attention. A lot of research went into the formulation of this book and the author is to be praised. Enjoy!!!

This book has proven extraordinarily useful in documenting the experiences of Hungarian Holocaust survivors for the purposes of restitution claims. Hungarian Holocaust survivors are routinely caught in a restitution Catch-22: how long were you persecuted by the Hungarians versus how long were you persecuted by the Germans and who's responsible? Usually, these survivors fall between the historical cracks. Without books like this one, wherein extensive research has been done on this particular point of Holocaust history, not ALL of these survivors are falling through the cracks. On behalf of my clients, the survivors, I thank the author wholeheartedly for this extraordinary resource.

Rarely do you have an opportunity to meet someone who has "made a difference in history." Ambassador Per Anger is just that sort of person. Elizabeth R. Skoglund touches on the thread that held people like Per Anger, Rauol Wallenberg and others together while they tried to help those escaping the Holocaust. For us now, we too can "make a difference".

A historical text which traces the cultural and intellectual attitudes of 19th century Europe which gave rise to the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian empire. A striking parallel is also drawn in relation to contemporary American cultural and intellectual attitudes that is both insightful and ominous.

Finally, this amazing country is recieving the attention it deserves. This book is not only about Hungarian architecture, but it gives you a brief history of the country that undergone dramatic change in the recent past. The pictures are awe-inspiring. This book will change your mind about this little, seldom talked about country. Fabulous!

This book is really superb, and makes an excellent case for how tragically overlooked Hungarian literature is. Think of it as a Hungarian answer to Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body. In that book, the identity and gender of the narrator fade into insignificance so that the focus can be entirely on love itself. Here, the narrator reminds fixed, but the beloved remains something of an amorphous blur, ambiguously slipping through different people in a non-linear chronology throughout 20th century Hungarian history. Esterhazy brilliantly uses sex and love as a metaphor for Hungarian politics and national identity (hardly a new trick for him) and vice versa. Thus, the book is not only an exquisite encyclopedia of love but an implicit meditation on Hungarian history. I first read this book sitting by the Danube with a bottle of bikave'r, but you don't have to be conversant at all in Hungarian history to get a ton out of this book. And it just might make you interested in Hungary as a side-effect.

Jeno Gyorkei and Miklos Horvath, eds. _Soviet MilitaryIntervention in Hungary, 1956_ . Trans. Emma Roper Evans. Budapest:Central European University Press, 1999. xv + 318 pp. Tables, photographs, maps, endnotes, biographical notes. (cloth), ISBN 963-9116-36X ; (paper), ISBN 963 9116 35 1.

The _Soviet Military Intervention in Hungary, 1956_ , edited by Jeno Gyorkei of the Military History Institute in Budapest, and Miklos Horvath, of the Hungarian Army's Political College, is a worthy addition to the series of books by Columbia University Press (Atlantic Studies on Society in Change ) that surveys many aspects of East Central European society. [1] Originally published in Hungarian in 1996, this book consists of three essays, each about one hundred pages, by Gyorkei and Horvath, Alexander Kirov, and Yevgeny Malashenko, respectively [2]. All three selections primarily focus on Soviet and Hungarian military actions in the 1956 crisis, rather than the Soviet decision making process, or the influence of other Warsaw Pact countries. In the book's preface, Bela Kiraly, the chief editor of the series and a key participant in the 1956 events, poses--and then answers--four questions about the Hungarian crisis, which have preoccupied scholars from former communist countries. First, was the 1956 uprising a revolution or counter-revolution? If it was a revolution, did it succeed or fail? As Kiraly contends, "Without 1956 the radical changes of the 'lawful revolution' that commenced in 1989 and is still in progress would not have happened, or if it had, it would not have been what it is today." (xiv) (The Hungarian Parliament passed a resolution on May 2, 1990 classifying the events of 1956 as a "revolution" and "war of independence.") Second, was the introduction of Soviet troops an aggressive act, or did it constitute military aid to a beleaguered socialist state that had requested it? Kiraly confirms that the Soviet actions did amount to war by pointing out the size of the Soviet military force used in Hungary in the November 4 intervention (17 divisional units), the number of Soviet casualties (722 men killed, 1,251 wounded), and the number of medals awarded to Soviet soldiers (26 "Hero of the Soviet Union" medals, 10,000 combat medals). Kiraly argues that if the USSR had to exert such a great effort, this could not have constituted mere "aid" to Hungary. (Let us also remember Hungarian Premier Imre Nagy's last radio appeal at 5:20 a.m. on November 4, in which he states that the USSR "attacked our capital with the obvious intention of overthrowing the legitimate Hungarian democratic government." In addition, on October 24, 1991, as reported by _ Izvestiia _, the Soviet Supreme Council categorically condemned the Soviet troop intervention, acknowledging it as an interference in the internal affairs of Hungary. ) Thirdly, was there indeed armed conflict between "socialist" states? Kiraly asserts that Hungary had no intention in 1956 of completely abandoning socialism, and therefore the Soviet Union did attack another socialist state. Finally, was the declaration of neutrality on November 1 the cause, or the effect, of Soviet aggression? Kiraly states that Nagy's declaration was merely the effect; by November 1 Khrushchev and his colleagues were already informing other Warsaw Pact leaders in Bucharest, and on the island of Brioni the following day of impending action. (....)Kiraly, commander-in-chief of the National Gua END