Between the Lines: The Diary of Margit Kassai (The Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs 2024, 18)

Plot

"Margit Kassai is a Jewish woman living in Budapest, Hungary, when the Nazis invade in March 1944. The book is written in diary form during World War II, starting in February 1945, so she refers to her writing on the previous year as a “retrospective diary.” Her story is addressed to her husband, who has been sent to Hungary’s forced labour service along with most of the other Jewish men, and centres on the terrible year she experiences. Born Jewish but a convert to Lutheranism, this conversion does not help Margit avoid persecution during the Holocaust. She is fired from her job at a bank because of the anti-Jewish laws and forced to relocate to a Jewish house, into which Jews in the city were being segregated in June 1944. Her diary outlines the near misses and extreme suffering she witnesses while enduring the rise of the anti-Jewish Hungarian Arrow Cross regime, followed by the Soviet Siege of Budapest. She finds work in Red Cross children’s homes run by Lutheran pastor Gábor Sztehlo, who saved hundreds of Jewish children. Margit takes care of the children and runs a kindergarten, while helping her own family when she can. The book provides a near-daily depiction of the life-and-death struggle to obtain food and to avoid the bombs and the anti-Jewish atrocities that comprise her life in Budapest at this time. The book ends after the Soviet liberation of the city, with the author returning to work and waiting for her husband to come home from a forced labour camp. An afterword is written by the author’s daughter, Frances Tolnai, and her longtime friend, Dr. Eva Aniko Székely."--