Synopsis
Béla Zsolt's Holocaust memoir was banned in his native Hungary for nearly four decades because of its unsparing exploration of the situation there during the war. Zsolt reveals his homeland as a hotbed of fascism committed to an escalating program of genetic cleansing in concert with Nazi Germany. A Jewish journalist whose World War I service to his country didn't improve his position, Zsolt was sent to a labor camp, where he witnessed his share of unspeakable atrocities. He was scheduled to be sent to Auschwitz, but managed, miraculously, to survive after a short span at Bergen-Belsen, and, with his wife, to escape to Switzerland, where he lived until his early death in 1949. His wife committed suicide, and it is said that Zsolt died of despair brought on by the experiences he describes so eloquently in this powerful volume.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2004-01-01 |
Publisher's Note
First appearing in May 1946 at a time when there was, of course, no “Holocaust literature,” Nine Suitcases appeared in weekly installments in Haladás. Concentrating on his experiences in the ghetto of Nagyvárad and as a forced labourer in the Ukraine, Zsolt provides not only a rare insight into Hungarian fascism, but a shocking exposure of the cruelty, selfishness, cowardice and betrayal of which human beings – the victims no less than the perpetrators – are capable of in extreme circumstances.
Apart from being one of the earliest writers on the Holocaust, Zsolt is also one of the most powerful: he bears comparison with Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel or Imre Kertész. Nine Suitcases is a horror story but, sadly, a true one. Zsolt was both a journalist and an accomplished novelist. He reports and analyzes the appalling events almost immediately after they occurred, with a devastating blend of despair and cool detachment. Yet for all the imaginative qualities of the writing, the crucial facts are authentic.
Set in a very dark period of modern European history, interspersed with moments of grotesque farce, grim irony and occasional memories of human kindness, Zsolt’s nightmarish but meticulously realistic chronicle of smaller and larger crimes against humanity is as riveting as it is horrifying.
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