Budapest Blackout

Mária Mádi (1898–1970) was a Roman Catholic Hungarian physician living in Budapest during World War II. Stuck in the city, she vowed to become a witness to events as they unfolded and began keeping a diary to chronicle her everyday life, as well as the lives of her Jewish neighbors, during what would be the darkest periods of the Holocaust. From the time Hungary declared war on the United States in December 1941 until she secured an immigrant’s visa to the US in late 1946, she wrote nearly daily in English, offering current-day readers one of the most complete pictures of ordinary life during the Holocaust in Hungary. In the form of letters to her American relatives, Mádi addressed a wide range of subjects, from the fate of small countries like Hungary caught between the major powers of Germany and the Soviet Union, to the Nazi pogrom against Budapest’s Jews, to family news and the price of food. Mádi’s family donated the entire collection of her diaries to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. This edition transcribes a selection of Mádi’s writings focusing on the period of March 1944 to November 1945, from the Nazi invasion and occupation of Hungary, through the Battle of Budapest, to the ensuing Soviet occupation. While bearing witness to the catastrophe in Hungary, Mádi hid a Jewish family in her small flat from October 1944 to February 1945. She received a posthumous Righteous among Nations Medal from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. Editorial commentary by James W. Oberly situates Mádi’s observations, and a critical introduction by the Holocaust scholar András Lénárt outlines the wider sociopolitical context in which her diaries gain meaning.

This collection brings together for the first time the dramatic responses to the Holocaust from two generations of Israel playwrights. Leah Goldberg, Aharon Megged, and Ben Zion Tomer survived the Holocaust and settled in Israel after the war. Their plays explore survival issues and the concepts of heroism and of good and evil in a candid, straightforward manner.

Structured to reflect a journey, this book begins with the play "James Joyce and the Israelites," the station from which the journey begins. The remaining chapters are a diary of a trip the author made to Israel. The 'stops' are the voices of six Israeli playwrights, interspersed with extracts from their plays.

Arriving in America after World War II, Andrew Laszlo kept much of his Hungarian childhood a secret. Decades later, his wife Ann, convinced him to share the secret with his grown children. When Andrew was born in 1926, His middle-class family lived in Papa, a small town west of Budapest. It was a happy time. At age fifteen, Andrew was not allowed to join the Boy Scouts. His brother could not attend the university. The reason…. Their mother was Jewish. As Nazi inspired antisemitism grew, Andrew’s determination to survive was tested again and again. On March 19, 1944, Germany invaded Hungary. He wrote: “…as I warned you…Yes, from here on this account is going to get rough.” His family was relocated to the Ghetto and forced to wear the yellow Star of David. Andrew’s brother, Sandor, and then Andrew were conscripted into Hungarian Labor forces. His mother, father, grandmother and aunt were taken away. As the war dragged on, Andrew was sent to the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. Years later; his children learned that Anne Frank was a prisoner in the camp at the same time. She perished before the war ended. The loss of his family deeply affected Andrew. At 20 years old, having nothing left, he escaped Russian occupied Hungary and made his way to post-war Germany. There, he filed an emigration petition for the United States. He arrived in New York Harbor on January 17, 1947. He carried his secret past locked in his heart…for 50 years. Andrew Laszlo went on to have a distinguished motion picture career. He was a cinematographer for over 50 movies and televisions series, including Shogun and Rambo, First Blood. He worked with many of the movie stars of his time. He traveled the world doing pictures and teaching the next generation of film makers.