Overview

Suppressed in Hungary until 1980, Nine Suitcases is one of the first - and greatest - memoirs of the Holocaust ever written. Originally published in weekly instalments, Nine Suitcases is the Hungarian writer Bela Zsolt's harrowing memoir of his experiences in the ghetto of Nagyvarad and as a forced labourer in the Ukraine. Written with exceptional freshness and a devastating blend of angry despair and cool detachment, Zsolt - one of the earliest writers on the Holocaust - provides not only a rare insight into Hungarian fascism, but a shocking exposure of the cruelty, indifference, selfishness, cowardice and betrayal of which human beings - the victims no less than the perpetrators - are capable in extreme circumstances. 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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9780712606899

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[A] heartbreaking memoir... Unbearably immediate -- Laurence Phelan Independent on Sunday 20050410 A sombre yet strangely beautiful account, devoid of sentimentality...the recent publication of his work in English is long overdue -- Phil Baker Sunday Times Remarkable...exceptional -- Caroline Moorehead Times Literary Supplement This is by far the best book I've come across on the subject of the extermination of Hungary's Jews -- Tibor Fischer Guardian Very, very rarely you read something that knocks the breath out of you... This masterpiece does -- Carole Angier Literary Review

[A] heartbreaking memoir... Unbearably immediate -- Laurence Phelan * Independent on Sunday * A sombre yet strangely beautiful account, devoid of sentimentality...the recent publication of his work in English is long overdue -- Phil Baker * Sunday Times * Remarkable...exceptional -- Caroline Moorehead * Times Literary Supplement * This is by far the best book I've come across on the subject of the extermination of Hungary's Jews -- Tibor Fischer * Guardian * Very, very rarely you read something that knocks the breath out of you... This masterpiece does -- Carole Angier * Literary Review *

Very, very rarely you read something that knocks the breath out of you... This masterpiece does -- Carole Angier * Literary Review * This is by far the best book I've come across on the subject of the extermination of Hungary's Jews -- Tibor Fischer * Guardian * Remarkable...exceptional -- Caroline Moorehead * Times Literary Supplement * A sombre yet strangely beautiful account, devoid of sentimentality...the recent publication of his work in English is long overdue -- Phil Baker * Sunday Times * [A] heartbreaking memoir... Unbearably immediate -- Laurence Phelan * Independent on Sunday *

An affecting memoir of the Holocaust by a noted Hungarian author, with many an unusual twist. Born in 1895, Zsolt had published ten novels and four plays by the time a right-wing government came to power in Hungary, the product of folksy populists . . . who decried urban Western civilization and championed a chauvinistic system based on the alleged strength and purity of an unspoiled Magyar race rooted in the Hungarian countryside. Regrettably, Zsolt was an urban Jew, and though he had served the emperor with distinction in WWI, he found himself a target. Because it was, at least superficially, a full partner with Nazi Germany, Hungary got to set its own rules, which did not include exterminating its Jews-at least at first. Zsolt was thus sent to the countryside, and then into Ukraine, as a laborer. I was thoroughly trained in gravedigging out there, he writes, waiting with his fellow prisoners to clean up after Hungarian soldiers, White Ukrainian commandos, and Nazi troops as they burned villages and gunned down the fleeing inhabitants, who tumble all over the ground, into the glowing ashes. Zsolt writes of the daily torments of the region's Jews, who sensed that something worse was on the way but for the time being had to withstand the greedy scheming of neighbors outside the shtetls and ghettos and, as the author recounts it, the excesses of Nazi martinets and fascist petty officials; as one SS officer berates a young rabbi, in one memorable scene, a Hungarian police captain watches with the expression of a pedantic official, who is not responsible for the matter in hand, but who doesn't disapprove of what's going on. But the victim refuses to relent, and, as Zsolt writes, It made no difference, but the rabbi won, which sends the Nazi officer into a foul humor: He felt as uncomfortable about looking his audience in the eye as an actor who feels everything has gone wrong that day. Vignettes of hell: a valuable account of daily life under Hungarian fascism-banned for four decades even under Communist rule. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Bela Zsolt (Author) Bela Zsolt was one of Hungary's best-known writers in the early twentieth century. Born in 1895, he served in the Austro-Hungarian Army from 1914 to 1918 and in a Hungarian-Jewish forced-labour unit in 1942-1943. In 1944, after a spell in a Hungarian ghetto and a German concentration camp, he found refuge in Switzerland. In 1945 he returned to Hungary and in 1947 became an anti-communist member of parliament. He died in 1949. Ladislaus L-b was born in Transylvania. Ladislaus L b (Translator) Ladislaus L b is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Sussex. He was born in Transylvania and spent five months in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp aged eleven. He grew up in Switzerland where he worked as a journalist and teacher before moving to an academic job in Brighton. He has published widely on German and English literature. His translations include Nine Suitcases by Bela Zsolt, Battle for Budapest by Kriszti'an Ungvary and Sex and Character by Otto Weininger.

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