Overview

Opening with the ominous scene of one young schoolgirl whispering an urgent account of Nazi horror to another over birthday cake, Ozsváth’s extraordinary and chilling memoir tells the story of her childhood in Hungary, living under the threat of the Holocaust. The setting is the summer of 1944 in Budapest during the time of the German occupation, when the Jews were confined to ghetto houses but not transported to Auschwitz in boxcars, as was the rest of the Hungarian Jewry living in the countryside. Provided with food and support by their former nanny, Erzsi, Ozsváth’s family stays in a ghetto house where a group of children play theater, tell stories to one another, invent games to pass time, and wait for liberation. In the fall of that year, however, things take a turn for the worse. Rounded up under horrific circumstances, forced to go on death marches, and shot on the banks of the Danube by the thousands, the Jews of Budapest are threatened with immediate destruction. Ozsváth and her family survive because of Erzsi’s courage and humanity. Cheating the watching eyes of the murderers, she brings them food and runs with them from house to house under heavy bombardment in the streets. As a scholar, critic, and translator, Ozsváth has written extensively about Holocaust literature and the Holocaust in Hungary. Now, she records her own history in this clear-eyed, moving account. When the Danube Ran Red combines an exceptional grounding in Hungarian history with the pathos of a survivor and the eloquence of a poet to present a truly singular work.

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A highly polished literary work, with direct speech inserted into the text to convey a sense of immediacy, and dramatic final sentences placed at chapter endings. In short, this is a hybrid text that needs to be read atthe intersection where memoir, history, and literature meet."" - English Historical Review ""This powerful and astute memoir, written by a mature woman many years after the events narrated, embodies a child's-eye view of the Holocaust in Hungary."" - The Sewanee Review

A highly polished literary work, with direct speech inserted into the text to convey a sense of immediacy, and dramatic final sentences placed at chapter endings. In short, this is a hybrid text that needs to be read atthe intersection where memoir, history, and literature meet. - English Historical Review This powerful and astute memoir, written by a mature woman many years after the events narrated, embodies a child's-eye view of the Holocaust in Hungary. - The Sewanee Review

Author Information

Zsuzsanna Ozsváth is the Leah and Paul Lewis Chair of Holocaust Studies and professor of literature and history of ideas at the University of Texas, Dallas. Her publications include In the Footsteps of Orpheus: The Life and Times of Miklós Radnóti, and Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklós Radnóti (with Fred Turner), and The Iron-Blue Vault: Selected Poems of Atilla Jozsef (with Fred Turner).

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