The Jews of Hungary and Other Hungarians

The Diary of László Waldapfel 1933–1941

Author(s): László Waldapfel
Language: English
Year of publication: 2022
Page Range: 154
ISBN: 978-3-949607-00-4
E-ISBN-13: 978-3-949607-01-1

Subject(s): intellectual history, Holocaust studies, modern history, Jewish studies

Summary/Abstract:

This diary was not meant to be presented originally to the wider public. Its author is a young man of Hungarian-Jewish background, who is writing about the events in his life and the world around him in the 1930s and early 1940s.

Did he ever imagine that he was writing a veritable historical chronicle, reflecting on the complexities of his identity in the light of the gradual normalization of discriminatory politics and slide toward genocide? We shall never be able to find this out, because soon after the last diary entry, he is called up to forced labor service on the Russian front from where he would never return.