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Three generations of a family of lawyers have run a firm founded in
1893 in the small city of Becskerek (today in Serbian Zrenjanin),
first part of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg monarchy, then Hungary,
then Yugoslavia, then for a while under German occupation, then
again part of Yugoslavia and finally Serbia. In the Banat district
of the province of Vojvodina, the multiplicity of languages and
religions and changes of place-names was a matter of course. What
is practically unprecedented, all files, folders and documents of
the law office have survived. They concern marriages, divorces,
births and testaments, as well as expulsions, emigrations,
incarcerations and releases of these largely rural and small-town
dwellers. Mundane cases reflect times through war, peace,
revolution and counter-revolution, through serfdom and freedom,
through comfort and poverty. The files also show everyday lives
shaped in spite of history. Tibor Varady transforms them into
affecting and vivid vignettes, selecting and commenting without
sentimentality but with empathy. The law office of the three
generations of the Varady family demonstrates that the legal
profession permits and in difficult times even requires its members
to defend the ordinary men and women against the powers of state
and society.
A gripping first-hand account of the devastating "last chapter" of
the Holocaust, written by a privileged eyewitness, the secretary of
the Hungarian Judenrat, and a member of Budapest's Jewish elite,
How It Happened is a unique testament to the senseless brutality
that, in a matter of months, decimated what was Europe's largest
and last-surviving Jewish community. Writing immediately after the
war and examining only those critical months of 1944 when Hitler's
Germany occupied its ally Hungary, Erno Munkacsi describes the
Judenrat's desperation and fear as it attempted to prevent the
looming catastrophe, agonized over decisions not made, and
struggled to grasp the immensity of a tragedy that would take the
lives of 427,000 Hungarian Jews in the very last year of the Second
World War. This long-overdue translation makes available Munkacsi's
profound and unparalleled insight into the Holocaust in Hungary,
revealing the "choiceless choices" that confronted members of the
Judenrat forced to execute the Nazis' orders. With an in-depth
introduction, a brief biography of Erno Munkacsi, ample annotations
by Laszlo Csosz and Ferenc Laczo, two dozen archival photographs,
and detailed maps, How It Happened is an essential resource for
historians and students of the Holocaust, the Second World War, and
Central Europe.
Three generations of a family of lawyers have run a firm founded in
1893 in the small city of Becskerek (today in Serbian Zrenjanin),
first part of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg monarchy, then Hungary,
then Yugoslavia, then for a while under German occupation, then
again part of Yugoslavia and finally Serbia. In the Banat district
of the province of Vojvodina, the multiplicity of languages and
religions and changes of place-names was a matter of course. What
is practically unprecedented, all files, folders and documents of
the law office have survived. They concern marriages, divorces,
births and testaments, as well as expulsions, emigrations,
incarcerations and releases of these largely rural and small-town
dwellers. Mundane cases reflect times through war, peace,
revolution and counter-revolution, through serfdom and freedom,
through comfort and poverty. The files also show everyday lives
shaped in spite of history. Tibor Varady transforms them into
affecting and vivid vignettes, selecting and commenting without
sentimentality but with empathy. The law office of the three
generations of the Varady family demonstrates that the legal
profession permits and in difficult times even requires its members
to defend the ordinary men and women against the powers of state
and society.
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