Share This Page
Hungary at War
Civilians and Soldiers in World War II
336 pages | 18 illustrations/1 map | 6 x 9 | 1998
ISBN 978-0-271-01739-6 | cloth: $57.95 tr
ISBN 978-0-271-03244-3 | paper: $19.95 tr
“Whether Eby’s judgments on individuals and particular military operations are fair can only be evaluated by someone who has engaged the same huge body of new research material. Right now, Comrades and Commissars is by far the most comprehensive single work on the Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War.” —Robert A. Rosenstone, Journal of American History
“Very little has been written in English about the role of Hungary in World War II. Cecil D. Eby . . . moves part of the way toward filling the gap in Hungary at War. This is an oral history, composed of a series of interviews that Eby conducted in Hungary in 1989 and 1996. . . . These firsthand accounts of life in Hungary during the war are both interesting and informative. Eby summarizes rather than quotes the interviews, bringing them together into a clear and flowing narrative.” —Virginia Quarterly Review
Hungary's place in World War II has been woefully documented, because until recently any histories of the war years had to conform to the Communist Party line. Originally allied with Germany to defend itself against Bolshevism, Hungary saw its army decimated in 1943 and was subsequently invaded—and occupied—by the Soviets. Now fifty years after the closing of the Iron Curtain, the memories of those who endured those years can finally be shared.
Cecil Eby has compiled a historical chronicle of Hungary's wartime experiences based on interviews with nearly a hundred people who lived through those years. Here are officers and common soldiers, Jewish survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, pilots of the Royal Hungarian Air Force, Hungarian prisoners of war in Russian labor camps, and a host of others. We meet the apologists for the Horthy regime installed by Hitler and the activists who sought to overthrow it, and we relive the Red Army's siege of Budapest during the harsh winter of 1944-45 through the memories of ordinary citizens trapped there.
Most of the accounts shared here have never been told to anyone outside the subjects' families. We learn of a woman, Ilona Joo, who survived in a cellar while German and Russian armies used her house and garden as a battleground, and of the remarkable Merenyi sisters, who trekked home to Budapest after being freed from Bergen-Belsen. Eby has also included a rare interview with a former member of the Arrow Cross, Hungary's fascist party, which sheds new light on its leadership. From these personal accounts, Eby draws readers into the larger themes of the tragedy of war and the consequences of individual actions in moments of crisis.
Skillfully integrating oral testimony with historical exposition, Hungary at War reveals the knot of ideological, economic, and ethnic attachments that entangled the lives of so many Hungarians. The result is an absorbing narrative that is a fitting testament to a nation buffeted by external forces beyond its capacity to control.
Cecil D. Eby is a retired Professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he taught for thirty years. Among his other books are The Road to Armageddon: British Popular Literature, 1880-1915 (Duke, 1988), "That Disgraceful Affair": The Black Hawk War (Norton, 1973), and Between the Bullet and the Lie: American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969).