Maskerado: dancing around death in Nazi Hungary
Tivadar Soros Canongate, 208pp, £14.99
ISBN 1841950629
In March 1944, the German army invaded Budapest. I say invaded, but the Germans did not really need to invade Hungary; the country was an Axis power and had assisted the Nazis throughout the war. Tivadar Soros, the father of the more famous George Soros, says that, at first, the only evidence he saw of an occupying army was "a tiny German tank, camouflaged in green and yellow. This battered little tank, it seemed, had taken Budapest." But soon, Soros, an informed Jewish lawyer, realised all too well that the presence of the Germans in Hungary meant a turning point in the treatment of the Jewish population. Once Adolf Eichmann and the SS had moved into Budapest, Soros knew that the lives of his family, and of the wider Jewish community, were in peril.
He was right. Within a few weeks, Jews had been ordered to wear yellow stars and were being herded into a ghetto. Soros was particularly outraged that the Nazis succeeded in enlisting a Jewish Council to do their dirty work for them: "When systematic persecution of the Jews began, it was carried out astonishingly . . . by the Jews themselves."
I am not sure that Soros, who died in 1968, would have written that today. But this memoir was first published in 1965, when it was still acceptable to criticise the behaviour of Jews during the Holocaust. Maskerado was written in the invented language of Esperanto, which Soros learnt because he felt it would bring nations closer together. Indeed, the entire tone of the book would be different if it were written today - Soros writes breezily, almost flippantly, about the horrific events that unfolded.
Tivadar Soros - much like his son George, who was 14 in 1944 and is now one of the richest men in the world - was a talented wheeler-dealer. He may have been appalled by the persecution of his race, but he seems to have relished outsmarting the wartime authorities. He split up his family, sending his wife to a safe house in the country and placing the rest of his relatives in various houses scattered throughout Budapest. He became expert at procuring false papers that proved he was Christian. He continually traded documents, earning enough money to live on, and he strolled around the city like a free man, drinking coffee in cafes and going swimming. All the while, he was working tirelessly to save the lives of his friends and family.
Soros's resilience, his passion for life, and for telling the truth, make Maskerado a truly remarkable document. Anyone interested in the Second World War ought to read this book, which has been impressively republished by Canongate, with introductions by Soros's sons, detailed notes and a comprehensive index.
Francis Gilbert is completing a novel set in wartime Budapest
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