Bela Zsolt

Béla Zsolt was born in northern Hungary in 1895. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, until he was gravely injured in 1918. In 1920 he moved to Budapest and, for the next two decades, produced ten novels and four plays, as well as political and literary journalism. In 1945, after the experiences he describes in this book, Zsolt returned to Hungary and, in 1947, was elected to Parliament. In 1948, his health failing, he was admitted to a sanatorium in Budapest, where he died in 1949. Zsolt’s wife, Ágnes, committed suicide in 1948 after publishing the diary of her thirteen-year-old daughter, who was killed at Auschwitz.

Translated from the Hungarian by Ladislaus Löb.