From the spring of 1942 until the summer of 1944, some 45,000 Jewish men were forced to accompany Hungarian troops to the battle zone of the Soviet Union. Some 80% of the Jewish forced laborers never returned home. They fell prey to battle, starvation, disease, and grinding labor, aggravated immensely by brutality and even outright murder at the hands of the Hungarian soldiers responsible for them. This study constitutes a unique and invaluable chapter in the mosaic of Holocaust history. The laborers’ personal accounts speak powerfully to every Jewish family that lived under Hungarian rule during the Holocaust years, because it is their own personal story, but it is not one to be kept in the family alone, since it is profoundly relevant to all people.
"This book is at once engrossing and appalling, in its clear and civilized detailing of the catastrophe that befell tens of thousands of Hungarian Jewish fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers, who could not comprehend the fate that consumed their families, friends, and loved ones transported by rail to Auschwitz over the summer of 1944."
Robert Moses Shapiro, Jewish Book Council
