A TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR Budapest autumn 1943. Four years into the war Hungary is
allied with Nazi Germany and the Hungarian capital is the Casablanca of central Europe. The
city swirls with intrigue and betrayal home to spies and agents of every kind. But Budapest
remains at peace an oasis in the midst of war where Allied POWs and Polish and Jewish
refugees find sanctuary. The riverside cafes are crowded and the city's famed cultural life
still thrives. All that comes to an end in March 1944 when the Nazis invade. By the summer
Allied bombers are pounding its grand boulevards and historic squares. Budapest's surviving
Jewish population has been forcibly relocated to cramped overcrowded Yellow Star houses. By
late December the city is surrounded and under siege from the Red Army. Tens of thousands of
soldiers and civilians die in the savage siege as Budapest collapses into anarchy. Hungarian
death squads roam the streets as the city's Jews are forced into ghettos. Russian artillery
pounds the city into smoking rubble as starving residents hack chunks of meat from dead frozen
horses. Using newly uncovered diaries documents archival material and interviews with the
last survivors Adam LeBor brilliantly recreates life and death in the wartime city the
catastrophic fate of half of its Jewish population and the destruction of the siege. Told
through the lives of a cast of vivid gripping characters including glamorous aristocrats
spies smugglers and SS Officers a rebellious teenage Jewish schoolboy Hungary's most popular
actress and her spy chief lover a Jewish businesswoman who negotiated with Adolf Eichmann a
Christian doctor hiding her Jewish neighbours and a teenage Hungarian soldier the story of how
Budapest slowly dies as the war destroys the city is utterly compelling.
