Some of the darkest episodes of twentieth-century European history come vividly to life in this fascinating memoir. George Pogany beautifully portrays a 1930s childhood in the Hungarian town of Oroshaza and the spread of anti-Semitism. He describes life in the town's Jewish ghetto, his family's journey in a sealed cattle-wagon to Vienna, and their experiences in a forced labour camp there before being liberated by Soviet troops. Returning home to Hungary on foot, Pogany soon finds himself in a country in which freedom has been savagely curtailed. He offers a stark but often humorous account of what daily life was like under Hungary's brand of Stalinism, first as a student and then as an industrial chemist. After Moscow's brutal suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, Pogany manages to escape one night to the West, right under the noses of the Red Army. "When Even The Poets Were Silent" is a wry and dispassionate account full of surprises and challenges. It is likely to become one of the last eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust.

When Even the Poets Were Silent: The Life of a Jewish Hungarian Holocaust Survivor Under Nazism and Communism

Biographies & Memoirs

Pogany, George

Historical

Brandram

<p>"Catherine Exley was born in Leeds in 1779. Aged thirty, she boarded a ship and sailed for Portugal. Her memoir of the years she spent following the 34th Regiment is unique, the only first-hand account of the Peninsular War by the wife of a common British soldier. Published shortly after her death as a booklet which has since been lost, Catherine's Diary survived in a local newspaper of 1923 to be rediscovered by her great-great-great-grandson. It is difficult today to comprehend the hardships Catherine endured: of her twelve children, three died as infants while with her on the march; her clothes, 'covered with filth and vermin', often went unchanged for weeks at a time, and she herself more than once almost died from illness and starvation; shocked at the mutilation inflicted by muskets and cannons, she still had the composure to manhandle blackened corpses upon a battlefield in search of her missing husband when hardened soldiers could no longer stomach the task. Her diary is reproduced here along with chapters which bear upon Catherine's experiences in Spain and Portugal, and which put her life and writings in their social context."</p>

Catherine Exley's Diary: The Life and Times of an Army Wife in the Peninsular War

Probert, Rebecca

Community & Culture

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