Volume 48, Number 18 · November 15, 2001
Artful Dodger
By István Deák
Masquerade: Dancing around Death in Nazi-Occupied Hungary
by Tivadar Soros, edited and translated from the Esperanto by Humphrey Tonkin, with forewords by Paul and George Soros
Arcade, 275 pp., $24.95
If these quotations read like excerpts from the diary of a hedonistic bourgeois Hungarian, this is because their author, Tivadar Soros, was one. To be precise, he was a successful Budapest lawyer. What makes these quotations provocative, however, is that Soros was a Jew and that he wrote these words during the ten months in 1944 when the Germans were occupying his country and Adolf Eichmann's SS and the Hungarian government were sending nearly half a million Jews to Auschwitz. Even those who had been left behind, namely the Jewish labor service men under Hungarian military command and the Jews of the Hungarian capital, were under daily threat of extermination. In fact, late in 1944, when Soros and some of the Jews he protected attended the Opera and the National Theater on a season ticket, most Budapest Jews languished in ghettos while fascist Arrow Cross hoodlums dragged hundreds of them to the shores of the Danube to be shot and thrown into the river.
Review, 3484 words
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