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Concept
Béla Zsolt
Summary
Béla Zsolt (born as Béla Steiner, 8 January 1895 – 6 February 1949) was a Hungarian radical socialist journalist and politician. He wrote one of the earliest Holocaust memoirs, Nine Suitcases (Kilenc koffer in Hungarian). Tibor Fischer has called it "Hungary's finest contribution to Holocaust writing", warning that it is "not for the squeamish". It has been translated into English by Ladislaus Löb.
Zsolt was born in 1895, in Komárom and died in Budapest. Before World War I and whilst still a young man, Zsolt was already considered an outstanding representative of the Hungarian Decadence movement. In the tumultuous years of revolution, 1918 and 1919, he was a vehement advocate for a bourgeois-liberal regime and opponent of the soviet republics and Horthy's emerging Christian-nationalist corporate state. In the intervening years between the wars, Zsolt gains recognition as a playwright, novelist and political journalist. He blamed "folksy populists . . . who decried urban Western civilization and championed a chauvinistic system based on the alleged strength and purity of an unspoiled Magyar race rooted in the Hungarian countryside" for the Hungarian right wing government's rise to power.
Like thousands of other Hungarian Jews in World War II Béla Zsolt served in a forced labor battalion on the Ukrainian eastern front. Many of Hungary's intellectuals did not survive working in these battalions. Zsolt worked as a gravedigger as White Ukrainians, Nazis and Hungarian soldiers burnt villages. He describes how the inhabitants "tumble all over the ground, into the glowing ashes" as they are shot while fleeing.
By spring 1944, after the Nazis invaded Hungary during Operation Margarethe, Szolt was arrested by Hungarian fascists and held at the Nagyvárad ghetto. Located just across the border from Hungary in Romania, known today as Oradea, it became a collection point for Hungarian Jews. Zsolt's step-daughter Eva Heyman was among those deported to Poland; she lost her life in Auschwitz.
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