Between the Lines: The Diary of Margit Kassai

Margit Kassai uses her quick thinking and wit to survive the Nazi occupation of Budapest in 1944, the terror of the extremist Arrow Cross regime and the Soviet siege of the city until the early months of 1945. Jewish by birth but a convert to Lutheranism, Margit knows this makes little difference to the antisemitic officials and manages to elude roundups by working in children’s homes under a false identity. As hunger forces Margit to travel across the bombed-out city to look for food and take care of the children and those she loves, she knows she is always one wrong step from an explosion. Margit’s diary, addressed to her husband who has been taken away for forced labour, is written with a wry self-deprecation, an unflinching eye for details and a kindness that shines through her own desperation. Stuck between the Soviet front and Nazi and Hungarian Arrow Cross persecutors, Margit asks her husband to read Between the Lines of her darkly humorous true story.

Introduction by Gergely Kunt

“… Her unvarnished, sharp commentaries on the interactions between Jews thrown together by murderous measures and between Jewish and non-Jewish Hungarians make the book especially valuable to students of history. And her snapshots of apocalyptic scenes, broken-down social fabric and constant hunt for food in post-siege Budapest are unforgettable. Kassai’s keen eye for sociological detail and her awareness of the broader political context place her book in the company of celebrated wartime diaries such as those written by Jenő Heltai and Miksa Fenyő.”

- Judith Szapor, author and professor, McGill University

“… The memoir-diary is also stylistically significant, not least for the self-irony predominant throughout the text, which can of course be read as a kind of trauma-processing. Its very special style, preserved in the brilliant translation, brings back something of that bygone rich urban Jewish culture and humour, which survived only in fragments after 1945.”

- Éva Kovács, deputy director of academic affairs, Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies