Product Description

Concentrating on his experiences in the ghetto of Nagyvarad and as a forced labourer in the Ukraine, Zsolt provides a rare insight into Hungarian fascism, but also a shocking exposure of the cruelty, indifference, selfishness, cowardice and betrayal of which human beings are capable in extreme circumstances.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #279121 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-01
• Original language: Hungarian
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Nine Suitcases is Bela Zsolt's memoir of the Holocaust--his personal experiences in the Hungarian ghetto of Nagyvarad and as a forced labourer in the Ukraine is as tragic as it is moving. Zsolt's writing forces us past the simplicities of good versus evil and shows the awful human weaknesses, personal complicities and daily heroism and tragedy of war at its most brutal.

The difficulties and dangers of Holocaust literature are legion. (What could or should Holocaust literature be? Has Adorno's warning--no poetry after Auschwitz--been misunderstood or forgotten?) Norman G Finkelstein's provocative The Holocaust Industry has brought our attention to the difference between memorialising Nazi genocide and learning real historical lessons. But Nine Suitcases hugely deserves its publication and can fully stand alongside the work of Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel's Night. Originally published in weekly instalments, Zsolt describes in detail how he came to be in the ghetto (and the significance of those eponymous suitcases), his work as a gravedigger and labourer (ironically, in 1942, force to fight alongside the Germans); the bravery of a local Madame in serving her Jewish prostitutes; his feelings towards his Orthodox fellow inmates; and his plan to pretend a Typhus outbreak. And all of this is done with a matter-of-fact simplicity and without rhetorical flourishes or indulgences. This is an important, great book. Sometimes, Zsolt says, in the ghetto there was "a silence that provoke(d) prayer or blasphemy". We should read Zsolt and, in the ensuing quiet, decide anew what our strategies for learning and understanding should be. --Mark Thwaite

From the Publisher
Suppressed in Hungary until 1980, Nine Suitcases is one of the first – and greatest – memoirs of the Holocaust ever written. When Bela Zsolt first published it as a newspaper serial, there was no ‘Holocaust literature’. Today there are whole libraries on the subject, but Nine Suitcases remains unique.

About the Author
Bela Zsolt was one of Hungary's best-known writers in the early twentieth century. Born in 1895, he served in the Austro-Hungarian Army from 1914 to 1918 and in a Hungarian-Jewish forced-labour unit in 1942-1943. In 1944, after a spell in a Hungarian ghetto and a German concentration camp, he found refuge in Switzerland. In 1945 he returned to Hungary and in 1947 became an anti-communist member of parliament. He died in 1949. Ladislaus Lob was born in Transylvania. He is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Sussex.

Customer Reviews

The Possession of What Matters
Poignant is a word often used of Holocaust literature and yet it fails to capture exactly the measure of this classy autobiography. The author, a journalist and critic before the war, never abandons his masterful journalistic restraint while buzzing between the various situations in which he finds himself in the aftermath of capture, yet we feel his seething anger oozing through the ironic description, an anger which dissipates into resignation. Perhaps feisty would be more appropriate.

If Holocaust literature is concerned with the motivation of the German authorities, Zsolt's tome is more concerned with the reasons why the ordinary peasantry, like his Hungarian gendarme companion, consents to participate in the outrages, and the equally enigmatic question of why the Jews failed to resist or escape when they had the opportunity. Rightly, it is a book of questions and pastiches, rather than easy answers, but when the latter is proffered it is generally in confirmation of the reader's own suspicions.

The translator's prose style is impeccable, lucid and becoming, and the words and pages seemed to fly past at twice my standard reading pace.

In short, splash out your week's wages if necessary, but you won't be disappointed.

Nine Suitcases by Bela Zsolt
Bela Zsolt's Nine Suitcases is a memoir of the Holocaust in wartime Hungary. The author, a Hungarian writer of Jewish background, begins recounting his tale from the wartime ghetto in Nagyvarad (now in modern-day Romania). From his confinement in the ghetto hospital, Zsolt describes a Jewish community stricken with poverty and panic. There is talk of euthanasia amongst Jews in order to prevent further mutilation and debasement of their bodies. Despite the looming threat of deportation to concentration camps the community remains fractious, with children chafing at family penury and individuals attempting to curry small favours with their tormentors. The imprisoned Jews hide their valuables in the vain hope of recovering them when they are free men. They yearn for escape but have nowhere to go, even when the door is held open for them. It is a desperately grim position.

Rather than laying out his story in a straightforward chronological fashion, Zsolt turns his narrative back and forth in time. In on of the most powerful passages in the book, he tells the story of his deportation to Russia as if he is still in the ghetto talking to his friend Friedlander, adding details every now and again about the developments in the ghetto affecting himself and his friend. Like the other narrative threads in Nine Suitcases, this is all revived in clear and compelling prose. Zsolt adopts a detached, dispassionate tone for much of Nine Suitcases, reflecting the hopelessness and exhaustion that came upon him in the ghetto. His calm description of Jews being hoarded onto cattle wagons for deportation to the concentration camps is truly chilling. On occasion, however, there are gasps of horror and despair at his terrible experiences, most memorably when he recalls how he fled the labour camps before the Russian military advance, leaving behind those who clang onto their worldly possessions in the rush to escape.

In the final third of the book, Zsolt tells of how he escaped from the ghetto in Nagyvarad and made his way to Budapest by train. This story is very different to what has gone before but is equally compelling, providing a glimpse of the impending defeat of the Axis powers and of the views of Hungarian people after the Jews have been erased from daily life. It is not easy to critically compare memoirs of the Holocaust and I do not wish to attempt that here. I can, however, wholeheartedly recommend Nine Suitcases to anyone. It is a remarkable and unique account of the darkest chapter in twentieth century history.