Oliver Lustig

This is not a diary at all, but a combination memoir and history of the 1944 deportation of the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. As far as the story goes, it's about as good or as bad as you'll find anywhere -- it doesn't really stand out from all the other Holocaust memoirs, but it's a decent read, especially as I haven't read any other accounts that focused so narrowly on that particular topic. I had no idea the Hungarian authorities were such enthusiastic anti-semites -- even more so than the Germans!

But the translation/editing is very poor. There were legions of typos, spelling mistakes and punctuation errors. The names were also given inconsistently -- sometimes people were referred to by their family name first and then their given name, and sometimes it was the other way around. And Auschwitz was always referred to as "Birkenau-Auschwitz," when I've only ever seen it called "Auschwitz-Birkenau." It was really frustrating and confusing. But if you can stomach a poorly translated/edited story, and you like Holocaust memoirs and ones about Hungarians in particular, this is worth your time.… (altro)