Bela Zsolt (1895–1949)

Béla Zsolt was born Béla Steiner to a Jewish family in Komárom, Hungary. As a young man, he became a journalist, writer, and editor in Nagyvárad (present-day Oradea, Romania). In 1915, he published a collection of poems called Zsolt Béla verseskönyve (The Book of Poems by Béla Zsolt). He joined the editorial board of a radical Budapest newspaper called Világ in 1921. In 1925, he moved to Budapest, where he wrote political articles for newspapers and participated in literary circles. He became editor-in-chief of the weekly publication A Toll (The Pen). He published several novels that gained wide recognition, including Gerson és neje (Gershon and his Wife, 1930); Bellegarde (1932); Kínos ügy (A Delicate Affair, 1935); A dunaparti nő (Riverside Woman, 1936); A Wesselényi utcai összeesküvés (The Wesselenyi Street Conspiracy, 1937); and Kakasviadal (Cockfight, 1939). His play Oktagon (1932) is still performed today. After the invasion of Hungary by Nazi Germany in World War II, Zsolt was trapped in the Nagyvárad Ghetto and sent to forced labor for the Hungarian army in Ukraine. Although his wife Agnes was able to obtain his return, Zsolt was imprisoned in Budapest; the couple were then sent to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. They were both rescued from the camp and sent to Switzerland as part of a so-called Kasztner transport, named for Rudolf Kasztner, a Jewish Hungarian lawyer whose group paid ransoms and bribes to secure the release of Jews and others. In 1946, Zsolt described his experiences in a memoir called Kilenc koffer (Nine Suitcases), one of the earliest Holocaust memoirs. It was originally published in Hungary in weekly installments, but later suppressed by the Communist regime. The work was rediscovered and published in Hungary in 1980, and became well-known after being published in German in 1999 and in English in 2004. His 13-year-old stepdaughter Eva Heyman, killed at Auschwitz, left behind a secret diary that was also published after the war. Following his return to Hungary, Zsolt founded the Hungarian Radical Party and edited its newspaper Haladás (Progress). He was elected to the Hungarian National Assembly in 1947 and died in 1949, shortly before the Communists came to power.