September 2023 MBR The Holocaust Studies Shelf

The Holocaust Studies Shelf

Budapest Blackout: A Holocaust Diary
Maria Madi, author
James W. Oberly, editor
University of Wisconsin Press
728 State Street, Suite 443, Madison, WI 53706-1418
www.uwpress.wisc.edu
9780299343101, $79.95, HC, 360pp

https://www.amazon.com/Budapest-Blackout-Holocaust-M%C3%A1ri%C3%A1-M%C3%A1di/dp/0299343103

Synopsis: Maria Madi (1898-1970) was a Roman Catholic Hungarian physician living in Budapest during World War II. Stuck in the city, she vowed to become a witness to events as they unfolded and began keeping a diary to chronicle her everyday life, as well as the lives of her Jewish neighbors, during what would be the darkest periods of the Holocaust.

From the time Hungary declared war on the United States in December 1941 until she secured an immigrant's visa to the US in late 1946, she wrote nearly daily in English, offering current-day readers one of the most complete pictures of ordinary life during the Holocaust in Hungary. In the form of letters to her American relatives, Madi addressed a wide range of subjects, from the fate of small countries like Hungary caught between the major powers of Germany and the Soviet Union, to the Nazi pogrom against Budapest's Jews, to family news and the price of food.

Madi's family donated the entire collection of her diaries to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. This edition of "Budapest Blackout: A Holocaust Diary", published by the University of Wisconsin Press, transcribes a selection of Madi's writings focusing on the period of March 1944 to November 1945, from the Nazi invasion and occupation of Hungary, through the Battle of Budapest, to the ensuing Soviet occupation.

While bearing witness to the catastrophe in Hungary, Madi hid a Jewish family in her small flat from October 1944 to February 1945. She received a posthumous Righteous among Nations Medal from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

Editorial commentary by James W. Oberly situates Madi's observations, and a critical introduction by the Holocaust scholar Andras Lenart outlines the wider sociopolitical context in which her diaries gain meaning.

Critique: Deftly edited by James W. Oberly, Maria Madi's personal and detailed memoir, "Budapest Blackout: A Holocaust Diary" is an inherently fascinating and impressively informative read from start to finish -- as well as a welcome, unique, authentic, and unreservedly recommended contribution to personal, professional, community, college, and university library 20th Century Biography/Memoir/Diary collections in general, and supplemental Holocaust Studies curriculum studies lists.

Editorial Note: The Maria Madi diaries (https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn50967#) consists of seventeen bound volumes containing diaries written by Dr. Maria Madi, a non-Jewish female physician living in Budapest, Hungary, between December 1941 and September 1945. In the diaries, which are handwritten in English, Dr. Madi describes what she is hearing about the war, about propaganda in Hungary, and about missing her daughter, who immigrated to the United States in 1939 and started a family. After the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944, Dr. Madi describes constant air raids, intense deprivation, and what she knows and sees of the ongoing persecutions against Jews. She also references a young boy whom she hides in her home in the fall of 1944. The diaries include photographs, clippings, and correspondence, as well as pencil notations Dr. Madi made in the 1960s. Also includes one diary from Budapest during World War I.

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