We hear little about the Holocaust in Hungary. In a murderous 56-day period in Hungary during 1944, some 430,000 Hungarian Jews were transported on 147 cattle trains to the death camps in an act of brutal efficiency. Few survived. Proportionally, it was the Hungarian Jews who suffered more than other nationality. One of the survivors was Zsuzsanna Kalmar, then a 2-year-old child in Budapest.
This book, The Courage to Care, is a warning about the increased antisemitism that seems to be more and more prevalent in many parts of the world, including Australia, because the links with the past are being lost or tarnished by revisionism. Zsuzsanna Kalmar, now Suzi Smead, is one of those last surviving links with the past and writes of courage, heartbreak, brutality, and indifference to ‘the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the history of the world’.
As a child, she lived by day with her parents in the ceiling of a protector’s house while the Nazis and their supporters rounded up neighbourhood Jews. Her family knew what was in store if they had been caught and her protectors knew that they would be shot if caught. Later she was rescued from a camp where inmates were yarded awaiting travel to Auschwitz. Many were family friends. Her grandparents were not rescued and essentially sacrificed themselves for Suzi and her parents as escapee numbers were limited. During research for this book, she found lists of Jews to be murdered. Her name was on the list. Spine-chilling.
Read the article by Ian Plimer in The Spectator.