[.ca] One Woman in the War: Hungary, 1944-1945 (ISBN 9639241547)

Extraordinary insight into postwar Eastern Europe:
Alaine Polcz is the foremost child psychologist in postwar Hungary. After more than forty years of silence, she sat down one day and wrote these memoirs of her life as a young woman in Hungary during the war. The result is an extraordinary window into the decay of the German occupation of Hungary, and the "liberation" by the Soviet Red Army. There is no other book quite like this--ranking (with Agate Nesaule's Woman in Amber as one of the finest firsthand accounts of mass rape ever written.

A Testament to the Fighting Spirit:
This book is an autobiographic account of the experiences of a woman in the closing months of WWII. It had a huge effect on me: the inhumanity and cruelty made me both angry and sad but at the same time, the honest voice of the narrator touched me deeply. Even the most horrible details of rape and humiliation are told in a very straightforward manner and you often wish this whole story were only made up. But the fact that it's not what makes this book so remarkable. You get to know a woman who, despite all the terrible things, survived and not only survived but had the inner strength to face and, by telling her story, re-live her past. Before reading the English translation, I was a little bit skeptical because Hungarian literature doesn't translate easily into English (or any other languages for that matter). And then came my surprise: Mr. Tezla did a perfect job with the translation! I think people all around the world would find reading this book an unforgettable experience!