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Those For Whom No Accounting Was Required
Hardcover
Biographies GeneralGeneral World History
Publisher Price: $42.95
Publisher: Salisbury & York
Published: Jul 17 2026
Pages: 318
Weight: 1.31
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Between 1941 and 1944, approximately 100,000 Hungarian Jewish men were conscripted into the munkaszolgálat - unarmed forced-labor battalions attached to the Hungarian Army and marched into the killing grounds of the Eastern Front. They dug trenches, cleared minefields, and hauled ammunition under fire. Tens of thousands died before Germany even occupied Hungary in March 1944. Until now, English-language readers have had no first-person book to show for it.
Dr. József Bihari was among those men. A trained linguist, professor of Hungarian literature at Eger, holder of a doctorate from Debrecen, and a published literary journalist, he served with forced-labor company 106/8 from 1941 to 1943 and came home when most of his company did not. Six years after the events, with the precision of a trained scholar, he set down what he had seen.
Two hundred and thirteen men set out. Roughly fifty came home - in scattered groups, between 1945 and 1948. This is the arithmetic the book is written to honor.
Bihari does not perform his suffering. He rations it. On the first page he tells us, with disarming calm, that he will write down only half of the reality - so that he might be believed. It is one of the most quietly radical opening gambits in the literature of the Holocaust. And the restraint, page after page, becomes unbearable in a way that no catalogue of horrors could achieve.
The account contains what is, to our knowledge, the only published first-person eyewitness account in any language of the Dorosic hospital fire of April 29-30, 1943 - a documented atrocity in which 518 forced laborers died in a single night. Bihari was there. He saw how it started, who started it, and how the doors came to be locked. The next morning an official investigating commission arrived and, in minutes, ruled it an accident. He had watched the evidence being prepared for that verdict.
Translated and edited by Dr. Ivan Gulas - retired board-certified clinical psychologist, former Harvard Medical School faculty, and Dr. Bihari's nephew - the edition includes a Historical Introduction contextualizing the munkaszolgálat within Hungarian Jewish history, a Translator's Afterword on the principles of fidelity that governed the translation, a period glossary, and a Foreword by the diarist's daughters, Ági Bihari Kuti and Éva Bihari Harsas, who placed the manuscript in the translator's hands.
For readers of Primo Levi, Imre Kertész, and Elie Wiesel. For scholars of the Holocaust, Hungarian Jewish history, and WWII. For anyone who has ever asked: what did it look like from inside?
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