Those For Whom No Accounting Was Required

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,…