The Smell of Humans

Primarily a piece of creative writing and autobiographical literature of a very distinctive Central European kind, this detailed and imaginative short memoir is also an important document of the Holocaust in Hungary in 1944. Written by a master of twentieth-century Hungarian literature, it describes life for the Jewish population of German-occupied Budapest—the constant fear of deportation overshadowing the daily trials of living in the ghetto—before concentrating on the writer's own internment in a labor camp during the first weeks of rule by the extremist Arrow Cross regime. The experiences of those nineteen days spent in the camp are both harsh and disturbing, yet throughout his memoir Szep manages to maintain an extraordinary degree of compassion and detachment, even humor. Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the events described, this is the last of Szep's many literary works to appear in English."