Nine Suitcases
Bela Zsolt
  • Published: 1 June 2005
  • ISBN: 9780712606899
  • Imprint: Pimlico
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $32.99

Nine Suitcases

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Suppressed in Hungary until 1980, Nine Suitcases is one of the first - and greatest - memoirs of the Holocaust ever written.

Originally published in weekly instalments, Nine Suitcases is the Hungarian writer Béla Zsolt's harrowing memoir of his experiences in the ghetto of Nagyvarad and as a forced labourer in the Ukraine. Written with exceptional freshness and a devastating blend of angry despair and cool detachment, Zsolt - one of the earliest writers on the Holocaust - provides not only a rare insight into Hungarian fascism, but a shocking exposure of the cruelty, indifference, selfishness, cowardice and betrayal of which human beings - the victims no less than the perpetrators - are capable in extreme circumstances. Interspersed with moments of grotesque farce, grim irony and occasional memories of human kindness, Zsolt's nightmarish but meticulously realistic chronicle of smaller and larger crimes against humanity is as riveting as it is horrifying.
  • Published: 1 June 2005
  • ISBN: 9780712606899
  • Imprint: Pimlico
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

Bela Zsolt

Bela Zsolt was one of Hungary's best-known writers in the early twentieth century. Born in 1895, he served in the Austro-Hungarian Army from 1914 to 1918 and in a Hungarian-Jewish forced-labour unit in 1942-1943. In 1944, after a spell in a Hungarian ghetto and a German concentration camp, he found refuge in Switzerland. In 1945 he returned to Hungary and in 1947 became an anti-communist member of parliament. He died in 1949. Ladislaus L-b was born in Transylvania.

Praise for Nine Suitcases

A sombre yet strangely beautiful account, devoid of sentimentality...the recent publication of his work in English is long overdue

Phil Baker, Sunday Times

[A] heartbreaking memoir... Unbearably immediate

Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday

Remarkable...exceptional

Caroline Moorehead, Times Literary Supplement

This is by far the best book I've come across on the subject of the extermination of Hungary's Jews

Tibor Fischer, Guardian

Very, very rarely you read something that knocks the breath out of you... This masterpiece does

Carole Angier, Literary Review