The Last Days of Budapest
The Destruction of Europe’s Most Cosmopolitan Capital in World War II
Contributors
By Adam LeBor
Also available from:
- On Sale
- Apr 22, 2025
- Page Count
- 512 pages
- Publisher
- PublicAffairs
- ISBN-13
- 9781541700581
Despite Hungary’s German alliance, two years into World War II, Allied prisoners of war, French and Polish refugees, spies of every kind, and the city’s large Jewish population lived freely and openly in Budapest. While the other multicultural centers of Europe had fallen to the almost all-consuming conflict, Budapest remained intact, a shining reminder of what middle European high culture could be.
By September 1944, three months after D-Day, life in the city still seemed idyllic. By mid-October, Budapest had collapsed into anarchy: death squads roamed the streets, the city’s remaining Jews were funneled into ghettos, Russian shells destroyed city blocks, and everyone struggled to find food and survive the winter.
Using newly uncovered diaries and archives, Adam Lebor brilliantly recreates the increasingly desperate efforts of Hungary’s leaders to avoid being drawn into the cataclysm of war, the moral and tactical ambiguity they deployed in the attempt, and the ultimate tragedy that befell Hungary and, in particular, its Jewish population. Told through the lives of a glamorous aristocrats, SS Officers, a rebellious teenage Jewish school student, Hungary’s most popular actress, and a housewife trying desperately to keep her family alive, the story of how Budapest is threatened from all sides as the war tightens its noose is highly dramatic and utterly compelling.
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"The Last Days of Budapest is a masterpiece. Immaculately researched, it is packed with large-than-life characters and revelations about the unknown espionage history of the Second World War. Adam LeBor’s vivid, taut prose brings the story of the ‘Casablanca of central Europe’ alive in glorious technicolour. From the naïve optimism of the late 1930s to the depths of depravity and bloodshed during the siege in winter 1944, LeBor takes the reader on an emotional rollercoaster. This is history as it should be written: utterly engrossing."Malcolm Brabant, author of the New York Times bestseller The Daughter of Auschwitz
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