Lost Diary Offers Glimpse Into Anti-Semitic Mind
Image by Yaron Kaminsky
Crossposted from Haaretz
Image by Yaron Kaminsky
Tova Meir, a Hungarian-born woman and a member of Kibbutz Ayelet Hashahar, sat last Monday in one of the rooms of The Memorial Museum Of Hungarian Speaking Jewry in Safed, and browsed through a Budapest phonebook from 1944. Meir was looking for the carpentry shop where she used to work.
Yet before she found what she was looking for, she froze. A random conversation next to her about a rare artifact that had arrived at the museum caught her attention: segments of the lost diary belonging to Ferenc Szálasi, the Hungarian prime minister during the end of the Second World War.
“The name Szálasi for me is like Hitler and all of the horrors of war,” she said. The diary, or more precisely the copy of the original one that has yet to be found, has still not been translated into Hebrew. These days, Hungarian researcher Dr. Laszlo Karshai, who according to Roni Lustig, the head of the Zafed museum, is considered the top expert on Szálasi, is examining the diary.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
