CONSCRIPTED SLAVES: Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers On The Eastern Front During The Second World War.

black, white & red photo illustrated (cover of book and cover of dustwrapper are identical in appearance) hardcover 8vo. (octavo). dustwrapper in protective brodart book jacket cover. fine cond. binding square & tight. covers clean. edges clean. pages 157 159 are wrinkled at the bottom corner (looks like a bindery error, does not obscure text), otherwise contents free of markings. dustwrapper in fine cond. minor wrinkle bottom of rear panel, not torn or price clipped (no price listed). nice clean copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking, underlining, remainder markings etc~. first edition. first printing (nap). 288p. 3 b&w maps. bibliographic footnotes throughout. index. world war ii. nazi germany. jewish history. history of hungary. third reich. soviet union. military history. ~ From the spring of 1942 until the summer of 1944, some 45,000 Jewish men were forced to accompany Hungarian troops to the battle zone of the Former Soviet Union. The Hungarian authorities considered these men unworthy of bearing weapons, yet they demanded they take part fully in the "blood sacrifice" that was the war against Stalin and his forces. Some 80% of the Jewish forced laborers never returned home. They fell prey to battle, starvation, disease, and grinding labor, aggravated immensely by brutality and even outright murder at the hands of the Hungarian soldiers responsible for them; and with supreme irony, not a few who thought they had escaped this hell by surrendering to the Soviets succumbed to the wretched conditions of captivity. This study of the Hungarian Jewish Labor Service men on the Eastern Front constitutes a unique and invaluable chapter in the mosaic of Holocaust history. It builds on the earlier and seminal publications by the dean of Hungarian Holocaust research Professor Randolph Braham and the groundbreaking Hungarian scholar, the late Elek Karsai. In this unique monograph, Dr. Robert Rozett focuses on the laborers themselves, presenting the panoply of their experiences at eye~level. The laborers' personal accounts speak powerfully to every Jewish family that lived under Hungarian rule during the Holocaust years, because it is their own personal story. But it is not one to be kept in the family alone, since it is profoundly relevant to all people. It epitomizes gratuitous cruelty punctuated by rare flickers of kindness; it evokes scenes of men closely guarding embers of human dignity amidst a raging sea of humiliation, pain, and death; and it highlights the unrestrained cruelty of one group of human beings toward another that shared their language and culture, but were scions of a different religious group and thus, ultimately, shared a very different fate.…