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In 1944, Anna Ornstein was a healthy, happy 17-year-old girl who was eagerly looking forward to the future. As a Jew, she was painfully aware
that she and her family were enveloped in anti-Semitism and were being subjected to increasingly virulent political oppression and suppression of their rights as Hungarian citizens. The Jewish community in the little village of Szendro lived in relative isolation, but nevertheless peacefully within the restrictions that were increasingly placed upon them by Admiral Horthy's regime. Their peace was shattered in the spring of 1944, however, by the arrival of German soldiers, some of whom were SS troops. The increasing terror Anna and her community had been feeling as the Germans drew near quickly mushroomed into panic when the Jews in the area were rapidly identified, were forced to sew six-pointed yellow stars onto their sleeves, and were targeted for extermination.
Anna's two older brothers were sent to forced labor camps, along with other able-bodied Jewish men. (One brother died of typhoid fever in Mauthausen concentration camp shortly before it was liberated, while her other brother disappeared without a trace; her father also perished.) Six weeks after the arrival of the Germans, the remaining Jews were herded together for shipment to extermination camps. It is significant that in the little reminiscences Anna composed to read to her children—one by one, over two and a half decades—she brought back to life the lost members of her immediate and extended family. Not only that: she also revivified them as warmly interactive and strikingly human. (“Writing,” as Sylvia Plath put it, is “a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.”1) Anna's descriptions of her family members contrast noticeably with the much more measured and dryly factual account of what she and those around her experienced at the hands of their Nazi captors, who set out to systematically humiliate, dehumanize, and torture their victims before di