Los últimos días de Budapest: Espías, nazis, rescatadores y resistencia, 1940 1945

One of the best books of the year according to The Economist Budapest, fall 1943. While Europe bleeds, the Hungarian capital seems to live in a bubble as seductive as it is dangerous. An ally of Nazi Germany, the city is the great crossroads of Central Europe: a stage where diplomats, spies, traffickers, and agents from all the major powers intermingle. In the cafés along the Danube, conversation and music still fill the air; the theaters remain open, and cultural life clings to normality. For Allied prisoners of war and for Polish and Jewish refugees, Budapest remains an unlikely refuge, an island of calm amid the disaster. But everything collapses in March 1944, when the Nazis occupy the city. From that moment on, violence and fear spread unchecked: bombings that reduce its avenues to rubble, deportations, houses marked with the Yellow Star, ghettos, and death squads that turn the streets into a trap. When the Red Army surrounds the city, one of the war's most brutal sieges begins. Drawing on unpublished diaries and documents, archival material, and the voices of the last remaining witnesses, Adam LeBor reconstructs the fall of Budapest with narrative flair and historical precision. Through unforgettable characters--a famous actress, a rebellious Jewish teenager, a doctor who risks everything, aristocrats, smugglers, and SS officers--this book tells how a vibrant city slowly fades until it disappears. "The greatest strength of The Last Days of Budapest is its wealth of nuanced human detail. With this complex portrait of an often-overlooked chapter of the Holocaust, Mr. LeBor (...) offers us an opportunity for reflection," Wall Street Journal