Jewish fate in Hungary

Jenő Lévai (1892-1983) was born in Budapest in a Jewish family. Between the two world wars, he was one of the best-known star journalists. At important newspapers (Újság, Est-lapok, Kis Ujság, etc.) he was a colleague, editor-in-chief, owner. His books about the First World War were a great success. As a fact-finding journalist, he uncovered a series of embarrassing cases for the authorities, including the dealings of the Jew-loving Gödöllő Chief Servant Endre László, who later played a major role in the deportation of Jews, and who tried to hand him over to the Arrows in 1944. Lévai survived the crisis in the international ghetto. In the three years after the Second World War, he was involved in describing and documenting the tragedy of Hungarian Jewry and the road leading up to it, and accomplished a huge amount of work in an incredibly short time. He collected and processed a huge amount of documents. He traveled to several countries in search of documents and witnesses. He wrote the biography of Raoul Wallenberg for the first time. The last of his successively published books is the large, summary work, Jewish Fate in Hungary. A summary work of this kind was scarcely available in the world three years after the emergency period. From Lévai, they could learn about the fate of Hungarian Jewry in the wider world in English, German, and French. The Fate of the Jews was published in Hungary at the last moment, before the author and his subject were excluded from the public. Lévai was able to return to the public at the end of the fifties. To this day, Holocaust researchers rely on his works as a basic work, which of course also contains data and statements that have since been clarified or refuted by historiography. The historically important basic work, published three quarters of a century ago, is being published with significantly expanded explanatory notes and János Dési's study of Lévai's life.