Hungarian Holocaust forced-labor diary published in English

American Jewish memory of the Hungarian Holocaust begins in May 1944, at the trains to Auschwitz. But the catastrophe began earlier—in the munkaszolgálat, Hungary’s forced-labor service, into which the Hungarian army conscripted its own Jewish men. Unarmed, marked with armbands, they dug fortifications, cleared minefields and hauled supplies on the Eastern Front under overseers with absolute power over life and death. Of the roughly 45,000 sent east, most never came home. Some companies lost more than 90% of their men.

Those for Whom No Accounting Was Required: The Forced Labor Service Diary of Dr. József Bihari (Salisbury & York Academic Press) is the account of one man who survived it. Bihari—a Hungarian Jewish linguist and Hebrew teacher, later a professor—was conscripted into labor company 106/8 in October 1942 and marched into Ukraine. 213 men set out with his company—roughly 50 returned.

In 1951, six years after coming home, with a scholar’s precision and a refusal to let a single name fade, Bihari wrote down everything he had witnessed—by hand, in Hungarian. The manuscript was never published, in any language. Translated now for the first time, it gives readers a complete, day-by-day view of the labor service from inside: the conscription, the march east, the starvation winter on the Don, the typhus epidemic, the retreat and the return of the few.

“The ones we had most to fear were our own”

The diary documents who the perpetrators were. The Germans cursed these men and moved on; the men who starved, robbed and killed them were Hungarian—often officers of their own country’s army. “The ones we had most to fear,” Bihari writes, “were our own.” That is a hard conversation about neighbors—and not only a historical one. It bears directly on today’s contests over Holocaust memory in Hungary and on what a country owes the victims of its own uniform.

It also speaks to this moment. With antisemitic violence at record levels in the United States, Europe and Australia, Bihari’s diary reads as a warning about how that ends when it goes unanswered: these men were not attacked by invaders, but degraded step by step—by law, by neighbors, by their own army—while a nation looked away. He wrote it down so no one could claim it hadn’t happened. Eighty years on, that is the record this moment requires.

Among the atrocities Bihari documents is the Dorosics field-hospital fire of April 29-30, 1943—a barn packed with typhus patients that burned with the doors locked from the outside, killing more than 500 men in a single night. An official commission ruled it an accident the next morning. Bihari’s detailed eyewitness account—from the start of the fire through the forced participation in the cleanup—corrects the official record.

The accounting no one required

No accounting was ever demanded of anyone—so Bihari made one himself. Page by page, the diary names the conscripted men, records the deaths he witnessed and identifies the guards by name and rank—and its epilogue lists the sentences they received after the war: one chief tormentor executed in 1945, others imprisoned. For families still searching for men who vanished into the labor service, it is a finding aid as much as a memoir.

A family accounting

The diary was translated and edited by Ivan Gulas, Ph.D.—retired board-certified clinical psychologist (ABPP) and former Harvard Medical School faculty member—who is Bihari’s nephew. His father and two uncles walk through its pages; one of them never came home.

“For eighty years, this entire chapter has been missing from what English-language readers know of the Holocaust,” Gulas said. “My uncle understood that no court, no commission, no government was ever going to demand an account of what happened to these men. So he built the account himself—every name, every date, every rank. Translating it was finishing what he started.”

For editorial calendars

The anniversary of the Dorosics fire (April 29-30) falls each year in the season of Yom Hashoah.

The diary also holds a Chanukah sung in the house of a murdered rabbi and a Yom Kippur echo—“my fate was sealed”—written by a Hebrew teacher marked for persecution because he translated a single Hebrew sentence.

Those for Whom No Accounting Was Required is available now at biharidiary.com, Barnes & Noble, Amazon and by order from major book retailers.

Publication date: July 17

Hardcover (library/institutional): $42.95; ISBN 979-8-9967663-0-7; 6 inches × 9 inches; 316 pages

Paperback: $27.95; ISBN 979-8-9967663-1-4; 6 inches × 9 inches; 316 pages

eBook (EPUB): $12.99; ISBN 979-8-9967663-2-1; available at Barnes & Noble

BISAC: HIS022000 History / Jewish; HIS043000 History / Holocaust; BIO006000 Biography & Autobiography / Historical

Rights: World, all languages

Media contact and review copies

Review copies and galleys: biharidiary.com/reviewcopies

Press and interviews: contact@sayimprint.com