Steeped in the horrors of post-war Hungary, these are not ordinary Holocaust stories
The characters in Gábor Szántó’s work strive to be understood even when understanding seems impossible and dangerous
Screenshot Courtesy of Restless Books
By Aviya Kushner August 15, 2025
1945 and Other Stories
By Gábor T. Szántó
Translated by Walter Burgess. Marietta Morry, TLR Bass and Ivan Sanders
Ceeol Press, 272 pages, $19
Gábor T. Szántó’s stories examine the lives of people dealing with extreme cruelty and extreme loneliness. Some of these stories, written in Hungarian and translated into English, take place in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, in 1945 and 1947, detailing the reactions of individual survivors to their own near-extermination and to the annihilation of their families.
But these are not ordinary Holocaust stories.
The “loneliness” stories include one about a 16-year-old girl who becomes pregnant from a one-night stand with a traveling salesman. Her son never learns to talk, her mother dies of stress, and the story ends shockingly, with a moment of incest which leads to murder, then suicide. That kind of five-alarm ending is Szántó’s trademark, but so is something more difficult to describe — revelations of unexpected kindness, what Jewish tradition calls chesed emet, or a favor that cannot be returned.
That concept came to my mind as I read “Trans,” a story in which Meyer, an old scholar from The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York on sabbatical in Hungary, reaches out to a seminary in San Francisco to find a more accepting home for a young rabbinical student who had bravely come out as trans, and was expelled. The non-Jewish psychologist who encourages the student to discover who he is — and then live as himself — is also a portrait in kindness, as is the student’s mother, who “knew about his attraction to clothes.”
This is not a book of easy, or unemotional, reads. The stories can take a long time to get going, with extended observations in one, and multiple meetings in another. They take their time showing what people living in pain and loneliness will do — detailing their notions of justice, which have, of course, been shaped by their often-harrowing experiences. Incest is one reaction; so is blackmail.
But, in one story in which two penniless Holocaust survivors anticipate the concept of reparations when they demand payments from a German industrialist with a Nazi past, Szántó forces the reader to ask — is it really blackmail?
Born in 1966 in Budapest, Szántó, editor-in-chief of the Hungarian Jewish magazine Szombat, is steeped in the post-war, post-Holocaust environment. The opening story, like many in the collection, begins slowly. Some cargo is transported by train, and then by cart. We learn the conductor’s thoughts about the cargo, and those who packed it and paid for its transport — clearly, Jews who had survived the war, though that is not said explicitly. “Jews” are not named — they are referred to as “them” or as “original owners.”
We also see the attitude of locals toward Jewish property and Jewish lives: “They must still have a lot of power if they dare to return on their own just like that, back to the places they were forced to leave in such disgrace, and they will seize in no time what was once theirs,” says a man who has been hired to help move the crates along
“The farmer pays wordlessly, his face tense, and departs for home. There’s no justice on earth, he thinks, ashamed that he’ll have to move away if the original owner returns. He has no issue with them, except the envy he always felt for their prosperity, their easy lot, and the future they secured for their children,” Gabor writes. “He never did anything to claim their possessions, but since fate willed that their houses remained empty, he felt little remorse for moving into a house with clean, whitewashed walls.”
In the end, we learn what the cargo contained — more than 1,000 pieces of soap, each of which bear the initials of the Reich Office of Industrial Grease and Detergents, and which say Reines Israelitisches Fett, or Pure Israelite Fat.
The numbers correspond to the numbers of Jews in the surrounding area who were murdered, and we realize that the slow-moving section was about giving these bars of soap a proper burial.
“During the Second World War British propaganda spread the story that the Nazis cooked the remains of people killed in death camps into soap,” Gabor concludes. “Historical research has uncovered no evidence for this, but nevertheless soap was buried to represent human remains in many places after 1945.”
I appreciated this note, especially in this time when facts are endangered, and propaganda spreads like fire. The truth is often awful enough, without the gasoline of lies.
Part of the truth of the present moment is understanding what is happening in the rest of the world; in recent years, Hungary has moved toward fascism, and America’s far-right has invoked it as an example to emulate. Curious to read what a Hungarian-Jewish writer had to say, I waited for this book of stories for weeks; the initial copy sent by courier did not arrive, and finally I received a slim package from UPS with a red paperback of stories that were written in Hungarian, translated into English, and published in Germany. The world travel involved in the publication mirrored what has happened to the stories since they entered the world. So, too, is the time travel; while the first two stories take place in 1945 and 1947, and trace post-war antisemitism, the second-to-last story in the book features an iPhone, ringing.
While the stories can move slowly, they require sustained attention, because, apart from their length and historical detail, they also delve into matters of Jewish law. In “Trans,” for instance, the main character, Ádám, makes his own case to the rabbis on the necessity of gender-affirming care, raising the issue of abortion as he tries to use halacha to make his case to the rabbis in charge of his career. “Saving the mother’s life takes precedence over the life of the embryo when physical or mental pain is so severe that the procedure is necessary for saving a life or the integration of a personality,” he explains. “The life of a living person takes precedence over the life of the unborn.”
Gabor’s stories thank us for our attention. His characters refuse to accept their situations — whether they are pregnant and abandoned women, survivors with exterminated families, or rabbinical students who have been expelled. They push back against those who see their rebellion as a crime. And they seem to relish having an audience for this rebellion.
When the survivor Moritz tries to get money out of former Nazi and wealthy businessman Krummer, in the story ironically titled “Living in Peace,” the businessman says: “I do not like being blackmailed.”
“And we do not like being exterminated.”
“Krummer’s face twitched,” Szanto writes. “He was not accustomed to such a tone and did not know how to react to it. The last time anyone had talked to him in that way was in the summer of ’45, during several interrogations by the Americans, one of whom was a Jewish officer. He took a deep breath.”
“It will never happen again,” Moritz continued, “You can rest assured, Krummer, neither you nor anyone else will be able to do it. We will not let it happen. Do you understand me?”
That final question sums up this memorable collection. At their core, these stories are about human beings trying to get other human beings to understand them, even when true understanding seems both impossible and dangerous.
