The Forger of Budapest

Summary

From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy comes a deeply researched account of two unheralded heroes of the Holocaust—one a Jewish forger whose documents rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Final Solution’s terrifying peak, the other a movement of Jews across Europe who resisted Nazi rule to save themselves and countless others.

In the spring of 1944, it took just fifty-six days for the Nazis and their local henchmen to murder 437,402 Jews across the Hungarian countryside—the most ferocious engine of annihilation during World War II. By then, the Nazis were chillingly efficient at killing Jews. But a band of youthful Zionists learned in real time how to resist, racing a clock measured in lives. One of them was David Gur, an eighteen-year-old counterfeiter who–with a few well-practiced flourishes of his pen—became a linchpin of the largest wartime rescue operation of its kind, helping shield 120,000 Budapest Jews from deportation and extermination. Birth certificates and baptismal records. Ration cards. Vatican passes. Nobody could conjure them more quickly or convincingly than the intrepid Forger of Budapest.

Gur’s story was extraordinary, but it was not unique. In The Forger of Budapest, acclaimed author Larry Tye weaves a sweeping yet intimate history of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, a time when survival itself was an act of defiance. David Gur stands as the face of that resistance: of spies and smugglers, gunsmiths and agitators, couriers and seductresses who pushed back against their Nazis tormenters at every turn and with dramatic effect. Braiding these stories into a single, unforgettable narrative, Tye refutes the persistent myth that Hitler’s Jewish victims went passively to their deaths with heretofore hidden stories of:

• Jewish tailors who sabotaged consignments of German uniforms—stitching trouser legs together, buttons on backwards, pockets upside down, and sleeves reversed;
• Jewish merchants who sneaked bread, winter boots, and morphine into the ghettos, offering relief to those living in savage conditions;
• Jewish parents who put their sons and daughters on Kindertransport trains to London, Paris, or Stockholm, knowing they would likely never be reunited. Surely that was no less courageous—and far more effective—than picking up a gun.

The Forger of Budapest makes a compelling case for reimagining how we tell the story of the Holocaust itself. There is one number familiar to anyone with even a passingly knowledge of the Shoah: 6 million—the unfathomable number of Jews murdered. But Tye argues that a second figure is just as essential: 3.5 million—the count of those who survived. This is their story.