How it happened : documenting the tragedy of Hungarian Jewry

This book is written by a privileged eyewitness, the secretary of the Hungarian Judenrat, and a member of Budapest's Jewish elite. Writing immediately after the war and examining only those critical months of 1944 of Nazi occupation, Erno Munkacsi describes the Judenrat's desperation and fear as it attempted to prevent the looming catastrophe, agonized over decisions not made, and struggled to grasp the immensity of a tragedy that would take the lives of 427,000 Hungarian Jews in the very last year of World War II.