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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus |
| Original language | |
| English | |
THE MAY BEETLES
My First Twenty Years
Baba Schwartz (*1927) grew up in a warm and loving Jewish family, living a normal life in a small town in eastern Hungary. In THE MAY BEETLES Baba describes the innocence and excitement of her childhood, remembering herearly years with verve and emotion, remarkably unaffected by what took place after the Nazis arrived.
What did happen was unspeakable horror. Baba describes the shattering of her family and their community from 1944, when the Germans transported the 3000 Jews of her town to Auschwitz. She lost her father to the gas chambers, yet she, her two sisters and her mother survived this concentration camp and several others to which they were transported as slave labour. They eventually escaped from the final death march and were liberated by the advancing Russian army. Baba writes about this period of horror with the same directness, freshness and honesty as she writes about her childhood.
Baba wrote this book in 1991 but only revealed the manuscript in 2015, when she was eighty-eight. THE MAY BEETLES, prepared with the assistance of Robert Hillman, has a story to tell that will affect all readers deeply.
From the book:
"The larvae of the May beetle live on the roots of plants and emerge only once every four years. They gather in great numbers on the acacia trees, emitting a strident sound. For some reason, Nyi´rba´tor's schools paid the children of the town to shake the trees, dislodge the May beetles in their thousands, gather them up in cardboard boxes and turn them over to the beetle authority. Inside the boxes some small, some large the beetles would crawl over each other in their panic, a seething mass of them, deeply fascinating to watch. The beetles could open their wings and fly away, but they never did. It was as if they accepted their captive status: that they would likely never know the freedom of their acacia trees again."
What did happen was unspeakable horror. Baba describes the shattering of her family and their community from 1944, when the Germans transported the 3000 Jews of her town to Auschwitz. She lost her father to the gas chambers, yet she, her two sisters and her mother survived this concentration camp and several others to which they were transported as slave labour. They eventually escaped from the final death march and were liberated by the advancing Russian army. Baba writes about this period of horror with the same directness, freshness and honesty as she writes about her childhood.
Baba wrote this book in 1991 but only revealed the manuscript in 2015, when she was eighty-eight. THE MAY BEETLES, prepared with the assistance of Robert Hillman, has a story to tell that will affect all readers deeply.
From the book:
"The larvae of the May beetle live on the roots of plants and emerge only once every four years. They gather in great numbers on the acacia trees, emitting a strident sound. For some reason, Nyi´rba´tor's schools paid the children of the town to shake the trees, dislodge the May beetles in their thousands, gather them up in cardboard boxes and turn them over to the beetle authority. Inside the boxes some small, some large the beetles would crawl over each other in their panic, a seething mass of them, deeply fascinating to watch. The beetles could open their wings and fly away, but they never did. It was as if they accepted their captive status: that they would likely never know the freedom of their acacia trees again."
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Book
Published 2016-07-01 by Black Inc. |