Holocaust Museum To Publish Hidden Diary Entries Online

A diary kept by a non-Jewish Hungarian doctor, who was hiding two Jews in her home during the Second World War, is set to be published online over the coming months. Maria Madi, a doctor in Budapest, started keeping the diary in December 1941 after her daughter emigrated, documenting life in the country. The diary features life in Budapest during the remaining years of war, the suffering of Jews, and details about the two people she hid in her apartment behind a large mirror when visitors came to call. Madi, who was not Jewish herself, wrote 16 notebooks in handwritten English in an effort to inform her daughter of the terrible incidents happening in their country: “I am going to see, to hear, to witness everything. It may happen of course that neither myself nor my diary will ever reach you.” Washington’s US Holocaust Memorial Museum has now started preparing the notebooks to be published online, after being donated the collection by Madi’s grandson last year. According to The Washington Post, the diaries lead to a new account of life during the war, of a British-educated, divorced Hungarian doctor who held some negative views about Jews but risked her life to hide a Jewish friend, Irene Lakos, and her friend’s 7-year-old nephew Alfred. Alfred, (centre) pictured with his parents before they were arrested and sent to concentration camps. His mother died in Auschwitz, while his father survived the labour camps. The diaries also hold snapshots of Madi’s dog, Joe, newspaper clippings from local events, and commentary on the food rations, weather and politics throughout the time of war. Madi even commented that the material she wrote in her diaries was “enough to hang her five times a week”, and that she was shocked she was never reported for her “sympathies with allies”. After the war, Madi travelled to the US, bringing her diaries with her. They remained in the family’s care and were “hardly looked at” before being donated to the museum. She died in Houston in 1970, at age 72. Speaking at the announcement, Rebecca L. Erbelding, a museum archivist who has transcribed the handwritten journals, said: “Hungary is such a specific story in . . . the Holocaust. It happens completely differently in Hungary than it happens anywhere else. “It’s so late in the war . . . 1944. For the Jews of Germany it’s been coming since 1933. For the Jews of Hungary, they had been safe.” It is believed more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews had been murdered in Nazi concentration camps by the end of World War II. Story via The Washington Post