budapest (hungary)

A novel about a young Jewish girl in Budapest who suffers worse and worse conditions under Nazi rule until hope arrives in the form of a foreign man who risks his own life to save others. Based on the real-life efforts of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved up to 100,000 lives during the Second World War.

In July, 1944, thirty-two-year-old Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest on a mission to rescue the last Jews of Europe. Over the next six months he rescued thousands of Jews by issuing diplomatic safe passage passes and establishing numerous safe houses. When Budapest was finally liberated by the Soviet army, Wallenberg disappeared into the Soviet gulag and to this day his exact fate is unknown.

Gy?rgy K?ves, a fourteen-year-old Hungarian Jew who knows neither Yiddish nor Hebrew, attempts to make sense of his experiences in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps while ostracized by the other prisoners.

A child tells how her family and other people in Budapest help save the famous hippopotamuses in their city's zoo from starving one difficult winter during World War II. Based on a true story.