Dr. József Bihari
Dr. József Bihari (1908–1997) was a Hungarian Jewish linguist and professor, a native Yiddish speaker fluent in Hungarian, French, German, Russian, Romanian, and the Slavic languages. He earned his doctorate in the humanities at Debrecen in 1934 and became a founding member and professor of the Teachers' Training College in Eger, later named a Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Conscripted into the forced-labor service and sent to the Eastern Front, he survived what tens of thousands did not. Five years later he set down the full account in his own hand — a diary that, translated here for the first time, is to our knowledge the first full-length first-person account of the munkaszolgálat to reach English-language readers.
Dr. Ivan Gulas
Translator, Editor & Contributor
Dr. Ivan Gulas is a Board-Certified Clinical Psychologist (ABPP) and former Harvard Medical School faculty member who has devoted his retirement to authorship, translation, and publishing under the Salisbury & York Academic Press imprint. He is the author of Changing the Odds: A New Understanding of PTSD and a Path to Recovery, Asylum Without Walls, and Senior Sex: Intimacy and Aging in Silence. He has written for Newsweek and is a regular contributor to the Times of Israel.
Dr. József Bihari was his uncle. Born in Hungary, Gulas escaped during the 1956 Revolution as a child — a crossing on foot through the snow into Austria and the refugee camps beyond. His own father appears three times in these pages by name, attached to another labor unit on the same front.
Beyond translating and editing the diary, he supplied a historical introduction on the munkaszolgálat, the footnotes and annotations throughout, and the closing chapter, "Afterwords." The work was, for him, also the work of recovery: rendering a family voice, and a vanished world, into English for the first time.