Over 100,000 Hungarian Jewish men were conscripted into the munkaszolgálat — the forced-labor service — and sent to the Eastern Front. Not as soldiers. As expendables. Unarmed, marked with armbands, they dug fortifications, cleared mines, built bridges, and hauled supplies behind the front lines at the mercy of overseers with absolute power over life and death. Approximately 40,000 died before Germany even occupied Hungary. Some units lost 95 percent of their men.
Dr. József Bihari, a Hungarian Jewish linguist and professor, was one of them. He survived. Five years later, with a scholar's precision and a refusal to let a single detail fade, he wrote it all down — in Hungarian, by hand. His diary is, to our knowledge, the first full-length first-person account of the munkaszolgálat to reach English-language readers.
Roughly 100,000 Hungarian Jewish men served in the labor battalions during the war, but those sent to the Don Front in the winter of 1942–43 suffered by far the highest mortality. Some companies lost more than ninety percent of their men — giving rise to the survivor refrain that only one in ten came home.
The Witness
He was there. He wrote it down in detail. Never published, in any language — until now.
Tens of thousands endured the munkaszolgálat. Almost none left a detailed written record. Bihari did — a trained scholar who set down what he saw, in his own hand, five years after he came home. His diary remained unpublished for decades. This is its first appearance in print.
On the night of 29–30 April 1943, a field hospital at Dorosic burned. The official record called it an accident. Bihari was there, and what he set down does not match the official record. It is among the most harrowing passages in the book — and we will not summarize it here.