We hear little about the Holocaust in Hungary. In a murderous 56-day period in Hungary during 1944, some 430,000 Hungarian Jews were transported on 147 cattle trains to the death camps in an act of brutal efficiency. Few survived. Proportionally, it was the Hungarian Jews who suffered more than other nationality. One of the survivors was Zsuzsanna Kalmar, then a 2-year-old child in Budapest.

This book, The Courage to Care, is a warning about the increased antisemitism that seems to be more and more prevalent in many parts of the world, including Australia, because the links with the past are being lost or tarnished by revisionism. Zsuzsanna Kalmar, now Suzi Smead, is one of those last surviving links with the past and writes of courage, heartbreak, brutality, and indifference to ‘the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the history of the world’.

As a child, she lived by day with her parents in the ceiling of a protector’s house while the Nazis and their supporters rounded up neighbourhood Jews. Her family knew what was in store if they had been caught and her protectors knew that they would be shot if caught. Later she was rescued from a camp where inmates were yarded awaiting travel to Auschwitz. Many were family friends. Her grandparents were not rescued and essentially sacrificed themselves for Suzi and her parents as escapee numbers were limited. During research for this book, she found lists of Jews to be murdered. Her name was on the list. Spine-chilling.

She was later shipped as a child to the countryside and, in a remarkable series of coincidental events, was eventually found by her parents after Nazi brutality was replaced by communist thuggery. Her escape from Soviet-occupied Hungary to Austria was under a pile of mailbags in a truck. If discovered, the Russian driver would have been shot as well as Suzi and her parents. Suzi writes of the generous, brave, honourable, people, many of whom were not Jews, who risked their lives to save as many as possible from slaughter. She writes kindly of these folk who were faced with impossible moral dilemmas and danger at every turn. One wonders whether such courageous people exist today in our sheltered Woke world of creeping authoritarianism.

After years as a refugee, she ended up in Australia. A new life, language, and culture awaited. Her parents had to start again, assisted by a win in the Sydney Opera House lottery which allowed a house to be purchased, and Suzi writes of her painful personal life in Australia and how she has found comfort and relative peace through her husband John. She now spends her time teaching future generations about the Holocaust on a mission to try to stop such brutality and crimes from occurring again.

In 1977, I was a visitor to Auschwitz. It had a lasting impression on me, as did Suzi Smead’s book which was difficult to put down.