Christmas in Auschwitz

The Jewish-Hungarian poet András Mezei (1930-2008) survived the Holocaust as well as the three-month siege of Budapest. His life was inevitably shaped by these events.

Throughout his long writing career, he returned repeatedly to the terrible experiences of his childhood, assembling a poetic collage of eye-witness accounts of racist mass murder. Christmas in Auschwitz brings together, for the first time in English, all of Mezei's most important poems about the Hungarian Holocaust.

"A many-sided and accomplished Hungarian writer and poet."
The Independent

András Mezei, a locksmith by trade, was one of the most prominent writers in Communist Hungary. A poet, novelist and essayist, he wrote the script of Lucky Daniel, one of the first Hungarian films to critically examine the events of 1956. In the 1990s he launched the Belvárosi Könyvkiadó publishing house and the cultural journal Central European Times. He was a recipient of the Hungarian János Arany Prize and the Israeli Kotzetnik Prize. He died in his native Budapest in 2008.

Thomas Ország-Land is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent based in Eastern Europe. He is also a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and the 1944-45 siege of Budapest.