The Last Days of Budapest

LeBor works from first-hand accounts to reconstruct Budapest's collapse from a relatively free, cosmopolitan capital into a city of roundups and street executions in the space of about a year, once Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944. The book's method is character-driven rather than thematic: figures like the smuggler Andor Grosz, the Swiss consul Carl Lutz who used diplomatic cover to save thousands of Jews, and aristocratic resistance figures like Princess Odescalchi each get enough space to function as a small history in themselves. That density is also the book's demand on the reader, since the cast of spies, smugglers, and Mitteleuropa nobility multiplies fast enough that readers unfamiliar with the period's who's-who may need to backtrack. LeBor's reporting instincts, evident in the granular detail, keep the book from ever feeling like a dutiful survey.