Budapest Diary: The Diarist as Witness to the Holocaust, with James Oberly

Budapest Diary: The Diarist as Witness to the Holocaust, with James Oberly  
January 16, 2024 @ 10:30-11:45am

Mária Mádi (1898–1970) was a Roman Catholic Hungarian physician practicing medicine in Budapest in the 1920s and 1930s, and a single mother. Her daughter, petroleum geologist son-in-law, and newborn granddaughter relocated to the US summer 1941. After Pearl Harbor, she lost all communication connections to her family there. Stuck in Budapest and motivated to create a historical record for her family, she kept a diary chronicling her everyday life and the lives of her Jewish neighbors during a violent period of war, genocide and foreign occupation. Her diary from Dec 1941 to Dec 1945 offers one of the most complete pictures of ordinary life during the Holocaust in Hungary. She also hid a Jewish family in her small flat Oct 1944 to Feb 1945. Mádi received a posthumous Righteous among Nations Medal from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. Her family donated all her diaries to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. James led a joint US-Hungarian research team based at the Univ of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and at Károli Gáspár Református Egyetem (The Reform Univ of Hungary) in Budapest in transcribing, editing, and annotating a selection of Mádi’s writings focusing on the end of the war, from the Nazi invasion and occupation of Hungary, through the Battle of Budapest, to the ensuing Soviet occupation. Budapest Blackout: A Holocaust Diary was newly published Aug 2023 by the Univ of Wisconsin Press. James is Emeritus Prof. of History at the Univ of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.