Maria Madi is unique in a number of ways in our collection. She's not Jewish,
she's a woman, and she's highly educated. She was living in Budapest
throughout the war. From 1941 to 1945, she kept a diary,
actually a series of diaries. There's 16 volumes altogether.
She wrote about everything that she was seeing,
everything she was hearing on the street. She wrote about
what her friends were going through, many of whom were Jewish,
and in 1944, she wrote about the invasion of Hungary.
The thing that makes this diary the most unique, however, is that she was writing
this all in completely clear,
fluent English. Maria had a daughter,
Hilda, who got married to an American in the late 1930s.
Hilda was able to immigrate to the United States out of Lisbon.
Maria became increasingly convinced that she did not want her grandchildren to
learn Hungarian,
but she still wanted to share what her experiences had been during the war,
so the easiest way to do that was to write in English. She starts her diary at
first as a way to pretend in her head that she has this conversation with her daughter.
She starts the diary with,
"As we are now in the war, there's no more attemptto join, you my only ones,"
so she's desperate to maintain this relationship with her daughter even
though they can't actually
communicate. Later in the diary, as the war comes to Hungary in a more
visceral way, it becomes more a testimony of what she's witnessing and what she's
going through.
"March 30, 1944: The German propaganda
in the Hungarian radio told us that Hungary has decided its fate,
to hold by the side of Germany against Bolshevism.
They did not ask me, neither any of my friends
or acquaintances. Pray, who was it
who made the decision?" Maria had
somewhat of a cultural antisemitism that was
likely common at the time, but she very much likes individual Jews.
She trusts them in a way that she doesn't trust anybody else,
and she's very sympathetic towards the plight of
the Jewish people, towards what she's hearing.
She's certainly sympathetic as to what she seeing on the street. "April 20, 1944: Every day,
some new cruelties. Last night
250 well-to-do Jews and Jewesses were called to work
with a rug and a pail, and it is believed
they will have to work and to live close to the target areas."
In the fall of 1944, Maria hides
two of her friends, women who were around her age,
and one of the women's nephews, a boy called
Alfred. Alfred is still alive. He lives in Atlanta.
After Maria's family donated the diaries to us, they really wanted to make sure
that Alfred knew that the diaries were here and that
she wrote about him. She clearly demonstrates
her desire to help people and
her decision, you know, not to turn against them even
at the peril of her own safety. Maria thought
that the Hungarian government was stupid. She thought that Hungarian people were
too susceptible to
propaganda. She was going to leave as soon as the war was over, as soon as she could
get to the United States,
and she did not want to be associated with Hungary anymore.
"September 18, 1944:
We had a constitution we had been very proud of
and used to accentuate the likeness with the British constitution.
You could say your opinion in public without any danger.
After all these preliminaries comes a few months
of Nazi propaganda, and all our constitutional rights were swept away
like the building on the sand, without the least resistance
or even resentment by the great majority of the population."
It's really an astounding diary, how observant she is,
and her involvement and awareness of
the persecution of the Jews in particular is really something
amazing. "March 26, 1944:
There are people who are so much afraid of house searching
that they burn every English print, even books.
I could not do this. As I told you at the beginning,
I am going to be a witness."