Béla Zsolt

In the tumultuous years of revolution, 1918 and 1919, he was a vehement advocate for a bourgeois-liberal regime and opponent of the soviet republics and Horthy's emerging Christian-nationalist corporate state.

[3] Like thousands of other Hungarian Jews in World War II Béla Zsolt served in a forced labor battalion on the Ukrainian eastern front.

[3] By spring 1944, after the Nazis invaded Hungary during Operation Margarethe, Szolt was arrested by Hungarian fascists and held at the Nagyvárad ghetto.

[citation needed] Following his return to Hungary in 1945 Zsolt founded the Hungarian Radical Party, whose newspaper Haladás ("Progress") he edited.

Though Nine Suitcases, considered one of the best, was one of the first memoirs to be serialized in 1946–1947, Zsolt died before he finished editing the text,[1] and it wasn't available in English until Löb's translation was published 60 years later.

[4] English writer Ian Thomson has written:[4] In unsparing detail, Zsolt describes the bestial insouciance of the ghetto's Hungarian guards who beat and tormented old women and children.

Nazi stooges, these men stopped at nothing in their pursuit of money and jewellery.Zsolt has been described as apathetic and cunning, traits that have been credited with helping to keep him alive: "At times his stoicism verges on the distasteful, and there is a complete absence of special pleading.