Death on the Danube: A New Year's Murder in Budapest


Book Description

Who knew a trip to Budapest could be so deadly? Tour guide Lana Hansen must sleuth out who is killing her clients before she too ends up floating in the Danube! Book 1 in the Travel Can Be Murder Cozy Mystery series - heartwarming stories about friendship, travel, and celebrating new experiences.




Vanished by the Danube


Book Description

Germany's invasion of Hungary in 1944 marked the end of a culture that had dominated Central Europe from the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. In this poignant memoir, Charles Farkas offers a testament to this vanished way of life—its society, morality, personal integrity, wealth, traditions, and chivalry—as well as an eyewitness account of its destruction, begun at the hands of the Nazis and then completed under the heel of Soviet Communism. Farkas's recollections of growing up in Budapest, a city whose grandeur embraced—indeed spanned—the Danube River; his vivid descriptions of everyday life in Hungary before, during, and after World War II; and his ultimate flight to freedom in the United States remind us that behind the larger historical events of the past century are the stories of the individual men and women who endured and, ultimately, survived them.




Rick Steves Budapest


Book Description

You can count on Rick Steves to tell you what you really need to know when traveling in Budapest. Following this book's self-guided walks, you'll explore Europe's most underrated city. Soak with Hungarians in a thermal bath, sample paprika at the Great Market Hall, and take a romantic twilight cruise on the Danube. Wander through the opulence of Budapest's late-19th-century Golden Age. View relics of the bygone communist era at Memento Park. For a break, head into the countryside for Habsburg palaces and Hungarian folk villages. Rick's candid, humorous advice will guide you to good-value hotels and restaurants. He'll help you plan where to go and what to see, depending on the length of your trip. You'll learn which sights are worth your time and money and how to get around like a local. More than just reviews and directions, a Rick Steves guidebook is a tour guide in your pocket.




The Danube


Book Description

A detailed history of the Danube river.




Shoes Along the Danube


Book Description

Shoes Along the Danube refers to the memorial of cast iron shoes that honor Hungarian Holocaust victims. Based on a true story, this amazing book follows the lives of two extended Hungarian families, the R zlers and the F ldes, one gentile and the other Jewish, through three decades.-----The story begins in pre-World War II Budapest, as increasing fascism and anti-Semitism lead Hungary to become an ally of Germany. In 1944, Germany invades Hungary to exterminate Europe's last remaining group of Jews at the infamous Auschwitz death camp. The story builds through the siege of Budapest, the Russian occupation of Hungary, and separation by exile.-----Julius R zler is a rising star among Budapest academics and refuses to compromise his integrity. His American half-brother, Francis, is a diplomat helping democratic Hungarians fight Nazis, and later organizes covert activities against the communists. Agnes F ldes is a Jewish woman who fights to maintain her dignity during the Holocaust.-----"Professor Reeves tells a fascinating story of two of his Hungarian-American friends, Julius and my cousin Agnes, who grew up between world wars in Gentile and Jewish families on Rose Hill, an affluent district of Budapest. Even though Hungary was forced to become Germany's wartime ally, it looked that Hungarian Jews would be spared the genocide occurring throughout Europe. Yet, in 1944 everything changed when the Germans occupy Hungary for the purpose of exterminating its Jews. Reeves recounts the experiences of Holocaust victims and survivors, Righteous Gentiles who save Jews, as well as a dramatic ending in which a husband and wife are forced to choose between their vows and freedom." - S. A. Colman, Sydney, Australia -----"A fascinating, honest look at lives intertwined with the history unfolding around them set against the very real backdrop of that tumultuous history itself. The Shoes Along the Danube is a most fitting allegory for all those that left their lives behind. Highly recommended" - Bryan Dawson, Executive Chairman, American Hungarian Federation




The Danube


Book Description

The magnificent Danube both cuts across and connects central Europe, flowing through and alongside ten countries: Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, and Germany. Travelling its full length from east to west, against the river’s flow, Nick Thorpe embarks on an inspiring year-long journey that leads to a new perspective on Europe today. Thorpe’s account is personal, conversational, funny, immediate, and uniquely observant—everything a reader expects in the best travel writing. Immersing himself in the Danube’s waters during daily morning swims, Thorpe likewise becomes immersed in the histories of the lands linked by the river. He observes the river’s ecological conditions, some discouraging and others hopeful, and encounters archaeological remains that whisper of human communities sustained by the river over eight millennia. Most fascinating of all are the ordinary and extraordinary people along the way—the ferrymen and fishermen, workers in the fields, shopkeepers, beekeepers, waitresses, smugglers and border policemen, legal and illegal immigrants, and many more. For readers who anticipate their own journeys on the Danube, as well as those who only dream of seeing the great river, this book will be a unique and treasured guide.




Budapest on the Danube


Book Description

The Danube is the most adventurous river in Europe, and Budapest is the city where this intrepid body of water is at its most spectacular. The Danube is part of the city, which simultaneously constitutes a part of the river. Their fate and history are welded into one. Together they have experienced misfortune as well as prosperity. The Danube is an eternal muse--inspiring music, poetry, fiction, and images. László Lugosi Lugo discovers its mystery through a selection of stunning photographs. This bilingual edition includes English and Hungarian.




When the Danube Ran Red


Book Description

Opening with the ominous scene of one young school girl whispering an urgent account of Nazi horror to another over birthday cake, Ozsváth’s extraordinary and chilling memoir tells the story of her childhood in Hun­gary, living under the threat of the Holocaust. The setting is the summer of 1944 in Budapest during the time of the German occupation, when the Jews were confined to ghettos but not transported to Auschwitz in boxcars, as were the Hungarian Jewry living in the countryside. Provided with food and support by their former nanny, Erzsi, Ozsváth’s family stays in a ghetto house where a group of children play theater, tell stories to one another, invent games to pass time, and wait for liberation. In the fall of that year, however, things take a turn for the worse. Rounded up under horrific circumstances, and shot on the banks of the Danube by the thousands, the Jews of Budapest are threatened with immediate destruction. Ozsváth and her family survive because of Erzsi’s courage and humanity. Cheating the watching eyes of the munderers, she brings them food and runs with them from house to house under heavy bombardment in the streets. As a scholar, critic, and translator, Ozsváth has written extensively about Holocaust literature and the Holocaust in Hungary. Now, for the first time, she records her own history in this clear-eyed, moving account. When the Danube Ran Red combines an exceptional grounding in Hun­garian history with the pathos of a survivor, and the eloquence of a poet to present a truly singular work.




Border


Book Description

“Remarkable: a book about borders that makes the reader feel sumptuously free.” —Peter Pomerantsev In this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the “Red Riviera” on the Black Sea, she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling electrified fence whose barbs pointed inward toward the enemy: the citizens of the totalitarian regime. Kassabova discovers a place that has been shaped by successive forces of history: the Soviet and Ottoman empires, and, older still, myth and legend. Her exquisite portraits of fire walkers, smugglers, treasure hunters, botanists, and border guards populate the book. There are also the ragged men and women who have walked across Turkey from Syria and Iraq. But there seem to be nonhuman forces at work here too: This densely forested landscape is rich with curative springs and Thracian tombs, and the tug of the ancient world, of circular time and animism, is never far off. Border is a scintillating, immersive travel narrative that is also a shadow history of the Cold War, a sideways look at the migration crisis troubling Europe, and a deep, witchy descent into interior and exterior geographies.




Days of Battle


Book Description

This volume of WWII military studies examines significant yet neglected clashes of German-Hungarian and Soviet armor north of the river Danube. In Days of Battle, Dr. Norbert Számvéber, chief of Hungary's military archives, examines armor combat operations in the southern territory of the historical Upper Hungary (part of Hungary between 1938 and 1945, at the present time now part of Slovakia) in three separate studies. The first is an account of the battle between the Ipoly and Garam rivers during the second half of December 1944, in which the élite Hungarian Division "Szent László" saw action for the first time. The second study examines the fierce tank battle of Komárom, fought between January 6th–22nd of 1945. This was an integral part of the Battle for Budapest, parallel in time with Operation Konrad. The third study describes the combat during the German Operation Südwind in February 1945, as well as the Soviet attack launched in the direction of Bratislava in March 1945. Based on files and documentation from German, Hungarian and Soviet sources, Dr. Számvéber’s authoritative text is supported by photographs and color battle maps.