The Survivor's Song: Under the hammer and sickle - Budapest to Montreal

The first part of this two-volume book (Unarmed Soldiers: Budapest to Stalingrad and back) follows the author's three-years on the road with the Hungarian forced labor battalions during WWII, taking him from Budapest to the area of Stalingrad. Armed with only his wits, a smattering of courage, some unexpected help and lots of luck, he survived the brutal conditions with his joie de vivre and sense of humor intact. He had simply not allowed the fascists to break his spirit in the time of war, and, as he demonstrates in this volume, he certainly wasn't going to let the incompetent post-war communists do so either.

Continuing to use the skill and inventiveness that helped him survive the war, he dabbles in forgery, distilling illegal liquor, commercial art, music, journalism, accountancy and much literary ado before finally realizing that the Great People's Republic didn't really need his expertise in order to make stupid decisions about the freshly-minted communist economy.

These two volumes form a continuous stream but divide quite naturally into two sections, just as the history of Hungary did during and after the war. The reader should be aware that the events described at the beginning of this volume occur on the very next day after the previous book ends. Nevertheless, the two books can be read independently.