Adam LeBor is the author of The Last Days of Budapest, an account of the Hungarian capital in world war two, to be published by Head of Zeus in early 2025.
Artillery boomed over the Buda hills, the flashes of explosions slicing through the freezing winter dusk. The crack of rifle fire sounded nearby and the air was thick with the acrid stink of cordite. It was 24 December 1944 and Giorgio Perlasca was trying to get to the Spanish Legation villa to celebrate Christmas. The
On 16 May, 1944, as the first full trainloads of Hungarian Jews trundled towards Auschwitz, the SS decided to clear out the area known as the ‘Gypsy family camp’ to make room for the new arrivals. The family camp housed several thousand Roma and Sinti (Roma with German roots) people. Like the Jews, they were
One day in May 1944, in the Nagyvárad ghetto, Sándor Leitner saw an elderly man struggling to walk towards him. His face was swollen from beatings and he was barely able to stand. It was his father, returning from his interrogation by the Gendarmes. The Nagyvárad ghetto (now Oradea in Romania) was the largest in
Few organisations reward incompetence as richly as the United Nations. Consider Kofi Annan, head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) during the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica. In January 1994 he twice refused General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda, permission to raid the Hutu arms caches, despite Dallaire’s warnings of