An early work, a novella set in wartime, in this case in Hungary. This is a fascinating extended portrait of the Wehrmacht (German army) in retreat, told episodically. The main protagonists are Lieutenant Greck with his bad stomach and punishingly narrow-minded upbringing, the young romantic Feinhals who falls in love with Ilona, a Hungarian Jewish teacher and the Nazi fanatic SS Captain Filskeit who runs a minor extermination camp in the woods with exemplary Teutonic precision and nurses a passion for choral music.

The episodes with Greck and Feinhals are, to begin with, relatively lighthearted, which only serves to set off a description of the transportation and murder of a group of Hungarian Jews (the last Jewish population to survive in Nazi Europe). No punches are pulled in this, nor should they be.

This is a salutary brief work because given the (generally healthy) human tendency to forget painful and horrifying things time is covering the traces of all this suffering, and all these prematurely ended lives (the circa 80 million deaths of World War Two). We get left with an enormous casualness about the most screamingly obvious lessons of that conflict; the dangers of nationalism, the need for European political unity and cultural understanding to forestall conflict...

‘She walked slowly up the steps to the hut, pulling Maria along; she glanced up astonished when the guard jabbed the muzzle of his machine pistol into her side and shouted, «Faster — faster,» She walked faster. Inside sat three clerks at tables; big stacks of index cards lay in front of them, the cards as big as cigar-box lids. She was pushed towards the first table... Another half hour, she thought. Maybe she would still have a chance to be alone for a bit after all. She was astonished at the casual atmosphere in this place given over to the administration of death. Everything was done mechanically, somewhat irritably, impatiently; these people were doing their job with the same lack of enthusiasm they would have brought to any other clerical work, they were merely doing their duty, a duty which they found tiresome but did anyway.’ p117-118