My grandfather, Pista, bought a fancy new Nettar Anastigmat. This German camera cost the equivalent of one-half of a Marcali teacher’s monthly salary (100 pengő), and was a luxury for a farmer. Pista proudly documented his family and the thriving family farm.

Pista and Gizi bought a DKW! Also made in Germany and pitched to the increasingly prosperous middle class customer, the lovely cherry-colored car was paid for with the sale of eighteen meat calves, to Italians. It cost 3500 pengő—what a Marcali teacher would earn in a year and a half.

The nuns were notoriously mean. All letters were censored going in and out. And the girls were only allowed a short walk twice a week (during which talking was forbidden!), to the dead nuns’ graves in the cemetery. Once a week each student received a lollipop, for which they had to curtsy and say “thank you, dear nun, for the lollipop.”

Gyula hated the smelly washcloth passed around to each boy after meals (they ate at their desks; the rag was used to clean the desktops, and the smell lingered on his fingers). He also disdained the doctors’ and lawyers’ kids, who labeled him a country hick and pelted him with snowballs. He was an unhappy outsider in this oppressive Catholic school.

From Ari and Gyula’s point of view, their parents’ decision to send them to boarding schools to raise the family’s status was not working out as blissfully as planned.

ANDhere’s another decision that didn’t work out quite as planned: when the Hungarian government decided to collaborate with Germany to regain the lands it wanted so badly—another decision based on pride and status—it seemed like a smart move at the time. But the price of territory was a deeper relationship with Hitler.

This relationship only intensified when Hitler gave Hungary yet another chunk of territory, this time in Northern Transylvania, in September 1940. Northern Transylvania! The territory of so many proud Hungarian princes! The center of “true Hungarianness” (for some) and the bedrock of Hungarian nationalism!

This award of land, referred to as the “Second Vienna Award,” carried other stipulations, too. Hungarian politicians were now obliged to...

The Hungarian government asked Hungarians to wave in support of the passing German troops. Pista and Gizi sent their children out instead. The siblings remember thousands of vehicles passing by their house as they rumbled south toward the Yugoslav border.

Although it wasn’t clear at the time, this was Hungary’s entry into World War II. This was the moment that would lead to dramatic changes all across Hungary, and certainly change the happy trajectory of my family’s social ascension.

POORYugoslavia, the Germans bombed them through and through. For Hungary’s compliance, Hitler gave a final territorial gift: two pieces of Yugoslavia that had belonged to pre-Trianon Hungary:

Hungarian anti-Semitism, and the idea of a racially pure Greater Hungary popularized by Gömbös in the 1920s, only increased during the war.

In August 1941 Hungary passed its Third Anti-Jewish Law, which prohibited sexual encounters between Christians and Jews.

Hungary’s government also conducted a formal census in 1941 to identify all Hungarians by nationality. This meant that families who had lived their entire lives in Hungary (but perhaps spoke German at home), had to decide if they were more German or more Hungarian ... Some members of a family wrote down “German,” while others wrote down “Hungarian.” This decision would have dire consequences in just a few years’ time...

Furthermore, every Hungarian citizen, including my family members and every person living in Marcali, had to file official papers proving they were not Jewish in order to retain their citizenship.

MEANWHILE,the industrial-scale murder of Jews—using poison gas—was already underway. Unspeakable. Horror of horrors.

Meanwhile, the U.S. had just entered the war after Pearl Harbor, and roaring American bombers began to fly over Hungary. No bombs dropping yet ... but soon.