This book of essays is the result of various lectures and conferences. The forty years noted in the title serves as a commemoration for 1944 and the events of the Holocaust in Hungary. The facts are, of course, well known. During the last stages of the Second World War the killing of most of the 800,000 Hungarian Jews who perished during the Holocuast was done with almost uncanny expertise and frightening speed by the SS ‘ ‘specialists’ and the Hungarian bodies attached to them, especially the Hungarian gendarmie which took part in the deportations. Between 15 May and 10 July 1944, 437,402 persons alleged to be Jews were taken to certain death to Auschwitz. Apart from Budapest's 200,000 Jews, all were deported. The forced marches and the brutality of the Hungarian fascists decimated even the relatively protected ones. But the ghetto in Pest and most of the Jews in the capital survived the War.

The book includes short and some longer essays by the finest specialists in the field. The work is not exclusively academic and included are personal confessions and literary essays as well as more standard historical studies. Some of the authors themselves were victims. The different viewpoints aired and the contrasts of opposing opinions make this collection especially valuable. The most striking difference between the essays written in Hungary and those produced by foreigners is that while the Hungarian writers aim to describe and understand the facts, some of the other researchers, from Israel and the United States, seek to identify criminals. They condemn both the representatives of the Hungarian cultural and political life and the elected leaders of the Jews. The essays in the first part of the volume study the roots of the German-Hungarian antisemitic traditions, the network of the Hungarian-Jewish, Jewish Hungarian bonds, the features of the political and ideological life between the World Wars. Nathaniel Katzburg, Gyorgy Száraz, Ivan T. Berend and Istavan Deak describe the route to the Holocaust through the institutionalization of anti-semitism. Gula Juhász lists the various authors and intellectual trends that sustained racism.

Raphael Patai examines the Hungarian Jewish intelligentsia. Elsewhere authors focus on the tragic year of 1944. Gyorgy Ranki and Béla Vágó analyse the respective role and responsibility of Germans and Hungarians.