Burning Horses: A Hungarian Life Turned Upside Down

This fictionalized account of real-life occurrences chronicles one woman’s amazing survival of the Hungarian Holocaust. Through the author’s creative first-person telling of her mother’s lifebased on her mother’s written and oral observations as well as the author’s own childhood memoriesa portrait of the remarkable Eva Leopold emerges. After spending an idyllic childhood on a pastoral estate in rural Hungary, Eva settled in Budapest where despite having been raised Catholic by parents who'd converted from Judaism and being married to a gentile, Eva was considered Jewish by the Nazi regime. Beginning in 1944when exemptions for Jewish women married to gentiles were liftedher daily life was dominated by desperate attempts to stay alive, avoid deportation to a death camp, and protect her family. Initially saved by taking shelter in the Papal Legation, Eva also hid in the air raid shelter in the basement of the family’s apartment building, which disappeared when the building went up in flames, consuming the horses stabled on the first floor. Having been widowed, Eva remarried, and she and her new husband made a death-defying escape to Austria. At risk of losing their U.S. visas, Eva and her husband enrolled their daughters in a Catholic boarding school, and boarded a ship to New York where they awaited their daughters' arrival six months later. A touching epilogue, written by the daughter-author, is also included.