Carol Peaker has had the honour of helping two remarkable Hungarians tell their stories about surviving WWII as teenagers, fleeing to the UK, and achieving extraordinary careers in a medical establishment that discriminated against them as Jews, foreigners, and women. The memoirs are the results of years of interviews, research, and friendship.
For more information about these books, or to discuss commissioning a memoir, please email Carol Peaker here.
Don’t Enter the Wagons
‘… a revelation and a real pleasure to read. The writing is marvellous and it really captures Marta’s essence …’
–Anne Andermann
‘I highly recommend this book to everyone who wishes to read a personal story of one of darkest chapters of our history.’
–Michael, Amazon reader
Marta Elian enjoyed an idyllic childhood in Nagyvárad, Romania, popping into the family bakery for delicious pretzels and buns, playing in her grandfather’s vineyard, learning languages with her beloved tutor, and planning adventures with her friends in the Lightning Bicycle Gang.
Slowly, the introduction of anti-Jewish laws eroded Marta’s contentment. When Nagyvárad was transferred to Hungary in 1944, the situation for Jews took an alarming turn for the worse.
Don’t Enter the Wagons is the tale of Marta Elian’s remarkable escape from the Nagyvárad Ghetto, made possible by chance circumstances, her father’s intelligence, and her mother’s relentless determination.
But it is also the story of Marta Elian’s resolution to succeed in life against all odds: the challenges she faced becoming a medical doctor and raising twins in war-torn Israel; her strength throughout a failing marriage; and her struggle to be accepted as one of Britain’s first female neurologists.
An exceptionally intelligent and irrepressible character, Marta has told an inspiring story dedicated to all those people who did not survive.
The Baroness in the Acacia Tree
When Eva Kohner was a little girl living on a vast estate in Hungary’s flatlands, she already knew that she was a great property owner and a Baroness. She was less conscious of being a Jew. Like the peasants living on her estate, she celebrated Christmas and Easter, was fiercely patriotic, and felt rooted to the Hungarian soil. When she was not roaming the great plain by bicycle, trap, or pony, she was to be found up an Acacia tree lost in her favourite book: a red-bound anthology of Hungarian poetry. A tom-boy, she played endlessly with her toy castle, re-casting historical battles against invading Turks so that the Hungarians always won.
Today, the only remnants from the baroness’s childhood are dried out clumps of earth from the four corners of her estate, which, after the war, she smuggled out of Hungary in a little wooden box. She remembers how the sense of security she enjoyed as a child was slowly corroded when the peasants’ radios began spewing anti-Semitic propaganda; when a German biplane landed in a field on her estate; when her Austrian nanny – “a beautiful and charming ‘Hitler Maid’” – politely asked for permission to return home to vote for the Anschluss. Eventually, the Hungarian fascists would steal Eva’s family’s property, the Nazis would murder her father, and occupying Russians would undermine her deep faith in Jesus.
In The Baroness in the Acacia Tree, Eva Kohner provides first hand descriptions of the German invasion, of hiding in a Wallenberg House, and of the bitter reality of the war’s aftermath: the growing oppression of Hungarian communism, the unwanted babies fathered by rapacious Russian soldiers, the unspoken absence of missing Jews. Her stories come to life because of their humanity. One day, during the Siege of Budapest, for example, two fourteen-year-old German soldiers appear and take refuge in her cellar hiding-place, crying for their mothers. Half-starved and terrified herself, Eva nonetheless comforts them. Her sympathy is genuine; she knows that the Russians roaming the streets above will soon slaughter the German boys.
Baroness Kohner is a last remaining link with a bygone world, a pre-WWII Hungary where the daily and seasonal rhythms of country life were shared and celebrated by peasant, gypsy, and landowner alike. The Baroness in the Acacia Tree documents festivals and traditions, habits and gentle manners, and how creeping hatred destroyed this fragile unity. Like the best stories, Eva’s casts light on the whole range of human nature, on good and evil, and on how a spirit can be broken and restored. It is to be hoped that The Baroness in the Acacia Tree will be a vivid contribution to Hungarian, Jewish, WWII, and Holocaust history, providing lessons against the beguilements of racism, populism, and the dogmatic pursuit of ideology.
If you are interested in publishing this book, please email Carol Peaker here.
