The Puppet Maker’s Daughter
The Puppet Maker’s Daughter tells the harrowing story of the Hungarian Jews in the final year of the Second World War. Up until March 1944, Hungarian Jews had largely escaped the fate of the rest of Europe’s Jews; they had faced restrictions and been conscripted into forced labour but had not been subject to mass transportation to concentration camps.
This changed when the Germans invaded Hungary and Adolf Eichmann took charge of the ‘Jewish Question’ in Hungary. The book follows this sudden change from the perspective of Marika Tausig, a 19-year-old Jewish nursing student whose world is turned upside down. Marika becomes a resistance activist and, working with the real life Swiss and Swedish diplomats Carl Lutz and Raoul Wallenberg, shows incredible resilience to not just survive, but to help save an untold number of people from Eichmann and the Nazi death camps.
This is a very well-researched novel that mirrors the horrible but familiar path of the Nazis’ treatment of Jews across Europe, from the revoking of civil rights to the mass transportations. What makes this novel different is its depiction of the way the local population turned on their neighbours and the murders carried out by the Hungarian Fascist party, the Arrow Cross, not just against the Jews but against the people who sheltered them. This apparently even shocked Eichmann. Despite the horror of the story, Kay’s novel leaves the reader with a feeling of hope. The human spirit cannot be crushed, and those who died will live on in the hearts of those who survived and their descendants.
