The Scent of Snowflowers: a chronicle of faith, hope and survival in war ravaged Budapest

IT WAS 1943 and the war in Europe had all but bypassed Hungary. The effects of the war were felt, to be all able-bodied males over 18 years of age had been drafted into Munkatabors slave-labor camps; food and fuel supplies were short; and for the first time in their sheltered, cloistered lives, Jewish women went out to earn a livelihood for their families. But for the most pan, life went on in Budapest as it always had and the loyal Jewish citizens remained blissfully — determinedly —— ignorant of the holocaust that raged on all sides. Rivka Leah was little more than a child when she married Jacob Klein that spring, and her childlike innocence is agonizingly apparent. From the remote city of Szombathely she is transported to the capital where the newlyweds settle into their own apart- ment and are befriended by Danny and Vera Brenner, theirjewish next- door neighbors. Despite the food rationing and black marketeering and the need for Jacob to remain hidden from the authorities, since he has evaded the draft, Rivka Leah transforms their home into a miniature Gan Eden. All winter long, she busies her- self with learning to be a proper balabusta. Her joy at the prospect of motherhood knows no bounds — until the war at last reaches her doorstep. It soon becomes clear that the flower of Hungarian jewry is destined to be trampled beneath the ruthless Nazi boot And like the tiny harbingers of winter’s end that peek enticingly through patches of snow, the spring for which Rivka Leah had yearned will be singularly lacking in fragrance. The author has written a stirring World War II memoir that electrifies the reader with its powerful prose and engrossing narrative. The Srentof Snow- flowers is a superb tribute to the Klein’s’ unflagging faith and fortitude under the most trying circumstances, and to the valor of Karoly Bitter, the “Righteous Gentile” who was their savior.