The Smell of Humans

The Smell of Humans recapitulates the events following the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, and then narrates the 19-day story of the forced march, the prison camp at the brick factory, the digging of trenches outside Budapest, the round-the-clock exposure to the elements and to the whims of the guards (ranging from taunts to summary executions), until the release of the author three weeks later, when the regular army took the labourers out of the hands of the Arrow Cross henchmen. Primarily a piece of creative writing and autobiographical literature of a very distinctive Central European kind, this detailed and imaginative short memoir is also an important document of the Holocaust in Hungary in 1944. What is unique is Szep's tone, a meld of stupefaction and irony. Without overt condemnation or succumbing to despair, he somehow manages to describe, in precise detail, a series of events along progressively grosser stages of infamy. These daily mounting horrors acquire an additional intensity generated by the author's wide-eyed, childlike refusal to accept the fact of man's inhumanity to man.