Two layers of meaning in Szabo's depiction of oppression of the Jews in the 1940s

The Nazi deportation and execution of Jews has been the subject of numerous works of literature and film over the past 75 or so years, but Magda Szabo's treatment of this topic is unusual and especiallly courageous for a # of reasons: First, she took on this topic relatively early - in1967, in he novel Katalin Street; 2nd, she was writing in Hungary and in Hungarian while the nation was under Soviet dominance an autocratic control; 3rd, she writes with an unusual sense of authenticity and personal witness. Briefly, her novel is about three families living adjacently (in would later be refurbished as some kind of communal housing development) in Budapest, over a period of time - one of the families (the Helds, a dentist, his wife, and their daughter Juliette) is Jewish. Szabo presents the novel as a sequence of "snapshots" at different period of time, including one set of snapshots from 1944. In this on we see from several perspectives the horror of the Held parents b3eing hauled off in the night, w/ their teenage daughter left behind; the family had an agreed-upon code word to let Juliette know if the parents were safe - the code word is not used, so everyone knows the truth. The other families take J in for shelter and have a # of secure hiding places and a set of codes as to where she should go in the event of a search. Because of a tragic series of mistakes, she ends up exposed and a German soldier shoots her to death. All this happens on the verge of the marriage of her two best friends from the street, Balint (a young soldier) and Iren (a premed student), and we see how this death affects the two differently, which proves inauspicious for their marriage. Reading this novel today one has to wonder how much of the novel was "coded"; by writing about the autocracy of the Nazis, the complicit Hungarian government, and the brave resistance of two non-Jewish families, she passes her work by the Soviet-era Hungarian censors (it's OK to hate the Nazis!) while slyly presenting a critique of the state control and the limitations on individual freedom of her own time - a critique the censors may have been too dim to recognize, or maybe they did recognize this secondary layer of meaning and were complicit it getting out the word.

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