Based on twenty published and manuscript diaries written by Jewish and non-Jewish adolescents during wartime Hungary, this book provides an unprecedented microhistorical perspective on how young people observed, interpreted, and internalized the profound social and political upheavals of the late 1930s through the 1950s. These diaries—often discovered by chance and preserved against all odds—reveal not only personal struggles with identity, belief and belonging, but also troubling reflections of prevailing social attitudes, including complicity, silence and, at times, approval toward the persecution of their peers. Through intimate narrative details and marginalia—from doodles to worn pages—the text reconstructs the emotional and intellectual worlds of teenagers who witnessed history unfolding around them. An unsettling yet essential contribution to Holocaust studies, social history and memory research, it challenges contemporary readers to confront the disquieting mirror held up by youth living through one of Hungary’s darkest eras.

Gergely Kunt is a historian specialising in ego-documents and microhistory. He examines how individuals – including, but not limited to, adolescents – experienced social and political transformations in twentieth-century Hungary through the lens of personal diaries. His work brings to light non-elite perspectives often absent from traditional historiography, revealing complex emotional and moral responses to major historical events. Based at the University of Miskolc, Hungary, he combines archival research with narrative analysis to offer new insights into memory, identity formation, and everyday life under extreme circumstances.

I. INTRODUCTION
II. SELF-DEFINITIONS
1. Religious and National Affiliation
2. Social Identities
3. Political Affinities
III. IMAGES OF SOCIETY AND PREJUDICES
4. The Family and the Place of Residence
5. Bipolar Views of Society
IV. SUMMARY
Bibliography
APPENDIX