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Step into Birkenau, Marco Nahon’s unflinching memoir of survival in Auschwitz, where a Greek doctor bears witness to brutality, loss, and endurance—preserving forgotten voices and compelling readers to confront history through one unforgettable, human testimony

Birkenau is a searing firsthand Holocaust memoir by Greek physician Marco Nahon, recounting his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau and survival of one of history’s most lethal extermination camps. Writing soon after liberation, Nahon offers a deeply personal chronicle of Nazi persecution. He recounts the occupation of Greece, the ghettoization of Greek Jews, their transport to German death camps, and the daily horrors of camp life. He documents the dehumanization and destruction of Greek Jews while preserving the memory of those who perished. 

Nahon presents his story episodically, guiding readers through his arrest, transport, forced labor, and survival. He illuminates the historical context of the Holocaust with vivid stories from daily life in the death camps. Rounding out the work are maps, appendices, and Bowman’s introduction, which provides background on Greek Jewry—whose complex story is little known—and describes the progress of the Nazi occupation of Greece and the Balkans.

Nahon, an MD trained in Beirut who lost much of his family, writes with restrained objectivity that heightens the emotional force of his account, while the translation and editorial framing make this early memoir accessible to modern readers. 

This book will resonate with scholars of the Holocaust, students of World War II, and general readers seeking an authentic survivor voice. It is especially valuable for those interested in lesser-known aspects of the genocide, such as the fate of Greek Jewish communities. Both an indispensable historical document and a powerful act of remembrance, it speaks urgently to anyone committed to understanding—and never forgetting—the human realities of genocide.

Mária Mádi (1898–1970) was a Roman Catholic Hungarian physician living in Budapest during World War II. Stuck in the city, she vowed to become a witness to events as they unfolded and began keeping a diary to chronicle her everyday life, as well as the lives of her Jewish neighbors, during what would be the darkest periods of the Holocaust. From the time Hungary declared war on the United States in December 1941 until she secured an immigrant’s visa to the US in late 1946, she wrote nearly daily in English, offering current-day readers one of the most complete pictures of ordinary life during the Holocaust in Hungary. In the form of letters to her American relatives, Mádi addressed a wide range of subjects, from the fate of small countries like Hungary caught between the major powers of Germany and the Soviet Union, to the Nazi pogrom against Budapest’s Jews, to family news and the price of food.

Mádi’s family donated the entire collection of her diaries to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. This edition transcribes a selection of Mádi’s writings focusing on the period of March 1944 to November 1945, from the Nazi invasion and occupation of Hungary, through the Battle of Budapest, to the ensuing Soviet occupation. While bearing witness to the catastrophe in Hungary, Mádi hid a Jewish family in her small flat from October 1944 to February 1945. She received a posthumous Righteous among Nations Medal from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

Editorial commentary by James W. Oberly situates Mádi’s observations, and a critical introduction by the Holocaust scholar András Lénárt outlines the wider sociopolitical context in which her diaries gain meaning.