Stephen Holtzer led a charmed life: he was born into a well-to-do, lib­er­al fam­i­ly, and his prodi­gious tal­ent as a pianist and com­pos­er allowed him to enjoy a whirl­wind of par­ties and per­for­mances, trav­el, and artis­tic friend­ships in pre­war Hun­gary. Yet as he and hun­dreds of thou­sands of Hun­gar­i­an Jews were to learn, ​“no amount of mon­ey or social sta­tus would have saved him” once the Nazis seized power.

Author Rox­anne de Bas­tion, Holtzer’s grand­daugh­ter and a musi­cian her­self, nev­er met Holtzer, who Angli­cized his name from Ist­van Bastyai Holtzer to Stephen de Bas­tion when he moved to Eng­land after the war. But she came to know him well through a rare gift: Holtzer left the fam­i­ly a stack of cas­sette tapes, record­ing both his life sto­ry and his play­ing on the Blüth­n­er baby grand piano that had been in the fam­i­ly for gen­er­a­tions. ​“Stephen has tak­en me by the hand and guid­ed me through his life — a front-row seat to his child­hood, music career, love life and sur­vival,” De Bas­tion writes.

Holtzer’s fam­i­ly built a suc­cess­ful tex­tile busi­ness dur­ing Hungary’s ​“Gold­en Era,” when the gov­ern­ment ​“adopt­ed a tol­er­ant posi­tion towards Jews because it suit­ed them for eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal rea­sons.” Ulti­mate­ly, these advan­tages were fleet­ing, and ​“no amount of real estate, shop branch­es, char­i­ty work or coats of arms could save the fam­i­ly from what was to come.”

Though his par­ents want­ed Holtzer to con­tin­ue in the fam­i­ly busi­ness, his tal­ent and suc­cess as a musi­cian led him on a dif­fer­ent path. As late as 1941, he was per­form­ing in top-rat­ed shows in Hun­gary and Switzer­land, so he was shocked to receive orders to report to a forced labor camp. This mea­sure was a con­ces­sion to Ger­many by the Hun­gar­i­an gov­ern­ment. The fol­low­ing year, he was among the 1,070 Jew­ish lead­ers, intel­lec­tu­als, and artists who were called up for the Hun­gar­i­an Army.

Although Hun­gary had pro­tect­ed its Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion up to that point, it ulti­mate­ly caved, hand­ing over Budapest’s elite to per­ish in forced labor camps on the Russ­ian front. The men were packed in freez­ing cat­tle cars to an even cold­er des­ti­na­tion, where tem­per­a­tures plum­met­ed to neg­a­tive degrees in the dou­ble dig­its. Holtzer said he sur­vived only because his lov­ing par­ents were able to deliv­er him a warm sheep­skin coat at the last minute. 

Holtzer saw how bru­tal­i­ty altered this elite group when they were crammed into the cat­tle wag­ons. He recounts, ​“The good-humored, cul­tured, knowl­edge­able peo­ple changed into ruth­less, heart­less indi­vid­u­als who stepped out of their old civ­i­liza­tion and gave all their ener­gy, phys­i­cal and men­tal, to self-preservation.”

After the Rus­sians assault­ed the camp and the pris­on­ers were aban­doned, Holtzer endured a har­row­ing trek back to Hun­gary, starv­ing and sick with typhus and dysen­tery. Though he recov­ered and was reunit­ed briefly with his fam­i­ly and his musi­cian friends, when the Nazis occu­pied Hun­gary, Jews were forced into ghet­tos, where they suf­fered vio­lence from both the mil­i­tary and the armed Arrow Cross vig­i­lantes. The Nazis then sent 440,000 Hun­gar­i­an Jews to con­cen­tra­tion camps. When Holtzer arrived in Mau­thausen, he was so des­per­ate that he pulled up tufts of grass to eat. 

Return­ing to Budapest after the war, he saw that his family’s ele­gant apart­ment on St. Stephen’s Square had been destroyed. Mirac­u­lous­ly, the Blüth­n­er piano was ​“unscathed, sit­ting defi­ant­ly, glis­ten­ing among the rub­ble smil­ing at its own­er’s return.”

De Bas­tion is a lyri­cal writer and a deter­mined researcher. Her love for her grand­fa­ther and their shared pas­sion for music make this a mov­ing account. Anoth­er gem in the book is the twen­ty-page let­ter that De Bastion’s grand­moth­er Edith wrote to her broth­er in 1946. The entire let­ter is includ­ed, unin­ter­rupt­ed by expos­i­to­ry nar­ra­tive. It is a frank and grip­ping descrip­tion of Jew­ish life in Hun­gary dur­ing the war.

The Piano Play­er of Budapest is rem­i­nis­cent of escape sto­ries like Two Wheels to Free­dom, the biog­ra­phy of Cioma Schön­haus, a skilled artist who forged hun­dreds of doc­u­ments that enabled Jews to escape Ger­many. Where­as Schön­haus relied on his bicy­cle and his sta­mi­na to flee Berlin, Holtzer used his Blüth­n­er piano and musi­cal tal­ent to elude (at least tem­porar­i­ly) the Nazis in Hun­gary. Sur­vivors like Holtzer remind us of the capa­bil­i­ties of ordi­nary peo­ple to find their own hid­den resources and fight against oppression.