Safe Return Doubtful

translated by Rowley Grau
This is a chillingly human story that revolves around two crucial dates a year apart, in 1944 and 1945. It tells of the critical moments in the lives of a handful of characters; an Auschwitz survivor and former shopkeeper’s return home, a young girl’s first love, an abject group of fatigued Hungarian soldiers awaiting certain defeat, and the secret an aging prostitute at the Hotel Dobray. The Hotel, and more specifically the billiard table, stand testament as players on it come and go.
It is a story told in reverse; Šarotar opting to put most affecting section as the third part of the book, after 150 pages: Franz Schwartz is the Auschwitz survivor, whose wife Ellsie, a year earlier, had been preparing their son Isaac, a gifted violinist, for his first solo concert, which is to take place at Hotel Dobray on his bar mitzvah and 13th birthday on April 26, 1944. But the German Army marches into town.
A year later the Hotel Dobray in Sóbota (now Slovenia), then a borderland between Hungary and what would become Yugoslavia, is a sad remnant of its former glory, a billet for the Hungarian soldiers awaiting the inevitable, when once it hosted dinners, meetings, concerts and a casino for the wealthy. Chandeliers still hang from the ceilings, and red carpets are still there, though they have been torn and muddied by soldiers’ boots.
The tension as the Red Army approaches is wonderfully described. Šarotar paints a picture of such detail that it is as if you enter into the story and are contained within its atmosphere; brooding, claustrophobic, menacing.
This is a remarkable historic view of the writer’s hometown which led a few years after publication to the town putting up its first memorial to its fallen Jews.