Yellow Star - Red Star

Agnes Kaposi was born in Hungary the year before Hitler came to power and started school at the outbreak of World War II. The Holocaust killed many of her family, together with half a million Hungarian Jews, but a series of miracles and coincidences allowed her to survive. She worked as a child labourer in the agricultural and armament camps of Austria and was liberated by a rampaging Soviet army. She struggled through post-war hardship to re-enter Hungarian society, only to be caught up for a decade in the vice of Stalinism. In 1956 a bloody revolution offered the opportunity to escape to Britain, a country of freedom and tolerance, where she started a family and built a career as an engineer. The story is written with compassion and optimism, without self-pity. The tone is light, and there is plenty of irony, even humour. The narrative is underscored by the historian László Csosz and illustrated by several maps and more than a hundred archival images and family photographs. Dr Agnes Kaposi is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Churchill Fellow. Dr László Csosz is historian and senior archivist of the National Archives of Hungary, and research fellow of the Wiener Holocaust Library, London.