Tibor Dáné: A Tatár-hágó előtere. [The Battlefields of Galicia] Târgu Mureș, Lector Publishers, 2023.

Category: memoir
Pages: 480
Cover: hardback
ISBN 978-606-8957-43-2

Tibor Dáné (1923-2006), writer and editor from Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He wrote non-fiction as well as YA literature. Some of the books he authored: Athá-Rá, a fáraó írnoka (1958), A Tau Ceti hívójele (1968), Négy tenger hajósa (1973), A varázsvessző lovagja (1978), A fáraó igazlátó szeme (1979).

This book is the author’s recollections of his experiences as a Hungarian army officer in the Second World War. The work, which is in the tradition of both military memoirs and literary coming-of-age stories, focuses on the year and a half that the author spent on the Galician front and as a prisoner of war from 24 March 1944 (his twenty-first birthday) to the end of June 1945. The book, however, only loosely follows the chronological order of events, occasionally veering towards the antecedents or the subsequent development of the fate of the individual characters, according to the mechanism of memory, thus providing a readable chronography of twentieth-century Hungary and Transylvania, and above all of Cluj-Napoca. Among the many WWII war diaries and memoirs that have now been published, the author’s skill as a writer stands out for the way he portrays the sometimes tragic, sometimes humorous experiences. The eerie topicality of the book is given by the fact that, not far from the place of the title, war is ravaging again…