Keep it Safe! Country: Hungary   Published by Boulevard Books Pub. Date: 2004 Pub. Place: Oxford, UK Format: 99 pages ISBN: 1899460217 List Price: $25.00, £15.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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During the run-up to the ‘Magyar Magic’ cultural festival in the UK 2003-4 I was introduced to a small, dynamic Hungarian woman in her seventies, Irén Ács, who has spent most of her life documenting her country as a photographer. In the room was an exhibition of her recent colour work on the ‘historic village’ of Hঁllőko, capturing with compositional precision and perfect colour naturalism the somewhat kitschy ambience of a place that self-consciously defies all modern implements or costume. Irén stood in front of me, looking up with her sympathetic but very sharp and lively eyes into my face and started to tell the story behind this book Keep it Safe!.
>br />Its title comes from her last contact with her deported father, a letter accompanying an extraordinary picture of him in his forced labour battalion recuperating before the march that would murder both him and Irén's brother. The room glowed with the prissy joys, the sparkling lace, the Catholic processions of the heritage village while Irén spoke. She had grown up in a small town where 20% of the population were, like her own family, Hungarian Jews. After a series of onerous restrictions and prohibitions, in 1944 they were all removed to the same bloody fate, and under various banally idyllic family snaps from the late 1930s and 40s reproduced in Keep it safe! sits the caption Nem tértek vissza Auschwitzból, a little Hungarian phrase I learnt to understand; ‘Never returned from Auschwitz’.

Near the end of this haunting yet also — is this a surprise? — delightful book, where Irén recounts, as well as the horrors, jokes the schoolchildren played on their teachers, the absurd machinations of petty officials and other entertaining trivia of a provincial town, sits a photograph of the shell of the town synagogue of Szécsény. Destroyed but with enough arches and decoration intact to say ‘built well of local stone by local men, not so easy to efface’. In Irén Ács's book the resilience (and the brilliance) of Hungarian Jewry finds a demonstration, a memorial and a celebration which I believe will come to be seen as a unique document of a historical moment still surrounded by the shame and the partial amnesia our continent suffered after 1945. As Irén's beloved father told her in 1944, sending the last photo it would ever be possible to take of him and his friends in the forced labour battalion ‘Keep this safe for the instruction of generations to come!’

And in fact the book, which joins together a brief memoir of Irén Ács's life in Szécsény, collected family photographs of her (mostly) doomed youthful companions, images of the town itself and terrifying newspaper clippings from the wartime period which blusteringly outline the nation's heroic struggle against the Jewish ‘liver-flukes’, has been an enormous success in Hungary, becoming part of the national curriculum in schools for a generation that, especially in the countryside, has grown up knowing of Hungarian Jews only as historical figures, rumours and ghosts.
Ray Keenoy, September 2004