Ottó Kornis, a Forgotten Author and Survivor of the Nazi Camps

Abstract

In May 1944, at the age of 33, the lawyer and writer Ottó Kornis was crammed into a cattle car in his native Transylvanian town, Kolozsvár (in Romanian: Cluj; after 1974: Cluj-Napoca) with 72 of his fellow Jewish citizens, his parents included. They were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. His parents were murdered upon arrival. Out of all the passengers in that cattle car, only he and four other Jews survived the hell of the death and forced labour camps. As soon as he returned home, he wrote a book about his experience titled Smoke ( Füst), which was published in November 1945 in Cluj by the Minerva Literary and Printing Institute and was one of the very first books about the Nazi camps. The present study deals with Kornis’ career and fate from the early years of his youth until his death at the age of 38, only four years after the end of the war. It is a microhistory that explores the career and work of a celebrated and award-winning, then completely forgotten author. His life story reveals the central problems that preoccupied most of the survivors who returned from the Nazi camps to multi-ethnic Transylvania; it also helps to document the literary memorialisation of the Holocaust during the early post-war period.