Gratitude

March 1944: The Germans descend upon Budapest. By the war's end nine months later, more than a half-million Hungarian Jews are dead at the hands of the Nazis or the Hungarians' own police force, and much of that beautiful city is destroyed. Gratitude is a conjured portrait of that rich, flourishing society at the moment of its dismantling. And it is a haunting tale of a disparate group of people - both Jews and non-Jews - who are brought together by the devastation and privations of war.
Lili, sixteen years old on the day her village is "evacuated," makes her way to Budapest and into the lives and hearts of a well-to-do Jewish family. As Klari and Robert Beck take the young girl into their home, their nephew Paul, a suddenly disbarred young lawyer, is meeting a visiting Swede, Raoul Wallenberg, who galvanizes Paul's own floundering sense of purpose and identity. Meanwhile, in the nearby city of Szeged, Paul's brother Istvan is forced into hiding to avoid capture and his very survival is cast into doubt.
Through a compelling range of deeply realized characters, Gratitude mines brilliantly the complexities of the human psyche in extremis: those who risked their own lives to save others and others who, even as the walls closed in around them, were unable to perceive the evil in their midst.

Joseph Kertes founded Humber College's distinguished creative writing and comedy programs and is currently Humber's dean of creative and performing arts.