György Beifeld

Who was György Beifeld?

György Beifeld was a Hungarian Jew best known for writing a richly illustrated memoir while spending more than a year at the eastern front in 1942–1943 as a member of a forced-labor battalion.

György Beifeld was a 40-year-old Hungarian Jew in 1942. He lived in Budapest, where he was trained as a lawyer, but earned his living as a stockbroker. He was also a talented artist who loved to draw and paint in his spare time. In the spring of 1942, Beifeld was one of 50,000 Jewish men who were deployed in the Hungarian Labor Service in the Soviet Union to support Hungarian troops sent to the eastern front to help the Axis to conquer the Soviet Union.