The Piano Player of Budapest: A True Story of Survival, Hope, and Music

British singer de Bastion’s poignant first book nimbly reconstructs the life of her Jewish paternal grandfather, Stephen de Bastion, who was born Istvan Bastyai vol Holzer in 1907 Hungary and survived the Holocaust. Drawing on tapes that her grandfather recorded about his life, de Bastion pieces together a narrative that gathers steam in 1940, when Stephen was a professional pianist in Switzerland. Despite his mother’s protestations, he returned home to Hungary, only to be separated from his parents and deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1944. There, Stephen witnessed cruelties that haunted him for decades, such as walking “past corpses of men who had pulled down their trousers to ‘do their business’ and had instantly frozen to death.” Though he survived, got married, and immigrated to England in 1948, Stephen never returned to playing piano professionally. Still, his love of music serves as a powerful undercurrent throughout the narrative. In an atmospheric touch, de Bastion utilizes the family’s piano, which miraculously survived the Holocaust, as a vector for Stephen’s emotional experience (as he suffers through “the hours of the work, the humiliation,” at the camp, “dust settles” on the unplayed piano; when “the layer grows thick enough,” it produces a “muted sound”). This strikes a moving and melancholy note. (July)