My Works

Sixteen-year-old Klara has a plan. She will finish school, become a mathematician, and build a future beside her sister, Rozsi. Maybe if she’s lucky, she’ll even get her new neighbour, Paul Bloom, to notice her. It’s a small life, maybe. But it’s hers, and Klara intends to hold onto it.

In 1943 Hungary, that future begins to slip. As the war closes in, it becomes harder to believe Klara and her family will be spared. Restrictions tighten around Klara’s Jewish family, each new rule a small concession she tells herself she can endure. After all, Klara and Paul have become something she doesn't quite have a word for yet, and as long as she and Rozsi remain together, the rest feels survivable.

Then 1944 arrives. The veneer Klara has been fighting to maintain collapses: Jews in Hungary are no longer safe, and it’s too late for Klara and her family to escape. Klara, Rozsi, and their family are forced into the Nagyvárad ghetto, crammed into a single apartment with thirteen others. Privacy vanishes. Hunger sharpens. And the closeness Klara once relied on begins to fracture under the strain. The anger she’s always kept buried begins to take up more space than she knows what to do with.

Deported to Auschwitz, Klara, Rozsi, and their mother manage against impossible odds to stay together. But survival comes with a calculus Klara cannot solve and the only thing she can rely on is her anger. The person she knew she was, empathetic, reasoned, and controlled, becomes harder to find.

When Rozsi falls ill with typhoid, Klara tries to hide it from the guards, and she discovers the specific terror of having something left to lose. If Rozsi is discovered, she will be taken. If Klara intervenes, she will be killed. Klara fails. Rozsi is taken.

Klara survives the work camp, the death march, and the end of the war. She returns to her city, her father, and Paul but without Rozsi the future she fought for is impossible to claim. Klara sees Rozsi everywhere, hears her laughter, and understands she is now all her parents have left.