Background
Mária Földes was born to a Jewish Hungarian family in Arad, Romania on September 5, 1925. She grew up speaking Hungarian and did well in school.
Mária Földes was born to a Jewish Hungarian family in Arad, Romania on September 5, 1925. She grew up speaking Hungarian and did well in school.
After surviving several Nazi concentration camps during 1944-1945 in World World War II, including Auschwitz, she returned to Romania, where she studied drama and theater arts
Writing several plays in Hungarian, she is also known for her memoir, The Stroll (1974), published in Hungarian and in Hebrew (1975). lieutenant was adapted as a one-woman play by the same name, and received productions in Yiddish and English during the late 1970s, including in the United States. In May 1944 during World World War II, the Nazi occupiers forced the country to collect the Jews into the Cluj ghetto.
Then in her last year of secondary school, Földes at the age of 18 and her mother were deported some time during May–June 1944 from the ghetto to Poland, together with more than 16,000 other Romanian Jews.
They were shifted from one Nazi concentration camp to another, passing through at least six or seven before ending at Auschwitz. Her mother died there.
After the war, Földes finally made her way back to Romania. She studied drama at the Szentgyorgy Istvan Academy of Dramatic Art in Târgu Mureş.
She soon began writing plays.
Földes wrote and published several plays:
Weekdays
The Demoiselle in the Barracks
The Accident on Street Number Nine
The Seventh is the Traitor
The Inheritance
Short is the Summer
With the exception of the last one, the plays were collected and published in a 1968 book titled “The Seventh is the Traitor”. In 1974 Földes published her memoir, “The Stroll”, in Hungarian in Bucharest. Földes published a few short stories in various i newspapers, but at age 49 she found it difficult to work in a new country and under a new language.
In 1975 her memoir The Stroll was published in a Hebrew translation.
Suffering from depression, Földes committed suicide in 1976. Her daughter Agnes Lev worked with the actress Baatsheva to adapt her mother"s memoir for the stage.
They wrote a one-woman show, starring Baatsheva, which was produced at the Habima Theatre. The play toured in Yiddish and English productions.
lieutenant was performed in the United States in 1977 or 1978.
Földes" memoir was adapted in Hungary as a radio dramatization, produced in Budapest about 1985.