Wrong Passport

‘This country is like a little island, where the people live so happily, as if nothing was wrong with the world…’ When Ralph Brewster wrote those lines, in the summer of 1943, Hungary’s involvement in WWII was still barely felt in Budapest. Less than a year later the Nazis took over. Born an American but given Italian nationality as a child—the ‘Wrong Passport’ of the title—Brewster refused to return ‘home’ to Italy to fight for Mussolini. Instead he went into hiding in Budapest and his story of life in a country at war, resorting to ever more desperate measures to dodge detection, makes fascinating reading. As Fascists tighten their grip and the Soviets begin their advance, the once-carefree city of coffee houses, concert halls and thermal baths is torn apart and Brewster’s world disintegrates, together with that of his extraordinary cast of characters: the Archimandrite, the art-dealer spy, the cinema impresario, the Jewish philosophy student who refuses to wear the yellow star and the real-life ‘English Patient’.