This book attempts to fill a gap in Holocaust memory research by addressing questions about the witness testimonies of the Pusztavám mass murder event in 1944. Pusztavam is a village in Hungary not far from Budapest, where a couple hundred Jewish forced laborers were shot in a day. The questions remain who shot them, the Hungarians or the German SS, and who can testify to what happened exactly. By questioning how, when, and who provided testimony to whom and when, Anikó Boros calls attention to the multifaceted dynamics that influence witness accounts when they are recorded and questions their usage as evidence when creating narratives of past events. Unlike most scholars of this subject, Boros rejects the aim of determining who was responsible and who were the perpetrators. She argues that such goals, heavily based on witness testimony and filled with emotional undertones, have resulted in flawed research that tends to depict non-Jewish locals as victims and Jewish deaths as acceptable collateral damage of the war. Her aim is not to reconstruct the past but to critically analyze how, why, by whom, and whose witness accounts have been used in the attempt to create a factual and sequential story of the event. To this end, using mixed methodology of source criticism and hermeneutical methods, she scrutinizes the witnesses’ testimonies while reminding the reader that witness accounts are not the whole story, even if they are the only story we have. She emphasizes that the narrating and recording of witness accounts does not happen in a void; the witnesses are influenced by political and cultural currents, and their testimonies are directed by the questions of their interviewers. In this regard, witness accounts are dialogues, not monologues, and one needs to take into consideration the prompts of the dialoguing partner.

In the execution of her argument, Boros dissects the multiple phenomena that play a part in the making and recording of witness testimonies, such as: competitive victimhood, distribution of resources, interviewers’ influence, willingness of witnesses to testify, duplicate testimonies resulting from the exchange of accounts between witnesses, and lack of testimony from those who remain silent. In order to deduce macrohistorical conclusions from her microhistorical case study, she investigates the dynamics of how witnesses’ interaction with their surroundings and community gives birth to their accounts. Boros does so because, in her view, in East-Central Europe “memory” continues to be an active problem even today. The prevalent narratives blame Nazi Germany for killing the Jews and portray non-Jewish locals as victims of the Germans as well. The inconsistent nature of the narratives surrounding the Pusztavám mass murder event, the lack of nuance and acknowledgment of complicity, prevent true commemoration or active remembrance of the tragedy. Competing views of the Holocaust create memory grey zones that stand in the way of reconciling with the past and appropriately commemorating it in the present. These “memory” problems, in her view, are an obstacle to reconciliation.

Boros argues her thesis in five chapters of varying lengths. The first chapter lays the groundwork for her methodology and points out the lacunae and mistakes of the scholarship she is attempting to overcome. She provides some examples of how the Pusztavám mass murder has been studied but does not reference other similar Hungarian or European cases and how they have been studied. In the second chapter, she introduces the history of Jews and Germans in Hungary during the modern period. The third chapter is the longest and provides a thorough, well-argued analysis of the witness accounts that the author groups by those of Jews, non-Jewish villagers, and military personnel. She subdivides these groups based on who, where, when, and by whom the witnesses were interviewed. In the short fourth chapter, she analyzes secondary sources, including media, literary, museum, and material cultural accounts (tombstones) of the event. Her fifth chapter states her conclusions and emphasizes that Boros is not interested in reconstructing the “facts,” but prefers to call attention to the dialectics, perspectives, and interpretations that take place when scholars create perceptions of past narratives based on witness accounts.

The book's strength lies in the execution of Boros’ argument and her well-introduced methodology, terminology, and critical perspective. Nevertheless, the work would benefit from a broader discussion of memory studies in order to underscore the book's value and significance. A comparative perspective to the author's case study would help the reader to fully appreciate the macrohistorical propositions of her approach to witness testimonies. This is especially relevant because the subject of Holocaust memory is of interest to a wide array of readers and has major political connotations even today. The flaws of methods that use witness testimonies to tell the past have major implications not just for Holocaust studies but for all crimes. Therefore, it would be useful to compare the methods and results of Boros’ case study to other similar case studies in the region in order to see the macrohistorical significance that she indicates her research aids. In this way, one could better observe how the concerns Boros raises about the use of witness testimonies are applicable to or differ from other cases.