Mária Földes

Mária Földes was a Romanian-Hungarian playwright. She was born in Arad on September 5th, 1925, and died in Tel Aviv on August 21st, 1976.

Biographical details

In her last year of secondary school, at the age of eighteen, she was deported, together with her mother, from the Cluj Ghetto to Auschwitz, and passed through at least six or seven concentration camps, ending at Auschwitz.

Education: Târgu Mureş, Cluj, Baia Mare; She studied drama at the Szentgyorgy Istvan Academy of Dramatic Art in Târgu Mureş.

Her memoirs and autobiographical details appear in her memoir, The Stroll. Her plays were individually published, and are:

Weekdays The Demoiselle in the Barracks The Accident on Street Number Nine The Seventh is the Traitor The Inheritance Short is the Summer

They appeared, with the exception of the last one, in a 1968 anthology titled “The Seventh is the Traitor” In 1974 her memoir, “The Stroll” appeared in Hungarian in Bucharest. That same year she fled Romania for Israel.

There she published a small number of short stories in various Israeli newspapers, as well as the Hebrew translation of “The Stroll” in 1975. After her suicide, the actress Baatsheva and her own daughter, Agnes Lev, dramatized the book which was staged as a one-woman show at Habima Theatre. This actress received the Kinor David (David's Harp) Prize for her role.

The play toured in Yiddish and in English, coming to the US in 1977 or 1978. Also in Hungary in ~1985 there was a radio dramatization of the book, in Budapest.