George Byfield

György Beifeld (later George Byfield) (ca. 1902–1982) was a Hungarian Jew best known for writing a richly illustrated memoir while spending more than a year at the eastern front in 1942–1943 as a member of a forced-labor battalion.

György Beifeld was a 40-year-old Hungarian Jew in 1942. He lived in Budapest, where he was trained as a lawyer, but earned his living as a stockbroker. He was also a talented artist who loved to draw and paint in his spare time. In the spring of 1942, Beifeld was one of 50,000 Jewish men who were deployed in the Hungarian Labor Service (Munkaszolgálat) in the Soviet Union to support Hungarian troops sent to the eastern front to help the Axis to conquer the Soviet Union.

Living conditions were abysmal in the labor service, and the Jewish conscripts were often brutally mistreated by their officers and guards. The abuses against them included withholding or stealing their meager rations, denying them adequate clothing or footwear to perform their duties, quartering them for long periods outside without shelter, and dousing them with water and leaving them to freeze in the bitter cold of the Russian winter. During the retreat of the Hungarian army and its auxiliary labor units in the winter of 1943 after their defeat by the Soviets, Hungarian soldiers often plundered and even killed many of the Jewish labor servicemen. In all, more than 40,000 Jewish labor servicemen lost their lives.

Beifeld was inducted into the 109/13 labor company in April 1942. The Jewish conscript took with him an ample supply of paper, paint, and pencils to keep him occupied in whatever spare time he could find. As it turned out, not only did these art supplies give him something to do in that spare time, they actually helped to spare his life during his year in the Soviet Union.

Beifeld began painting immediately after his induction, creating watercolors of the base camp in Hungary where the company was initially stationed. On 20 April 1942, Beifeld's company departed by train for the Russian front. Just before their departure the members of the company received a superficial medical checkup and readiness review. As Beifeld writes in his memoir,

On April 19, Lieutenant Colonel Domonkos, Commander of the Replacement Center, reviewed the Company's readiness to march. The only things he was concerned about were the yellow armbands [the Jewish labor serviceman's only uniform] and the dog tags. Were the yellow armbands properly sewn to the jackets and overcoats, and did we have dog tags around our necks? Apart from that, he was concerned only with the horses. He looked at us with deep disgust. Later it came to our attention that he said goodbye to Banovich [the company commander] with the hope that not a single Jew would be among those whom he would bring back home

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