Mária Földes

Mária Földes (5 September 1925 – 21 August 1976) was a Hungarian-Romanian playwright. After surviving several Nazi concentration camps during 1944-1945 in 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).

Early life and education

Mária Földes was born to a Jewish Hungarian family in Arad, Romania on 5 September 1925. She grew up speaking Hungarian, Romanian, and German. From the age of ten she studied at the Notre Dame de Sion nunnery in Satu Mare, where she studied in French. In 1940 she was forced to enlist in the newly established Jewish gymnasium in Cluj due to the numerus clausus against Jewish students in all other schools.

In May 1944, after graduating from the gymnasium, Földes at the age of 18 was interned in the Cluj ghetto, where the Nazi occupiers forced the local authorities to gather the Jews. She and her mother were deported some time during May 1944 from the ghetto to Auschwitz. Later they were shifted to other concentration camps, such as Krakow-Plosow, Wiesau, and Langenbialau, where they were liberated by the Russians. They both survived and returned home in May of 1945.

Career

After the war, Földes returned to Romania. She studied drama at the Szentgyorgy Istvan Academy of Dramatic Art in Cluj. Soon thereafter she 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 Cluj at Criterion Publishing House. That same year Földes left Romania as a dissident and rejoined both her children who lived in Israel.

Földes published a few short stories in various Israeli newspapers. In 1975 her memoir The Stroll was published in a Hebrew translation. It was adapted as a one-woman play by the same name, and received productions in Hebrew in Tel Aviv at the Habima Theatre, and a short tour in the United States.

Marriage, family, and death

After the war, Földes married her school sweetheart Bartha Gabor, the future documentary director, and in 1946 gave birth to their son, Gabriel Bartha. In 1948 she divorced her first husband and married Lazlo Foldes, an adjunct professor at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj. She and her husband had a daughter, Agnes Földes.

Suffering from long-term depression, Földes took her own life 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 National Theater. She received the Kinor David (David's Harp Prize for her performance.

The play toured in Yiddish and English productions. It 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.