While most studies of the Holocaust stop in 1945, the year of the liberation and the official end of the Holocaust, Tamás Stark follows the fate of the Hungarian Jews until the Communist takeover in the late 1940s. The basic problem confronting quantitative experts in Holocaust studies is the difficulty in locating accurate data relating to the Holocaust and the immediate postwar era. The author has collected and evaluated virtually every primary and secondary source related to the quantifying of human loss among the Hungarian Jewish communities to produce a full, detailed measure of the scope of destruction.

The author goes on to cover the enlarged, war-years territory of Hungary, and then to a detailed comparison of the destruction of Jewish communities and the emigration of the survivors.