In Footnote to History, Andrew Laszlo takes the reader from the "good days," the good life of a prosperous Hungarian landowner family before World War II, through the deteriorating conditions that culminated in the Holocaust. Through the eyes of a child growing up into young adulthood, experiencing and surviving those events and their aftermath, Laszlo does not devote his story exclusively to the horrors of the holocaust, which differentiates this book from others that describe the same period of history.