Upon the Head of the Goat

Upon the Head of the Goat: A Childhood in Hungary 1939-1944 is a 1968 Holocaust memoir by Hungarian-American author Aranka Siegal. Written for younger readers, the book narrates a childhood overshadowed by Nazi expansion in Siegal’s native Eastern Europe. The author’s family fights to survive as hunger and chaos descend, and the narrative closes as trains arrive to transport them to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The book has been showered with literary prizes, including the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award and the Newbery Honor. Its title quotes a Biblical passage (Leviticus 16) which Siegal unearthed while she was trying to track down the Biblical definition of a “scapegoat.” Siegal has published two further books about her childhood experiences in war-torn Europe: Grace in the Wilderness: After the Liberation 1945-1948 and Memories of Babi.

The narrative opens in Komjaty, a bucolic rural region in Ukraine, where nine-year-old Piri is staying with her grandmother, “Babi.” Piri is very close to her grandmother: the name “Piri,” which is a nickname, derives from the Yiddish “Perele,” which is Babi’s pet name for her. Babi is a sensible, kindly woman with a strong religious faith.

Almost as much as she loves her grandmother, Piri loves the farm where she lives. Piri’s family live in urban Beregszasz, Hungary, and the rhythms of life on the farm are very different. The day starts when the cow needs milking. Everything is done by hand: by the time Piri wakes up, Babi has set a fire, made breakfast and started baking bread for later. It seems to Piri that there is nothing Babi can’t do. When another woman gives Piri a bad haircut, Babi evens it out.



However, Piri begins to notice a sense of fear amongst the adults in Komjaty. The world beyond the farming district is collapsing. One day, Piri’s mother comes to visit, and Piri overhears the older women talking about sending her and her siblings to America.

A civil war breaks out in Hungary and the border is closed. For months, Piri cannot re-join her family or get news of them.

Finally, Piri is able to make the crossing to Beregszasz, but when she arrives, life has changed completely. Her father, Ignac, and her brother-in-law, Lajos, have been conscripted and sent to the front. The German army has taken Poland and is pushing towards the Hungarian border.



Piri’s mother and siblings, together with Ignac’s family, try to keep normal life going. Piri goes back to school. The family celebrates the Jewish holidays of Hanukkah and Passover, but the shadow of war keeps darkening. The anti-Semitic feeling spreads through Beregszasz, and after a series of frightening incidents, the whole family takes to staying indoors, donning peasant disguises whenever they need to leave the house.

Piri’s Aunt Lujza joins the Zionist Club, a local organization helping Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied territory to escape. Piri and her sister, Eboya, help Lujza to hide refugees in the town and smuggle them onto their next destination.

Soon the war is almost on their doorstep. The town begins to run out of food, and rationing is imposed. The family buys smuggled black-market goods and hides their goat, in order to have fresh milk for the children, but housing officials find the goat and force them to give it up.



Piri’s father does not return from the war: he has been captured and taken to a Russian prison camp. Her brother-in-law Lajos comes home, but shortly afterward, he is taken away, along with his wife (Piri’s sister Lilli) and their daughter, Manci: Hungarian officials accuse Lajos of  “speaking ill of Hungary.”

Piri’s mother makes a reckless trip to Nazi-occupied Poland in an attempt to rescue Manci—still just a baby—but she arrives too late. Manci has been sent to a concentration camp.

Back in Beregszasz, Lujza realizes she is about to be caught, and perhaps tortured to reveal the secrets of the Zionist Club. She chooses to throw herself under a train instead.



Piri’s mother makes her bread with a strain of yeast that the family has kept alive for generations, saving a little dough from each loaf as a starter for the next. In each generation, a mother would give each of her daughters a chunk of dough when they started their own families. They think of it as the “same” bread, made by the women of the family as far back as anyone can remember. However, when the Germans arrive and begin to round up Jews, Piri’s mother bakes all her remaining dough. Piri understands that her mother has given up hope that the family’s traditions will survive, perhaps even that the family will survive.

The Germans round up Piri’s family and send them to an old factory, converted into a temporary ghetto. Conditions are inhumane. The narrative ends as the inhabitants of the ghetto are corralled onto a train platform, watching the arrival of the trains that will take them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They don’t know what awaits them, but the author does: Piri and her sister will survive because they will be assigned work duties, but the rest of the family—as far as anyone can know—will die.