The mass murder of Hungary’s Jews, an attempted genocide that ended 60 years ago this month, is a story that still lives vividly in the memory and research of survivor Istvan Deák. The Columbia University history professor explained it to a 40-person audience on Monday night at the George Ignatieff Theatre.
The Holocaust in Hungary is viewed as a distinct tragedy within the 20th century because it took place from March 1944 to January 1945-the last days of World War Two. It was by that point certain that the Axis powers were going to lose, and a bombing of the Auschwitz death camp at that juncture likely could have prevented the death of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews who would be sent there and murdered in gas chambers, then cremated en masse.
The numbers of dead are still uncertain. “There is no doubt that the majority of Jews [in Hungary] died,” Deák said. “There is disagreement among statisticians about whether it is 60 per cent or 70 per cent.” Uncharacteristic of Nazi operations, he continued, there is no record for most of the Hungarian Jews who were deported and gassed.
One audience member, Murray Teitel, asked why Hungary chose to take the losing side so late in the war. “Didn’t they think there’d be hell to pay?” Teitel asked.
Deák explained that Hungary’s leader at the time, Miklós Horthy, had to choose between the lesser of two evils: to side with the Nazis meant that the fascists would likely take over the country, but to side with the Allies meant that they opened the door to Soviet invasion. Horthy decided that he would be in a better position with the Nazis. Any alliance with the Nazis meant collaboration in their “Final Solution” to exterminate all Jewish people.
There was a huge range of opinion among the non-Jewish public in Hungary, Deák explained, “from killers to saviours”; often they were the same people.
Deák said of Horthy: “I always thought he deserved a medal and then ought to be hanged.”
Another remarkable aspect of the war in Hungary Deák discussed was that, by the time of the war, Jews had almost completely assimilated into Hungarian society. Jews were professionals in almost every field: for example, over half of journalists were Jewish in the early 20th century. Moreover, the Jews of Hungary were always very patriotic. During the First World War, one in five officers was Jewish.
In December, 1944, a death march was forced on the Jewish women, children, and elderly of Budapest. Deák added a personal note when he said that many died on this march, including his grandmother.
Deák said that bureaucratic complacency in the government made a big difference in the effectiveness of the deportation. Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi organizer of the Hungarian deportations, came to Hungary with only 40 SS officers; it was only through the help of Hungarians, bureaucrats, policemen, and civilians that the Hungarian Holocaust was possible. “Of the 200,000 people employed in the public service, there are no cases of resistance to following orders,” Deák said.
“The heroes of the Holocaust years,” Deák concluded, “were not those who obeyed the law, but those who were willing to break it.”
