by
Thomas Ország-Land
The
physical destruction of European Jewry during the Nazi era has been probably
the most thoroughly documented disaster in all human history. A huge proportion
of the eyewitness accounts, expert analyses and artistic depiction of that
catastrophe pertains to the organized murder of close to 600,000 Hungarian
citizens of Jewish birth perpetrated by the Hungarian state in collaboration
with Nazi Germany. This happened at the close of the Second World War when an
Allied victory was already obvious.
Randolph L.
Braham, the doyen of Holocaust studies and once a youth survivor of a Hungarian
slave-labour camp, has assembled and classified the thousands of books and
articles generated by the Hungarian Holocaust and made them accessible through
an invaluable bibliography. It is accompanied by a magisterial encyclopaedia,
edited by Braham and introduced by the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz
survivor, chronicling the wartime fate of thousands of ravaged Jewish
communities. Both authors are enormously influential American historians of
Hungarian origin well disposed towards
These books
are likely to prove useful for university courses in Holocaust studies and
European history as well as political science, literature and sociology. They
are being published at a critical moment.
Fearing a
significant setback in national elections widely expected in April, Hungary‘s
ultra-Conservative, populist government has set about courting the resurgent
far-Right by denying in its new constitution the country’s enduring
responsibility for the Holocaust. The government has also included several
anti-Semitic authors in the national school curriculum, tacitly encouraged
demands by anti-Semitic nationalists for the official rehabilitation of the WW2
leader Miklós Horthy and, in the worst tradition of East European authoritarianism,
it has just announced plans for the establishment of a state historical
research foundation clearly intended to rewrite official history.
This has
contributed to mounting safety concerns by the surviving Jewish community.
Authoritative research results just published by the Vienna-based Fundamental
Rights Agency suggest that nearly half of Hungary’s Jews are actively
considering emigration because of the unmitigated rise anti-Semitism. Theirs is
the highest proportion of Jews to entertain such plans in the eight countries
surveyed where Europe’s largest Jewish populations live. Braham’s books
comprise a treasure house of meticulously assembled research findings exploring
the background to the unfolding social crisis.
The
three-volume geographical encyclopaedia is an exhaustive research and teaching
aid chronicling the tragedy of hundreds of well established East European
Jewish communities deeply loyal to the indigenous society that enthusiastically
participated in their destruction. Illustrated by many historic photographs,
the work is organized alphabetically by county, each section prefaced with a
map and a contextual history describing its Jewish population up to and into
the fateful year of 1944.
Entries
track the demographic, cultural, and religious changes in even the smallest
communities where Jews lived before their marginalization, dispossession,
ghettoization and eventual deportation to slave-labour and death camps. It
provides both panoramic and microscopic views of the destruction of most of the
Jews of Hungary, until then the last significant surviving Jewish community
within Nazi-occupied Europe.
Most
individual entries are set out in a common format, detailing the first
available records of local Jewish settlement; employment patterns; synagogues
and other community buildings and their ultimate fate; the names of rabbis and
other leaders; shifts in the local Jewish population from the beginning until
the Holocaust; references to Jewish-Christian relations; Zionist organization;
the implementation of anti-Jewish measures; the deportation of Jews; survival
statistics; Jewish demographics up to the present; and whether there is a
Holocaust memorial in the town today.
The
bibliography is an indispensable guide through the maze of source material
quantifying the tragedy. It includes close to six thousand annotated references
to independent and periodical literature published in many countries and in
many languages on all aspects of the recorded history of Hungarian Jewry
before, during, and after the Holocaust. References to works in Hebrew, Russian
and Yiddish are rendered in English translation. Each entry is provided with a
succinct annotation when its title is not indicative of its content. Supplied
with author, name, and geographic indexes, the book is easily usable.
It lists a
wealth of little known but valuable material as well as work that has come to
shape our view of the Holocaust. Its authors include such outstanding witnesses
and commentators as Miklós Radnóti, probably the greatest poet of the Holocaust
whose collection of poetry has just been publicly torched in an orgy of book
burning at a rally of Hungarian racists. There are also such authorities as
György Konrád, the sociologist and best-selling novelist, Zsuzsanna Ozsváth,
professor of Holocaust studies and literature at Texas University in Dallas,
and Paul Lendvai, a much revered foreign correspondent based in Vienna and
lately also in Budapest, who is bitterly loathed by Hungarian Prime Minister
Viktor Orbán.
The book
faithfully represents the views of some academic apologists of Holocaust
deniers as well as the treatment they sometimes manage to provoke from eminent
historians. For example, one article listed by the book, originally published
in the Budapest Népszabadságnewspaper by Géza
Jeszenszky, a Rightist politician turned historian, defends the new Orbán
constitution by minimizing the responsibility of the state for the Holocaust
crimes of the Horthy era. And his argument is accompanied by a brilliant
rebuttal by Professor István Deák, a highly respected Hungarian historian at
Columbia University, New York, in the context of a wider discussion of Orbán’s
undemocratic legislative programme.
The
government’s new constitution muscled through parliament in the absence of
cross-party support came into force in 2012. It denies not the occurrence of
the Holocaust but Hungary’s culpability for the Holocaust murders during the
rule of Admiral Horthy, by shifting all blame on his German Nazi allies.
Teachers throughout the Hungarian school system departing from this line face
dismissal.
And the
administration is about to set up a historiography authority operating under
government control to clarify remaining controversial issues of the past. It
will be called the Veritas Institute of Historical Research and open in 2014,
the election year that the government has also just devoted to Holocaust
remembrance. The purpose of the institute, according to the official Gazette, is “to strengthen national cohesion”
by generating popular awareness of “the true nature of the fateful political
and social developments” in the country’s recent history “interpreted correctly
and free of distortion.”
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