Trapped between the Black Eagle & the Red Star:

At the beginning of 1945, even with the Pest side of the capital under siege, Szalási’s idiotic Arrow-Cross terror turned its attention to those who were helping the Jews of Budapest to survive until the Red Army could complete the ‘liberation’ of the whole city. Yet, even as they did so, the Red Army was also unleashing its own form of ‘revenge’ and terror on Hungarian citizens on the eastern suburbs and peripheral villages. Though the siege had begun at the end of 1944, the German army was ordered to hold the city to defend the Vienna Basin and the only oil field still at its disposal, the one in Zala County. But the war in the country did not end even after the siege of the Hungarian capital and its capitulation. Meanwhile, efforts were being made to have regular Hungarian troops take part in the final crushing of the Nazi Third Reich. A group of soldiers who wound up as prisoners of the Soviet armies initiated the establishment of a Hungarian legion, but they were not allowed to implement their plan.

The Provisional Government formed in Debrecen recruited a new democratic Hungarian army recruited in the ‘liberated’ part of the country, but it did not become battle-ready in time. Only the military cooperation of a single spontaneously rallied outfit, the Buda Voluntary Regiment, could be observed in the battle for Budapest. When the German Army’s attempt to break through the Allied lines in the Ardennes failed by early January, the few still combat-worthy élite guards, with the Sixth SS Panzer Army, were hastily transferred to Transdanubia, where, deployed around Lake Balaton, they were able to hold on to the Zala oil fields.

Above: Soviet soldiers in battle in Budapest on 14 January 1945. This photograph was taken four days before the liberation of Pest was completed. The complete defeat of German forces in the capital, including the equal numbers of Hungarian soldiers still supporting them, took until 13 February.

New Year in Pest – A Frightful Fortnight:

On New Year’s Eve, units of the Red Army overran Hungarian army positions around Pest. House-to-house fighting extended into the working quarters of the city, and Soviet soldiers penetrated the culverts of the inner district.  Often the two sides were separated by only one street or house. Aircraft squadrons continued to drop bombs, and fighter planes strafed streets that were deemed to be in enemy hands, though sometimes they were shooting at their own men. In the city centre, as the siege progressed slowly in their direction, the co-workers of Raoul Wallenberg, the Langfelder-Simon family, which had been placed under Swedish protection, moved from Üllői út to Révai utca, near to the Opera House.

Almost eighty people had moved into the apartment building which was rented by the Swedish Embassy. In the afternoon of 1 January, Arrow-Cross armed men shot the lock off the outside door. They smashed the door to the cellar, where the Swedish Embassy employees were living. To the accompaniment of shouting, swearing and threats, they pillaged all the families’ money and food. Meanwhile, someone managed to inform Wallenberg by telephone, and he sent a detective to intervene, thus avoiding more serious harassment or massacre on the spot. Wallenberg and Langfelder arrived later with an armed gendarme to guard the house. At that time, Wallenberg was forced to spend most of his time in hiding, and was constantly preoccupied with survival, his plans for Hungary and making the earliest possible contact with the Soviet forces. A few days later, a further five gendarmes were added and had served there for scarcely a fortnight when a further order sent them into the firing-line. No more was heard of them. With Wallenberg’s permission, Langfelder brought his two-year-old niece, Éva Simon there. Until then the child had found shelter and a home with a friendly Christian family in central Pest, an action which was strictly forbidden by decree. The house had been bombed, and so she had to be moved and from then on had remained with her parents.

On 5 January, following direct orders from the Szalási government, police and Arrow-Cross irregulars began emptying out the remaining ‘international houses’, those under the protection of the various neutral countries’ governments, most notably the Swedish and the Swiss. When the news reached Raoul Wallenberg, he offered a bribe of food and medications for them to leave his charges where they were.

On the night of 7 January, armed raids took place on the occupants of Jókai utca 1 in Terézváros where the Swedish Embassy had rented the second floor the previous autumn. Ten groups of activists operated in the rooms under the direction of Dr Béla Forgács and Dr Antal Léderer, caring for the Swedish protégés. The ever-more savage Arrow-Cross could not tolerate the Swedish presence any longer and meant to mop it up, paying no attention to the protected status of the various rented properties. In the raid, the first part of the nightmare was total plundering. Then, some two hundred people were turned out into the street, some of them being marched away, the women and children escorted to the ghetto, where ninety of them were crammed into the flats within a house in Akácfa utca.

Some of the men were tortured and shot on the way in the streets and squares or on the Danube embankment. Wallenberg searched for the kidnapped people but without success. Imre Nidosi, commander of the Arrow-Cross guard on the Pest side simply denied all knowledge of Swedish-protected persons being in his custody.

The Arrow-Cross marauders’ atrocities also struck at the Swedish embassy offices in Üllői út. On the evening of the 8th, they intimidated and robbed a hundred and fifty persons – for the most part, embassy employees – and then marched them off to the Mária Terézia barracks. Hans Weyermann, the active agent of the International Red Cross on the Pest side, made an interesting special report of that day. According to this, an agent of the Soviet State Security Police had dropped by parachute and appeared at his office. Asking to see Weyermann in private, he told him that he was expected to speak to the commander of the German defenders about avoiding needless bloodshed. The Germans were to spare hostages, political prisoners and occupants of the ghettoes, and in return, the Red Army would not trouble the civilian population and any calling to account would be done exclusively through the law and the courts. According to Lévai’s Wallenberg, Langfelder’s sister and brother-in-law, Dr Gyula Simon, last spoke to him on 10 January. He dashed in to see them for a few minutes in the Swedish Embassy building at Révai utca 16. His brother-in-law had been second-in-command of the building on 1 January at the time of the Arrow-Cross attack. Lévai tells us that on the evening of 10 January Károly Szabó reported that…

… the front was on Thököly út by the the Millenáris Sports Ground. There he had had a word with a captain, a friend of his, who was quite prepared to let him and his wife through, so he would gladly take Wallenberg and … Langfelder, as that was what Wallenberg wanted. Szabó said that that he too would go through with them and come back next day.

On the same night, Wallenberg took further steps and made preparations to travel. With the help of György Szöllősi and Langfelder, he secretly made the touring car ready for a long journey in the garage, hiding a large sum in gold and jewels in a petrol can. According to Szöllősi, their idea was first to go to Debrecen, and from there to Sweden, for Wallenberg to make his report. These details are confirmed in the memoirs of the gendarme, Lajos Bajusz, who also recalled that both men were very nervous before the journey. Sándor Erdey, a war reporter, later recalled that he had been asked by the restauranter of the ‘Paprika csárda’ (where he was a regular customer) to help a Jewish family to get to Pannónia utca. Erdey promised to do so, but immediately declined the “generous return favour” that was offered. Next morning, during an air-raid, he managed to transport the family, with the help of his brother. He went back to the restaurant for lunch, where he was spoken to by a ‘stranger’ according to his memoirs, which continued:

The well-dressed young man introduced himself, and it was Raoul Wallenberg, embassy counsellor. He too wanted to reward me, and was offended when I declined. As he put it, that would mean that he couldn’t ask me to do something else. With great difficulty he made his request known, and it was the same as the day before. I gave my consent, but asked that we should start within hours. Again, I asked for my brother’s help. I took the man entrusted to me and his fiancée from the address given to the Pannonia Hotel …

It’s not clear how Erdey recognised the ‘stranger’ as Wallenberg, especially as he does not record the language of the conversation. Since both men spoke good German, they would have had little difficulty in communicating. Neither is there any mention of Langfelder, Wallenberg’s ever-present driver. But the incident shows that the rescue of several people by car from Jókai utca by car was successful, and the Pannonia Hotel was indeed where several Jewish families found shelter, along with many other persecuted people. The manager, Sándor Kaufmann, succeeded, by much ingenuity and even more risk (later honoured at Yad Vashem), in protecting to the end those hiding from the persistent ‘Jew-hunt’ of the Arrow-Cross. On 11 January, Wallenberg and Langfelder said goodbye to their closest colleagues at the Hazai Bank. The secretary could now see that he no longer had the ways and means to continue his work. That night, they slept once more at László Ocskay’s roomy flat in Benczúr utca, which was in a building under Red Cross protection. Next day they set off by car, but turned back, presumably due to the Soviet advance. On the 13th, the front line reached the mid-point of Andrássy út and the parallel Benczúr utca. It was at this point, in both space and time, that Wallenberg tried to make contact with Marshal Malinovski. He reported personally to the Russians in Benczúr utca, using a note which apparently read, in Russian, ‘I come over’. He was then taken behind the Russian lines with a major and military escort, accompanied by Langfelder.

At about this time in Berlin, Wallenberg was under consideration in Berlin by the ‘Jewish expert’, a leading figure in the campaign for the destruction of the Jews of Europe. He had followed attentively the activity of Eichmann and knew a great deal about the diplomatic rescue attempts in Budapest. In a telegraphic summary, he informed Eichmann, then in Berlin, that ambassador Danielsson had gone into hiding and that Wallenberg had been placed under German protection. Although the precise details are still unclear, it seems that the Soviets intercepted this message, leading to Wallenberg’s arrest as a ‘suspected spy’ and his imprisonment by the Soviets.  By this time, Eichmann had become an embarrassment and encumbrance to the upper echelons of the SS. The next day, the 14th, the main military hospital in Budapest received a direct hit. Dying soldiers were left in destroyed buildings and the wounded piled up in makeshift hospitals, without medicine or nurses, lying in the cold cellars of the burned-out Parliament building and the Museum of Military History. A retreating German army unit blew up the Petöfi Bridge, then known as the Horthy Bridge. An Arrow-Cross group advanced into the ghetto and murdered several people they encountered before bein routed by Miksa Domonkos, a Jewish Council member with good contacts in the gendarmerie, together with a couple of policemen. In the streets, the advancing Soviet soldiers used captured civilians to shield them from enemy fire. In short order, the German military also adopted this tactic, but the strategy was ineffectual for both armies.

The Collapse of the Reich & Liberation of Auschwitz:

The collapse of the Reich was accelerating and every initiative of the German military leadership was a failure. The inner circle of the Nazi chiefs of staff clung on in blind faith that Hitler’s wonder-weapons would yet save them and their families from ignominious invasion and defeat. They wove fantasies, as the Hungarian political élite had done the previous year,  about making a separate peace, based on the mistaken belief that in no way would the West allow Stalin to penetrate deep into central Europe. Several saw the series of nightmare acts as the consequence of the fanatical genocidal activity of Eichmann. He was aware, as were the other Nazi leaders, that he occupied a prominent place on the Allies’ list of war criminals. The other SS leaders kept their distance from Eichmann as catastrophe loomed. They sat apart from him in the dining room of Hitler’s underground bunker in Berlin and did not invite the Obersturmbannführer to join them. The mass murderer pondered: Am I supposed to be the blackest sheep in the flock?

The deportation of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz had begun in March 1944, almost as soon as the SS arrived in Budapest (I have written elsewhere on this site about these) Eichmann led the special task force that gathered them in concentration camps and then loaded them in cattle trucks, deporting 437,000 of them there in just eight weeks. He later boasted to a crony that he would jump laughing into his grave for his part in the deaths of four million Jews. In a 1961 diary entry after his conviction in Israel of genocide, Eichmann wrote:

I saw the eeriness of the death machinery; wheel turning on wheel, like the mechanisms of a watch. And I saw those who maintained the machinery, who kept it going. I saw them, as they re-wound the mechanism; and I watched the second hand, as it rushed through the seconds; rushing like lives towards death. The greatest and most monumental dance of death of all time; this I saw.

The numbers of SS camp guards, Lagerschützen, at Auschwitz varied: very roughly in 1944 there were only 3,500 guarding the 110,000 inmates. There were also usually around eight hundred Sonderkommando prisoners at any one time. Out of the estimated seven thousand men and two hundred women guards who ‘served’ at Auschwitz during the war, only eight hundred were ever prosecuted. The rest merely disappeared into private life, and very many must have been able to escape with valuables stolen from the inmates. As the Russians advanced in the winter of 1944-45, Auschwitz was evacuated westwards in a terrible ‘death march’ of more than fifty miles in sub-zero temperatures. Those who could not keep up were shot and in all, around fifteen thousand died. Nor was the horror over even when the camps were liberated. Despicably, Polish villagers even killed some Jews after the end of the war in Europe when they returned to claim their property, as happened at the village of Jedwabne. We have no evidence of this happening in Hungary, but we know that very few of the Auschwitz survivors returned, and even fewer did so to resettle. This was certainly the case in the village of Apostag, where out of some six hundred Jews deported, fewer than six returned before emigrating (I have written about this elsewhere on this site).

Rationality might have dictated that, once the war looked as if it might be lost, the rail, military and human resources put into the Holocaust ought to have been immediately redirected to the military effort instead, and the Jews who could have been forced into contributing to the war effort ought to have been put to work rather than exterminated. This, after all, had been what had happened before March 1944 in Hungary. Yet a quite separate, entirely Nazi rationale argued that the worsening situation on the Eastern Front required if anything an intensification of the Holocaust, rather than a winding down. As Saul Friedlander has written:

Whipping up anti-Jewish frenzy was, in Hitler’s imagination, one of the best ways to hasten the falling apart of the enemy alliance … the Jews were the hidden link that kept Capitalism and Bolshevism together.

Furthermore, he asserted, if ‘Fortress Europe’ was about to be invaded, the domestic danger posed by the Jews in his diseased imagination needed to be eradicated as soon as possible. Finally, with the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January, his Final Solution to the Jewish ‘problem’ was brought to an end.

The Final Fight for Survival:

Yet, in Budapest at least, many of the Jews had survived, thanks largely to the letters of protection provided them by the Swedish and Swiss diplomats and their brave Hungarian colleagues and volunteers. The last few weeks of the siege were some of the most difficult to survive, however. None of the ‘safe’ houses protected by the Swedish and Swiss Red Cross was truly safe from the Arrow-Cross any more. The thundering sound of cannons was heard all the time and huge bombers flew low in the sky.

Nearly all of the people of Pest were starving, but especially the Jews, who were either in the ghettoes or in hiding, trying to get food without ration cards and only able to buy it after 5 p.m. By this time, Daisy Birnbaum (see her ‘letter of protection’ below) was back with her parents, unafraid even of the bombs, although they were walled in her uncle’s cellar. There were five of them, and their daily ration was a small slice of bread with margarine, so they were hungry all the time. They lived in what Daisy describes as a ‘nook’ behind a makeshift toilet wall for close to seven weeks with the help of neighbours and friends of her father. No other Jews remained in the house because they had all been taken to the ghetto. However, the few gentile families that remained soon moved down permanently to the cellar, due to the constant bombing of the nearby ‘Nyugati’ (Western) Railway Station.

Eventually, the Russian soldiers found them when they were searching for German soldiers by pressing stethoscopes to the walls. Hearing the hollow sound, they did not wait for a response but kicked the ‘communal’ toilet apart. They greeted them with machine guns at the ready as they crawled out from behind the destroyed wall, giving them part of their square-shaped black bread and bacon to eat. To begin with, the Russian soldiers behaved like liberators and were greeted as such, especially by the Jewish survivors, but that soon changed. Nevertheless, when the siege was finally ended in February 1945, it must have felt that, as it does so often in that part of central Europe, spring had come early, in both a physical and spiritual sense. Daisy Birnbaum recalled mixed feelings as most, though not all of her family were reunited:

During the spring of 1945, like the rest of the survivors, we tried to live as if those terrible months could have been erased from our memories. And we had not yet given up the hope that the deportees would return. The renewal of the Sunday lunches of the past also belonged to this noble effort. For about three years, Aunt Juliska appeared at our Sunday table. The poor thing wept every Sunday; from the soup until the end of the meal, her tears were flowing copiously. And she kept repeating to my mother: “You see, my dear, every stinking kike is back, only my darling Lajoska was killed”. Later she moved to her sister who lived in the countryside. 

Three other brief stories of survival remain to be retold here from Daisy’s little book about 1944, which many of her friends and their relatives sadly did not survive. The first is of her first ‘boyfriend’, György. His mother was one of those deported to Bergen-Belsen towards the end of the war who did not return and after the later liberation of that camp, Gyuri went to live with his aunt Ilus while his older brother, Pista, who had spent 1944 in Eger with false documents, moved in with another ‘survivor’ sister and her family. By the time Gyuri turned ten, his father, inforced labour in the army, was reported ‘missing’ before the German occupation. From then on, they lived in wretched misery with many others in a ‘Jewish house’, waiting to be deported. Probably with the help of their ‘Uncle Béla’, the family received the Swedish protective papers, Schutzpasse, and with about twenty strangers they were moved into the abandoned apartment of Aunt Ilus. There Gyuri survived the siege and the continuous Arrow-Cross raids. Almost daily, the thugs looked for any reason to take people out from the houses and shoot them into the Danube. In 1945, already free, but fully orphaned, Gyuri found himself in the same apartment in Pozsonyi út which he shared with Aunt Ilus and Ági, waiting for the return of Uncle Béla who was ‘spending time’ in the Soviet Union.

Above: Pista and Gyuri c. 1937.

Dr László, the father of Mihály or Misi (pictured above at Balassagyarmat in 1938), held the rank of lieutenant and worked as a physician in the First World War and also served in the Second. His maternal grandparents lived in Balassagyarmat, the family’s home since the eighteenth century. His grandfather was a member of the ‘Jewish gentry’, a well-to-do, respected landowner. Although he lived in Budapest with his family for most of the year, “Gyarmat” was his paradise where he, his mother and his sisters spent their summers. When his grandfather died in 1943, aged 62, the family ‘council’ decided that Misi’s mother should move back ‘home’ to manage the estate, as both uncles were in serving in forced labour camps. So Misi and his sister also stayed in Gyarmat and went to the Jewish school there. With the German occupation, the estate was confiscated and the family was required to return to Budapest. Those of the family who remained in Gyarmat, their friends and the rest of the Jews were crammed into cattle cars and sent to Auschwitz. Misi lost his maternal grandmother there, together with all his schoolmates from Gyarmat.

Hoping to avoid a similar fate, during the summer of 1944, Misi and his family converted to Catholicism. Whereas none of the churches had openly stood up for the persecuted, both children were saved by members of Catholic orders. Misi found refuge with the Collegium Josephinum whose Prioress was later awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for the nunnery’s role in saving sixty Jewish children and twenty adults from the Gestapo in 1944. Misi’s sister was saved by the Carmelite nuns of Kőbánya. Béla and Pali, his paternal uncles both wound up as forced labour soldiers on the Russian front, the former ‘disappearing’ and the latter surviving the siege of Stalingrad. Pali’s wife was deported to Auschwitz but, miraculously, both of them survived, as did Misi’s paternal grandmother who had remained in their Budapest apartment. She did not wear a yellow star and neither did she move into the ghetto, but somehow got through the war alive. It took thirty-five years for Misi to gather enough strength to visit Balassagyarmat, a similar story to many others who were forced to leave their beloved Hungarian villages. Many others never went back, and those still alive probably never will.

The final ‘survivor’s story’ recorded by Daisy Birnbaum is that of Ágnes, who was born in Endrőd, a small town in eastern Hungary, although her happiest summer memories were of her grandmother’s home at Zalaegerszeg in western Hungary. Ági’s much-adored father left their flat in Budapest for the forced labour camp ‘one evening in November’ and she never saw him again. She wrote the following piece of prose (an extract from which is given here) recalling the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945, including her return to Endrőd:

New Year’s Eve, someone tells fortunes from the residue of some black liquid. Everybody prognosticates. The key turns to the right in the prayer-book: We will survive. Wedding band in the bottom of a glass of water. What do you see? A cross. Your father will not return. Tell us, dear spirit, when will the ghetto be liberated? Slowly, the name of a month appears on the paper: January.

In January, a Russian soldier enters the building and points toward the exit. Marching columns. We break into a yarn depot and on the way back we exchange thread for bread. I drop the ten rolls of machine twist I am supposed to carry. The snow is knee-high on the road; the soles of my shoes are of cardboard. I walk the distance of Monor to Szolnok, practically unconscious. From Szolnok on, there is a train, a beautiful, uncovered cattle-car, one can sit down in, and we reach the village in a day.

Returning to Endrőd was anything but simple for Ági. She couldn’t walk as her toes were frost-bitten. She was given two wooden planks by a local peasant. Fastening them to her feet, she practised walking. Her mother is suffering from scurvy due to vitamin deficiency; She worked on a hand-driven carding-machine, torturing her body to provide milk, bread and soap for them. There was no husband or father left in their lives. A small kitchen was to be their home; there they lived, unaware even of what was happening in the village. There were no newspapers, no radio. She wrote that: It might be three months before we learn what had happened beyond the borders of the country.

Their apartment in Budapest had been ransacked, therefore they tried to resume life at Endrőd, but after a while it became unbearable. They first moved to Szeged, and finally returned to Budapest. Of her relatives in the countryside, Ágnes’ uncle died of starvation at Kőszeg and her paternal grandparents were deported together with her father’s sister. They were put to work on a farm in Austria, where Ági’s grandfather drove a tractor. They survived, despite the ‘disappearance’ of their son, Ági’s father. Being Jewish was never a simple issue in her life because she would always remember the gigantic capital Zs in her father’s military record book, and that she had to grow up fatherless. However, she always felt that she was Hungarian, even if she had only by chance. She never left Hungary, because she chose to be a Hungarian … Like nearly all Budapest children of that time, and especially those of the Jewish elementary school on Hollán utca, Ágnes was just a generation away from country life, having relatives in the countryside. The deportations of 1944 fractured that connection forever for Hungary’s Jews. Outside the capital, all Jews were deported, and Jewish children survived the Holocaust just by chance, whereas after the war, Budapest was full of Jewish orphans and half-orphans, because from there the adults were taken to various forced labour camps and sent on death marches.

From February 1945, the children remained largely silent about the recent past, and only by coincidence did they learn that a classmate lived with her aunt or just with her mother. Daisy has written that they didn’t want to remember, just as the adult survivors hesitated to face the memories of the previous terrible years:

We who survived have survived, but there are events in life that one cannot really survive. We try not to think of them all the time, but they are there and rule our lives, and our basic reactions to most things. …

I am writing of middle-class families who were not particularly broad-minded, polished people, but who worked hard, reared their children and were happy when their small savings increased. Many remained in towns and villages in the countryside where they had always lived; from there they were carried off to various extermination camps. These were simple people: even their dreams were grey. But they died incredible deaths, prepared for them by diseased minds. Millions shared their fate but each suffered death individually, death that  would have been unimaginable if they ever contemplated the end of their lives: Killed by gas, shot in the head, death by starvation.

Alluding to Fateless, the English translation (2004) of the novel Sortalanság (1975) by Imre Kertész, Daisy comments that their perishing completed their ‘Fatelessness’ because they were robbed of their adulthood or old age, and of death with dignity. Some of her friends never even turned eleven, a fact that she has never been able to assimilate and a crime she cannot forgive.

The ‘Disappeared’ – The Mysterious Fate of Wallenberg & Langfelder:

On 14 January in Budapest, Wallenberg appeared in a Russian car. He said that he had transferred his effects and a briefcase containing 222,000 pengős to his flat in Erzsebét királyné utca in Zugló. This was at the ‘city limits’ and may have functioned as the first Soviet detention and interrogation centre at the rear of the advancing Red Army, but it’s perhaps more likely that he was in the Soviet headquarters which had been established at the Széchenyi baths building where he could have made contact with officers of high rank and position. On 15 January, there was one final attempt to blow up the Budapest ghetto. Kasztner claimed that the destruction was prevented by General Winkelmann, acting under the orders of Kurt Becher, the SS officer with whom Kasztner had been negotiating on behalf ‘the Joint’, the international Zionist organisation. Although Kasztner was in Vienna during the siege of Budapest, making the ‘trade’ of twenty million francs with Becher, he claimed that the high-ranking officer called Winkelmann, who forbade the Arrow-Cross government’s action. The Germans told the Arrow-Cross minister that emptying the ghetto would not be in the best interests of Germany. Of course, many claimed, at Nuremberg, that they had acted ‘heroically’ in terms of humanity in the dying days of the Reich.

On the morning of the 16th or 17th, Wallenberg caused a stir when he appeared at the International ghetto, at the Swedish Embassy office at Tátra utca 6, together with a Soviet lieutenant colonel and Langfelder. At this point, the eye-witness accounts differ, but they agree that he left in a car headed east of the city centre, towards Gödölő and Debrecen. But it seems that the Soviet motorcycle escort took them on a roundabout route through the city, either due to the military operations or to scout out the diplomat’s personal connections and learn of his future plans. It also appears that the promise that he was free to leave was pure bluff. But in 1947, the Soviet authorities issued a statement denying that Wallenberg and his Hungarian driver had been taken away by their forces. They pointed out that:

It must not be forgotten that in an area where the Soviet forces then were, in that period when very heavy fighting was taking place in Hungary, all sorts of possibilties could have arisen. Wallenberg travelled at his own risk in areas controlled by Soviet forces.

On the 16th, before Wallenberg’s putative departure for Debrecen, the quarter containing the ‘protected houses’ was liberated, and the morning of the 18th brought the other tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest release from the Arrow-Cross terror, from mining and from air-raids. Advancing from house-to-house (often from cellar to cellar), the Soviet forces reached the Károly körút end of the central ghetto. They demolished the wooden gates of the ghetto, and in several places the palisades too. Hansi Brand remembered that it had been snowing the night before and, when she looked outside, the smell of fresh snow seemed stronger than the stench of corpses and smoke. She also recalled the few moments of quiet after Pest fell. In front of ‘the Glass House’, the young halutzim ran out to hug and kiss the first Soviet soldiers they saw. Their enthusiasm was so great that some of the soldiers grabbed their guns to free themselves. The houses and gateways in the ghetto, the streets too, presented a lamentable sight, and the sight and stench of death dominated everywhere. Outside the arcade of the Dohány utca synagogue, heaps of corpses lay in the street, frozen hard. Burials began at once in the garden, and the victims lie there to this day. A total of 2,281 bodies were buried in twenty-four common graves, forty-five had been shot – twenty-four women and twenty-one men. The great majority had been dead for weeks and very many were totally naked so that a very large number were unidentifiable. A large proportion of the dead was elderly. Lack of vehicles made the work of burial more difficult, as did the frozen ground and the revulsion felt by the people.

After the Fall – The Battle for Buda:

Along the Danube, the hotels and restaurants were on fire. German and Hungarian troops withdrew from Pest into Buda and the Germans then blew up the five bridges across the Danube that linked the two halves of the city. Remnants of the German and Hungarian armies crossed over the badly damaged Chain Bridge into the ruins of the old Castle District just before the bridge was destroyed. There were thousands of casualties. The narrow streets and burning buildings made it difficult to reach the bridgehead, and the bridge itself was continually bombarded. Within Buda, particularly around the central fortress which was defended by SS troops, the fighting was intense. Buda also came under heavy attacks both from the air and by advancing Soviet troops from the west. Still, the German Command deemed that the hills were defendable. Of the thirty thousand  German soldiers who eventually tried to break out of Budapest, only 624 reached the German lines. On the same day that Pest fell to the Soviets, Domokos Szent-Iványi returned from his ill-fated diplomatic mission in Moscow, arriving in Debrecen, where a provisional Hungarian government had been formed, with the support of the Soviets. He recalled feeling ‘helpless’ as …

… power was already in the hands of the Russian secret service and the power and influence of Gerő, Rákosi … and of the Hungarian Secret Police was steadily growing.

The provisional government, headed by Miklós Béla Dálnoki, a general who had gone over to the Soviets, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in Moscow on 20 January. Under the terms of the agreement, Hungary was to declare war on Germany; evacuate all territory occupied since 31 December 1937, and pay $300 million in reparations to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. An Allied Control Commission was established to oversee compliance, and Soviet troops remained to occupy the country. Major-General William S Key headed the US delegation to the Commission, and arrived in Hungary in February, overseeing a force of thirty-six enlisted men and sixteen officers on the Commission’s staff.

Eventually, worn out by the sheer force of the Red Army attack, the Germans attempted to break out of their stronghold in Buda, and all but a few thousand were killed or captured. Meanwhile, with Wallenberg’s departure for Debrecen, the Swedish humanitarian action was considered finished in the Tátra utca office. The head of the office, Hugö Wohl, prepared a report and inventory. He put the number of the persons provided with protective passes (SP) and other official Swedish documents at four thousand, the number of Hungarian colleagues named as officials at two hundred, and the total number of their family numbers at four hundred. He estimated the number supplied with Red Cross letters of protection at 2,500. On 27 January, the same day as the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz, a temporary executive committee made an announcement on behalf of the Royal Swedish Embassy. It addressed all the holders of the SP:

Seeing that persons of Jewish origin are now citizens enjoying equal rights, activity has come to a natural end.

More than two-thirds of the pre-war of Hungarian Jewish population perished in the Holocaust, and it might have been as high as three-quarters had it not been for the work of Wallenberg and the Swiss Vice-Consul, Carl Lutz, who rescued tens of thousands of European Jews, many of whom had found a haven in Budapest as Jewish refugees from all over central-eastern Europe. Lutz, a career diplomat who had been educated in the United States, was a religious man who was a convinced anti-Nazi. Seventy-two buildings in Budapest were declared annexes of the Swiss Legation, with diplomatic immunity. Working from the US Legation, because the Swiss represented US interests during the war, he is credited with saving over sixty thousand Jews.

On 9 February, the Budapest Police HQ announced that after 18 January the Soviet authorities had removed the police from their headquarters and barracks. Policemen had to make their way to work every day, and scarcely half of them reached their stations. They were picked up on such a scale that there were as many as three thousand of them in a prison camp in Gödöllő. Vilmos Bondor summed up the nature of the close of the fifty-one-day Battle of Budapest and the first months of 1945:

In the capital, chaos reigned. Russian deserters formed gangs of bandits and plundered. The pockets of SS did the same. The newly appointed Hungarian authorities looked on helplessly. They lacked manpower and experience. Police appointments were made from among the comrades, and those with any expertise were soon in prison. But what made their work more risible was that they were not to touch Russian soldiers, who did as they pleased.

Buda eventually fell on 13 February. The City finally surrendered. The entire siege of the capital had lasted one hundred days. The combined Soviet and Romanian losses in Budapest totalled more than seventy thousand men; the Hungarian army lost 16,500; the German army, thirty thousand. More than forty thousand civilians had been killed, including some seven thousand Jews.

About forty thousand Hungarian troops were taken prisoner by the Soviets. To round out the numbers, they took fifty thousand civilians as well. Everyone in uniform, even firefighters and postmen, was taken prisoner, as were men lining up for bread or going in search for water.  Around one-third of the soldiers and civilians were returned to Hungary after a few years of forced labour in the Soviet Union. Of the fifty thousand Jews ‘lent’ to the Reich to build fortifications around Vienna, only about twenty thousand were still alive in April 1945. Fewer than one in ten of the men in the Jewish labour brigades survived the war. During the fifty-one day battle, a quarter of the buildings were destroyed and three-quarters of them were damaged. Not a single bridge remained over the Danube. The ruins and rubble of the Chainbrige can be seen on the right. In the background, the effect of the fierce fighting around Buda Castle is apparent.  As at Stalingrad, Hitler did not permit any negotiation by his already completely conquered armies leading to some deal.

The German military command in Budapest asked for reinforcements, but Hitler had none to spare. Ignoring advice from his generals, he had thrown eight divisions into a last desperate counter-attack on the Allied troops in the Saar region in an attempt to retake the Ardennes borderlands in the ‘Battle of the Bulge’. The last attempt by the German forces in the capital in the Buda hills and the Pilis forests occurred through contravention of the Führer’s orders; by then it was futile to do so, however. Hitler’s determination to retain the possession of the Vienna Basin and the oil fields in Zala County by holding out in the Budapest area and thus buying time was also doomed to failure. When Hitler finally decided to send a Panzer division to Hungary, it was too late to relieve the besieged forces in Buda and was used instead to hold up the Red Army’s advance into western Hungary, with its important oil-fields. After Budapest was lost, Hitler’s Sixth Panzer Division still tried to hold out west of Lake Balaton against the combined Ukrainian and Russian assault.

‘Potato-peeling’ – The Mass Rapine of the Red Army:

Above: Two Red Army soldiers during the Battle of Budapest in the early weeks of 1945. The behaviour of some of the Soviet troops in the aftermath of the battle became infamous.

For their part, the soldiers of the Red Army, who had been told by Stalin to capture the Hungarian capital in ‘a few days’ had taken more than a hundred days to force a surrender. In the immediate aftermath of their victory, some of the Soviets took their frustrations on the women of Budapest. Ivan Polcz was one of the first to witness what happened. He was thirteen on 11 February, just two days before the surrender, and was the only child of a respectable middle-class Hungarian family. During the siege, he and his parents had hidden in the cellar of a relative’s house in the suburbs. They had all heard rumours of how the Soviets ‘did not respect women at all’ but many people did not believe that the Red Army soldiers would commit rape. Two nights before Ivan’s birthday, everyone in the cellar had heard heavy bombing. And then, he said, all of a sudden two Russian soldiers wearing white stormed into the cellar holding machine guns. The Red Army soldiers shouted that they were looking for Germans. Finding none, they ran back into the street. Horrified, Ivan watched as half an hour later German soldiers came into the cellar. But, not finding their enemy, they rushed away again. Then, on the night of his birthday, …

… an incredible number of Russian soldiers stormed into the cellar with guns. If it hadn’t been so frightening we would have been laughing our heads off because they were dressed with other people’s clothes. Men were even wearing women’s boots … They asked us if we had jewellery, but apart from taking our watches and some of the clothes which they liked they didn’t do anything. … And so we were quite OK with them. And we thought to ourselves that the idea they were aggressive with women, this is probably an invention of the Nazis to threaten us.

But a few days later, the atmosphere changed. At about ten o’clock at night, two Red Army soldiers came into the cellar where, by now, about twenty-five people were sheltering, a mixture of elderly couples, younger couples and children. The expressions on the soldiers’ faces were menacing. One of the young Hungarian husbands acted as interpreter and asked the soldiers what they wanted. When they told him, Ivan remembered, ‘he started to tremble’. They had said that they needed a woman:

Of course, the interpreter got frightened because he was a young man with a wife who was ther on one of those beds … so he said that there were only mothers and elderly people, and they should leave us alone. I was terribly afraid because my mother was … for her age, forty-eight … a good-looking woman. Next to her was her younger sister, and next to them was a counsellor from the embassy with his wife and his sixteen-year-old daughter.

When the soldiers reached the far end of the cellar they found a young blonde woman of seventeen, the maid of the couple who owned the villa. This was the woman they chose. They grabbed her and she started crying and pleading, shouting to the rest of the people in the cellar, Please help me! Help me! Ivan went on:

Everybody was frozen – a stone. … This was a terrible moment. I will never forget about it. Everybody knew by then that the women were in real danger. … And then something happened which was at first sight quite strange. The owner of the house, a retired military officer, started to talk to the maid. He said, “Please make this sacrifice for the sake of the country. And with this you will be able to save the other women here who will never forget this.” At the time, I thought this was a very mean statement, that he told her to “make this sacrifice on the altar of the Hungarian nation”, but in a way she did save my mother and all the other young women there. … Then there was quite a lot of crying and the Russian grabbed her and took her upstairs … and after fifteen minutes this girl staggered back down the stairs. She was absolutely collapsing, and she said that she had been the victim of a very fierce atrocity and rape, and this animal even beat her up because she had been crying. And of course everyone else was crying … when the saw this poor girl they didn’t even dare to look at her. … It was a terrible case. … Even today I can still remember it quite vividly and I get gossebumps, even though I am seventy-five years of age.    

The German and Arrow-Cross terror had been ended, but the survivors were already experiencing the first signs of a form of despotism and dictatorship which was just as inhuman in its consequences. In the aftermath of the Red Army’s advance across  Budapest, rape became almost ubiquitous. The pointless struggle had brought upon the country a series of ‘last-ditch’ sufferings, dreadful ruin and destruction. The worst suffering of the Hungarian population is due to the rape of women, a contemporary report from the Swiss embassy in Budapest asserted. The supporting evidence for this statement was clear:

Rapes – affecting all age groups from ten to seventy – are so common that very few women in Hungary have been spared. … The misery is made worse by the sad fact that many Russian soldiers are diseased and there are absolutely no medicines in Hungary.

Having hidden successfully from the Arrow-Cross for months, Jewish women and children were now just as much under threat from the Red Army as their gentile neighbours. One of Daisy Birnbaum’s friends, eleven-year-old Kati, had been hiding for weeks with her mother in the coal cellar of an apartment house where, from time to time, they received food from unknown benefactors who were not permitted to see them. Daisy commented that her mother saved her from sensing the deadly danger that surrounded them. Their area was liberated on 15 January, but at that point, Kati was not permitted out because her mother feared the Russians. The Soviet soldiers had a euphemism for their actions, which reveals how ‘routine’ and systematic it became. It was called ‘peeling potatoes’, based on the requirement of the subjugated women to help out in the military kitchens. However, they were taken from their homes and raped. Ági, a (then) twelve-year-old Jewish schoolfriend of Daisy’s, who went to live in a villa in Buda after her mother was taken into forced labour, recalled how, after finding her ‘Aunt Joli’, her mother’s friend there, they first came into contact with Russian soldiers:

There was very little to eat; they were all hungry, all the time. However, the sound of cannons was getting closer and, suddenly, Russian soldiers appeared in the street. Fortunately, Aunt Joli spoke Slovak and was able to communicate with them. Nonetheless, the Russians reappeared each night and behaved in a horrendous fashion, trying to carry off Aunt Joli ‘to peel potatoes’. She saved herself by pointing out that she had to take care of the children. The situation became unbearable, and they escaped on foot, until a horse-drawn carriage, heading for Budaörs, gave them a lift. There, they moved into an empty house, sharing it with a large number of refugees. However, just a few hours later, there too Russian soldiers arrived, drunk, threatening them with their machine guns, and wanting to take Aunt Joli with them. The children had to get up from their sleeping places to show how many of them were in Aunt Joli’s charge. The soldiers sobered up by the morning and apologised.

Ági B in 1939.

Hansi Brand, the wife of the Zionist activist Joel Brand, who worked closely with Rezső Kasztner to get the surviving Hungarian Jews from Budapest to Palestine, was also threatened by Soviet soldiers in the cellars, where she hid with her two children. One of her boys, although still quite small, told his mother to hide behind him in the corner. When the Russians told the women to come and help “peel potatoes”, Hansi remained in the corner, hidden by her two little boys while the other women went. She wondered how Dani knew what to do but later realised bitterly that “he had seen so much already, his childhood was lost.” She and her boys survived the siege underground.

Not all the women were able to escape the Russian soldiers, however.  The victims of rape included children like fifteen-year-old Ágnes Karlik, whose harrowing testimony has been recorded on the BBC Behind Closed Doors series which accompanies Laurence Rees’ (2008) book (see the list of sources below). Ágnes had been hiding in a cellar with her family during the siege and she found the first Red Army soldiers she met not unpleasant, … just making sure there were no enemies in the building. They didn’t stay long. They tried, actually, to be friendly. But then ‘these rough type of soldiers’ entered the building and they started to pull women out… to come and help peel potatoes. She and her sister were dragged outside, where there was snow on the ground, and into a tent nearby.  She was raped twice, once in the tent in front of her grandmother, and the second time the following night by two Soviet soldiers in a secluded section of the cellar. Her sister, aged fourteen, was also raped. They were sexually naive, having no idea what was happening to them, and the effect on Ágnes of these rapes was profound and lifelong:

For a long time I felt really resentful against men, being able to do such a thing without any sort of good reason. … It makes you feel really resentful against mankind, more or less.

In the hospital, immediately after the second attack, Ágnes was given an internal examination to check that she was not seriously injured. This was not an uncommon occurrence as a result of the severity and violence of the attacks that many women endured. Neither were these cases confined to Budapest, although – according to this author’s oral anecdotal sources – they seem to have been more common there. Medical student Barna Andrásofszky witnessed a case in a village outside the capital in the spring of 1945. He was called to a house by an elderly woman and was told that there was a sick young girl inside. When he went into the living room, he saw that it was in ‘disarray’ and a young woman of about twenty-five was lying on a bed, covered with a blanket:

I went up to her and took the blanket – it was covered with blood. And she was crying and she kept saying that she was going to die, and that she didn’t want to live any more.

Barna was told that the young woman had been raped by between ten and fifteen men. She was bleeding intensely from internal injuries sustained in the attack. He could not stem the flow of blood, and the woman was taken away to a hospital. He commented on this experience:

It was very difficult to see as a reality what the Nazi propaganda was spreading. But here we could see that in reality. And also we heard about many other terrible situations like this.

There have been many Red Army veterans who have tried to contextualise these crimes as a common, if regrettable, historical occurrence in times of war. But in the context of the Second World War in Europe, this excuse is not sustainable. As far as the crime of rapine was concerned, the Soviets were ‘in a league of their own’ according to Laurence Rees and other historians. The Western Allies committed no comparable crimes of this enormity, and mass rape was not tolerated either as a ‘weapon’ of war or as one of the ‘spoils’ of war. In Hungary, both were used to excuse it, as it began before the surrender and continued long after. There are no accurate numbers for the overall number of women raped by Soviet men in Hungary, but the crime was clearly conducted on a massive scale. One estimate is that around fifty thousand were raped in Budapest alone, and, even today, the silence from the countryside can be interpreted as the result of the understandable reluctance of young women and their families to report the crime unless it resulted in a medical emergency, as in the case ‘coincidentally’ reported to Barna Andrásofszky. From the capital itself, some cases were reported to the Soviet military authorities in 1945. The report came from the Hungarian Communists in Köbánya, a suburb on the eastern approaches to the city. They claimed that when the Red Army arrived, they committed a series of sexual crimes in an outbreak of …

… mindless, savage hatred run riot. Mothers were raped by drunken soldiers in front of their children and husbands. Girls as young as twelve were dragged from their fathers and raped in succession by ten to fifteen soldiers and often infected with venereal disease. … We know that intelligent members of the Red Army are communists, but if we turn to them for help they have fits of rage and threaten to shoot us, saying: “And what did you do in the Soviet Union? You not only raped our wives before our eyes, but for good measure you killed them together with their children, set fire to our villages and razed our cities to the ground.”

As a result, nothing official was said about the crimes. Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, never referred to them. Although there were occasional attempts to enforce the official line that rape committed by Soviet soldiers was a crime, so few cases were prosecuted that it is impossible not to conclude that the offence was often tolerated by the Soviet authorities. One of the few Red Army soldiers prepared to acknowledge that rapes occurred at all in occupied eastern Europe, Fiodor Khropatiy, remarked that:

… no-one paid attention to these things. On the contrary, soldiers gossiped about it, and they were proud, they felt like heroes, that he slept with such and such a woman, one or two or three. This is what soldiers shared with each other … it was normal behaviour. Even if somebody was killed, such a thing wouldn’t be reported, to say nothing of the fact of a soldier sleeping with a girl. … I feel hurt, because our army earned itself such a reputation, and I feel angry about the people who were acting that way. I am negative about such things, very negative. … To some extent, I can understand the soldiers. If you are at war for four years, and in the most horrible conditions, this … violent behaviour can be justified. I can justify the sodiers’ desire to rape a woman, but not … the actual performance. Of course, it’s natural to understand the desire to have a woman, because officers and soldiers, for four years, were deprived of any sex.

Fiodor Khropatiy estimated that a sizeable minority, perhaps as great as thirty per cent, committed rape. Stalin himself justified this crime on more than one occasion when it was brought to his attention, in public, including in the winter of 1944-45, claiming, angrily, that his eastern European allies ought to understand if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle. On another occasion, when he was told that Red Army soldiers were sexually mistreating German refugees, he is reported to have said: We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have some initiative. The frustrations of the Red Army besiegers were first taken out on the women of Budapest in acts of mass rapine, but they were then repeated all across eastern Europe as 1945 progressed, especially in Germany.

The ‘Changing of the Guard’:

Aside from the physical and psychological toll on Hungary taken by the last year of the war in Eastern Europe, forty per cent of the national wealth, accumulated by the work of generations, had also been lost. Meanwhile, society had fallen apart, and it quickly turned out that it was incapable of resisting the new tyranny, the Stalinist dictatorship. On his return from Moscow to Debrecen on 18 January, Domokos Szent-Iványi had written in his manuscript journal of the desperate, almost hopeless situation in which Hungary found herself in 1945. He felt that the country had once again been ‘sacrificed by the West’ and that the dismemberment of Central and in particular East-Central Europe made possible the extension of Nazi and later of Soviet domination in Europe. In February, Colonel-General Gábor Faragho, one of the three original members of the Hungarian Delegation to the Kremlin, where he had signed the provisional armistice terms on 11 October, and who had now been made Minister for Food and Supplies, drove from Debrecen to Budapest, escorted by the Soviet military. Szent-Iványi asked Faragho to contact members of the “intelligentsia” to establish a liberal democratic Party, thus completing the political basis for a pluralist national assembly and interim government, since four parties had already been formed. Out of these conversations, ‘a rather non-viable political Party’ was formed.

But, in these early months of 1945, a coalition of parties, the National Independence Front had brought together the leading parties including the Smallholders, Communists and Social Democrats. Despite their conflicting outlooks and endeavours, consensus still prevailed as to the most immediate tasks. Its goals were to establish independence and break with Hitler; reconstruct the war-torn economy through land reform and some nationalisation of industry; encourage the efforts of private enterprise; maintain close co-operation with the neighbouring countries, with the United States and the Soviet Union. The first task in achieving these was to sign an armistice with the allies which took place on 20 January, requiring Hungary to liquidate all pro-German and Fascist organisations and to accept the supervision of the Allied Control Commission as to the execution of these stipulations. As the latter body was under the direction of Marshal Voroshilov, this last clause in effect legalised Soviet influence, especially as it was in the authority of the Commission to ban political parties, to arrest people and to exercise censorship.

The ‘changing of the guard’ also started at the differing levels of administration, and special committees were charged with ascertaining whether the post-1939 conduct of officials violated Hungarian interests. The gendarmerie was dissolved and its tasks transferred to a reorganised and enlarged police force. As both of these operations took place under the auspices of the Communist-dominated Ministry of the Interior, the results were quite predictable. Simultaneously with the banning of twenty-five parties and associations qualified as ‘extreme rightist’, the ÁVO (State Security Police) started to make arrests, and ‘people’s courts’, each consisting of lay members and a trained judge, began to prosecute those charged with war crimes. Similarly to 1919-20, among the sixty thousand who were charged and the ten thousand who were sentenced by summary procedures, there were many victims of a political showdown, and those who could not be brought to court but were considered as personae non-gratae were interned by the police without further ado. Nevertheless, the majority of those who received sentences were indeed guilty of crimes against humanity.

Of the wartime political leaders, Horthy was in exile in Portugal, where he eventually died, and Kallay and Lakatos were spared because of their anti-German stance, though it had been somewhat equivocal. But Bárdossy, Imrédy, Sztójay, Szálasi and the Arrow-Cross ministers were among the 189 executed. The Provisional Government also undertook land reform. All of the coalition parties agreed that the system of latifundia would be liquidated and that Hungary would be transformed from a country of three million landless labourers or peasants with seven acres or less into one whose agrarian sector was dominated by prosperous peasant farms or ‘small-holdings’, but also including collective large holdings.

The land reform had far-reaching social, economic and political consequences, not least because the Communist Party was able to use the glory of satisfying the hunger for land to win support in rural Hungary.  Their Minister for Agriculture in the coalition government, Imre Nagy, became especially popular, remembered from then on as ‘the land distributor’. Meanwhile, the Communists began to fill the political vacuum in Budapest, creating a mass party of half a million members as a result of an unscrupulous recruiting campaign. Among other social groups, some among the decimated Jewry joined out of gratitude to the liberators and a search for a new sense of community, while their previous tormentors, the Arrow-Cross men, were rewarded with impunity if they exchanged their green party membership card for a red one.

Village people recalled how at least one of their number, who had helped terrorise and deport the Jewish community in Apostag (whose synagogue, now the Village Hall, is pictured on the right) before its deportation, was not only able to escape justice for his crimes but also became a local policeman. Obviously, by the spring of 1945, the wheel of fate had come full circle. When the Soviet forces eventually ‘liberated’ the last Hungarian town in early April 1945, barely a month was left of World War II in Europe. Even before it had ended, the Hungarian people had been forced to exchange one form of dictatorship for another.

 

 

Sources:

Szabolcs Szita (2012), The Power of Humanity: Raoul Wallenberg and his Aides in Budapest. Budapest: Corvina.

Marianna D. Birnbaum (2016), 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes. Budapest: Corvina.

Laurence Rees (2008), World War Two Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West. London: BBC Books.

László Kontler (2009), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing House.

Anna Porter (2007), Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust. London: Constable.

Gyula Kodolányi & Nóra Szekér (eds.) (2013), Domokos Szent-Iványi: The Hungarian Independence Movement, 1939-46. Budapest: Hungarian Review Books.

 

Extracts & photos from Marianna ‘Daisy’ Birnbaum’s (2016) book, 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes:

Daisy, as named on her letter of protection

D. TAMÁS:

Tomi was born in Budapest, in 1931. His father owned a large factory that produced light fixtures; his mother was a concert pianist. The entirely assimilated family, living on the first floor of a Rózsadomb villa, decided to take the final step and converted to Catholicism, mainly to avoid the increasing restrictions affecting Jews.

Nonetheless, in June 1944 … they had to leave their home. Tomi, his mother and his older sister Edit were moved to a ‘Jewish House’. By then, Tomi’s father was forced in a forced labour camp. After October 15, all three had to report to the brick factory of Óbuda, from where they were supposed to be deported. Tomi’s father was able to provide them with Swiss protection documents and, therefore, three days later, they were moved to the overcrowded ghetto. In the ghetto, Tomi shared a room with six children but he succeeded in smuggling them all out because he had two copies of the document proving that he was a Roman Catholic. According to his plan, two boys left the ghetto (one at each exit) with the Christian documents. Outside they met, and one returned with both copies, and the ‘game’ went on until all seven of them were outside the ghetto walls.

Escaping thus from the ghetto, the thirteen-year-old Tomi first returned to the Rózsadomb villa to call on their neighbour … the Rector of Pázmány Péter Tudományegyetem (Hungary’s oldest university). With his help, Tomi was enrolled in school in the Seventh District where the Rector … accepted him as a ‘refugee from Győr’. Thereafter, Tomi regularly went to their old place of business, where, by arrangement, a ‘Strobmann’, … (the property) manager gave him money for his support. … 

On 10th December, when Tomi again went to get money, he learned that his father was in the … hospital of the ghetto, having avoided the fate of seventy-five other Jewish men whom the Arrow Cross soldiers shot into the Danube at the Lánchíd (Chain bridge). He was one of the three, who during the last seconds before the shots were fired, jumped into the water. At the Hotel Hungária, several hundred feet from the place of execution, on the order of a Hungarian officer, Tomi’s father was pulled out from the Danube and sent to the ghetto. ‘He was so fortunate that he didn’t even catch a cold,’ remembers Tomi. … 

On 15th December, on his way to class, Tomi was stopped by another ‘refugee’ who told him that the Arrow Cross was conducting a police raid in the school. He had no choice but to linger all day in the city park. There, at about ten o’clock in the evening, he was stopped by the security guard of the Opera House. Figuring out that the boy was Jewish, the man offered him shelter in his own home, fully aware of the danger to himself and his family that such as gesture implied. Thereafter, Tomi visited the hospital from his new hiding place until, on the advice of his father, he moved to his uncle in the ‘protected house’ … where he survived the siege of Budapest on the sixth floor, living on two slices of bread and three glasses of water a day for several weeks.

Tomi was liberated on January 15, 1945. Ten days later he learned that both his parents and his sister had survived. … the Arrow Cross soldiers (seventeen of them) were tried and hanged for the murder of the seventy-three Jews, while Tomi’s father richly rewarded the man who had hidden and saved his son.

ÉVIKE:

She was my second cousin, but I thought of her as my closest relative because we were inseparable in Komárom, because we were both only children and of the same age, and because I, who was three weeks older, only seldom boasted with that advantage. My mother and Aunt Manci, Évike’s mother, were first cousins and close friends; they were even sent together to a boarding school in Wiesbaden. … Aunt Manci’s family was deported and Évike too was taken to Auschwitz. I often wonder: Who held her hand on the ramp as they stood in front of Mengele?   

NAIL POLISH

Our friend Ági C. also lived in Komárom. … We were mean little girls: Ági very much wanted to play with us, and she often had to pay a high price for that. We soiled her dress, and when we spilt nail polish over her hair had to be cut short. Aunt Ilus forbade her to come over to play with us, and Uncle Jenő complained to my grandparents. I was seriously scolded, and my grandfather wrote to my parents … I have her picture in front of me: I am deeply ashamed and feel very sad.

Ági was deported to Auschwitz with her mother where they were immediately gassed. Uncle Jenő, who was for years in a labour camp, survived those terrible times by some miracle and returned to Komárom in 1945. He found no one alive from his family and lived alone for months in their old house until he met Rózsi, an early acquaintance. She too had been sent to Auschwitz with her mother and her own daughter, also named Ági. The child clung to her grandmother. Therefore those two were sent to the gas chamber and Rózsi found herself on the other side with those who had survived the first selection. She was transferred from Auschwitz and worked in an ammunition factory. Broken, the lone survivor from her family, Rózsi too returned to Komárom. After a relatively short time, Rózsi and Uncle Jenő decided to marry.

Soon after, four or five young women, survivors who had been taken to Sweden after the liberation of the camps in order to help their recovery, returned to Komárom. They recognised Rózsi as the dreaded ‘capo’ (a prisoner assigned by the Nazis to supervise the rest of the prisoners in the camp) who beat and tortured them in Auschwitz and later in the ammunition factory where they too had been transferred. … They visited Uncle Jenő and – obviously – told him of what Rózsi had been known for in the camps.

Allegedly, Uncle Jenő pounced on Rózsi, who barely protected herself, and almost strangled her. With a great effort, the neighbours succeeded in pulling her off Rózsi; they placed the gasping woman on the grass and tried to revive her. Uncle Jenő went into the house, returned with a bag and disappeared from Komárom. It was later rumoured that he had gone to Palestine … two days later, Rózsi too left town.

   

The ‘Hungarista’ Horror:

Still inspired by the obsession of ultimate German victory, the reign of terror inflicted by the Arrow-Cross Party caused immense suffering to the people of ‘Hungaria United Ancient Lands’, as the new masters chose to call the country, practically confined to the capital and Transdanubia. Adolf Eichmann returned, and the Jewish population were now exposed to being systematically exterminated; despite acts of international and Hungarian solidarity, nearly half of the 200,000 Jews of the capital fell victim to horrible mass murder and few of the fifty thousand driven westwards in labour battalions survived. Among the Hungarian civilian population, in early November, armed Arrow Cross men, supporting the ‘Hungarista’ Szalási government, had begun murdering Jews from Budapest who had been sent to forced labour details in and surrounding the capital, on the roads into the city. In addition, large numbers of women and girls were assembled and systematically robbed, beaten and kicked in public.

A Child Alone:

‘Daisy’ Birnbaum was just ten years old at the beginning of November 1944 when she wound up – alone – in a feather depot in Budapest. Her mother had had to report to the Óbuda brick factory, so she ‘placed’ Daisy with her uncle Dezső, because her father was away in the forced labour camp. Very soon, however, her uncle and his wife, Aunt Ida, sent her with an unfamiliar woman to the cellar of a pillow and duvet factory owned by one of their female friends. This woman was obviously Christian and she left a small basketful of food with Daisy and told her not to turn on the light since the cellar could be seen into from the street. The tiny windows did indeed look out into the street, showing the pavement under the feet of the people passing by. Her uncle and aunt were supposed to come by the evening, but they did not show up. As she later wrote:

Instead, there were innumerable rats, frolicking among the sacks and in the bales of feather. I was terribly scared and knew that I could not spend another night there. I decided to take my chances … and try to get back to my uncle’s apartment … to learn what had happened.

… My only worry was a possible air raid, because without Christian documents I would not have been permitted to enter the raid shelter, whereas no-one was supposed to be outside during a raid. There was no alarm, but – even worse – I suddenly spied a group of Arrow Cross thugs conducting a roundup, rather far away, but still on the next corner.

There was no way out. I had to continue. As if a miracle, an officer in uniform stepped out from a house. Without giving it a second thought, I walked up to him and asked if I could walk with him, because I was scared of a possible air raid. … I… mumbled something about having to pick up that basket, to give him a reason for my being in the street. He took my hand and told me that he was on a furlough from the front where he would return in a week and that he too had a wife and children in Debrecen, to which he could no longer travel, and therefore he too had been staying with relatives in Pest. By then we reached the group of Arrow Crossers. My new friend simply waved and we were immediately let through. At the next corner he said, “Well, good luck to you” and leaving me, turned into the side street.

I will never know whether he believed that I was really close to my destination, or saw through my ploy and decided to save me. I was ten years old … and, … in that fateful second, albeit rashly, I made one of the smartest decisions of my entire life.

Daisy, as named on her letter of protection

Meanwhile, Daisy’s mother and other Jewish forced labourers at the brickworks were enduring appalling conditions. In his confidential two-page report to Geneva dated 11 November, the Red Cross delegate Friedrich Born described the Óbuda-Újlak brickworks, from his on-the-spot experiences, as a concentration camp. He said that the conditions beggared description, finding a crowd of five or six thousand starving Jewish prisoners in the open works yard, soaked to the skin and frozen to the marrow, in a totally apathetic and desperate condition. Some who had committed suicide lay on the ground. He asked where the group of people including twelve to fourteen-year-old boys were was being taken, and received a shocking reply from the Arrow-Cross guard: They’re going to be boiled down for soap!

Vice-consul Lutz, attempting to release Swiss protégés, witnessed similar heart-rending scenes. He was profoundly shaken by the way in which many pleaded to be saved, and he saw the final flickerings of the will to live being snuffed out. Those who pushed forward were beaten with dog-whips until they lay with bleeding faces on the ground. Lutz and his wife, horrified at what they saw, could not help at all and were themselves threatened with weapons. In mid-November, Daisy’s mother returned to Pest and the two of them ended up in what had been a placement centre for housemaids, but whose function had changed to being a ‘refugee’ centre for women and children fleeing from the Germans, the Arrow-Cross and the Russians. Daisy and her mother had false Christian papers with false names that they had memorised, but none of the other new ‘tenants’ asked about the details of these ‘refugees from Nyírbátor’, a village or small town in north-eastern Hungary. A couple of days later, an elderly lady arrived and was assigned a bed and nightstand in the same room. She introduced herself, telling them that she had recently arrived from Nyírbátor, fleeing from the Russians. She also asked if there was a chapel in the building because she wanted to say her prayers. Daisy’s mother,

… with a knowing smile on her face, advised the woman that there was indeed a chapel in the basement, and that we too were from Nyírbátor. The poor woman turned pale, staggered slightly, and had to hold on to the iron rail of her bed. But she pulled herself together and said that my mother looked familiar, that they must have seen each other at home, perhaps in church. Even I found this statement silly, since even I knew that Nyírbátor was a village where, most probably, everybody knew one another. … Soon we were given dinner in the common dining hall, and after the meal, the lady went down to pray in the chapel. She returned shortly before the lights went out. … a soft but audible voice from her bed began to chant, “Shma Yisrael, Adonai elochenu…”

A few days after their arrival, a kindly woman began a conversation with Daisy, asking her questions about Nyírbátor and her family. Her mother had told her always to say that they used to live behind the Reformed Church, that her father was at the front and that they had left in order to escape the Russians. However, when it came to further details, she should always tell the truth about her life, to avoid contradicting herself. So, when the woman asked what she missed most from her old home, she mentioned her dolls’ house:

I supposed she thought it would make me feel good to talk about it and urged me to describe it. Slowly, I began telling her that the house had four rooms, a bedroom, a dining room, a living room and a nursery, describing the furniture … In the end, she exclaimed, “Then, this was like a genuine house.” I responded, “Indeed, I even placed the yellow star over the entrance.” I immediately realised what I had done and wished the earth would open and swallow me up. I was ashamed, and afraid of the danger I had brought upon us. But the woman did not say a word, as if she had not heard the last sentence. … It turned that she too was Jewish…

A week later, they became homeless again; we urgently abandoned the house, because someone denounced the manager, claiming that she was hiding Jews in the building, It took a long time, much after the war, until her mother was able to convince Daisy that the manager of the house was not denounced because of her description of the dolls’ house, complete with its yellow star.       

As a novel form of murder, the party servicemen carried out group executions on the Danube embankment in the night. Incidents of the slaughter of Jews had occurred in October, but from the end of November, they became daily occurrences. People were murdered in the party houses, in the streets and squares of the city, occasionally in hospitals and flats, as well as on the banks of the Danube. It is almost inconceivable that while all this was happening, trams ran, cinema and places of entertainment opened and sporting events were reported in the papers, while in public parks, half-naked corpses could be seen and people were hanged with abusive placards around their necks. This latest form of group killing went on as long as the circumstances of the Soviet siege of Budapest permitted the banks of the river to be approached. At a cautious estimate, between 3,600 and 4,000 people were shot into the Danube.

Daisy Birnbaum had a narrow escape from this fate, as recorded in an earlier article in this series. As her book recounts, she was accidentally thrown into a column of about thirty people marching toward the lower embankment of the Danube under the guns of two young Arrow Cross hoodlums. With the exception of her parents, she never mentioned this episode to anyone, but in 1996, when the Historical Atlas of the Holocaust first appeared (published by the Holocaust Memorial Museum of Washington), she found an annotated map showing the two spots on the Danube where the Jews were shot into the Danube (see map above). One was close to the Lánchíd (Chain Bridge), where the exhibit of shoes can be seen today, and the other was in Szent István Park, in the vicinity of the houses under international protection.

The ‘Opposition’:

On 13 November, Edmund Veesenmayer, the ‘agent’ of the Reich in Budapest, reported to Berlin that around 27,000 Jews of both sexes, capable of walking and fit for work, had left on foot. He reckoned to be able to hand over further forty thousand for German purposes and would send them off in daily batches of two to four thousand. After that, it was estimated, 120,000 Jews would be left in Budapest, and their eventual fate would depend on the availability of transport. On 17 November, Danielsson and Angelo Rotta held talks with Szálasi. In a sharp tone, the Papal Nuncio enumerated staggering facts in defence of the Jews who were being forced onto such marches. The Prime Minister and Head of State denied the atrocities but was finally forced to promise to investigate them.

The Cardinal Primate of Hungary, Archbishop Jusztinián Serédi of Esztergom, a member of the upper house of parliament, repeatedly protested to Szálasi about the terror and the constant acts of cruelty. On 20 November, Szálasi – faced with a loud outcry – stopped the deportation of women on foot. If after that a lorry had been sent on an embassy errand and its load had not been confiscated by the Arrow-Cross, it may have helped the Jews of Budapest somewhat as they trudged towards the frontier. On 1 December, however, when Archbishop Serédi raised an objection to the taking of hostages and to the atrocities perpetrated on Jewish citizens, his intervention was brushed aside.

Meanwhile, the Swedish Embassy had continued to play an important part in gathering together the forced labourers in possession of foreign protective passports or exemptions from the government. Colonel József Herbeck, whose name is preserved in Raoul Wallenberg’s extant notebook, generously arranged the matter. Wallenberg travelled by embassy car round the camps that were digging trenches outside the capital to ‘extricate’ the Jewish forced labourers, the number of whom grew rapidly. These ‘companies’ were under the protection of the Swedish, Swiss, Portuguese and Vatican embassies. Company 701 was attached to the Budapest army corps. Diplomatic notes were also used in the life-saving missions. In a ‘note verbale’ of 26 November to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, the Swiss Embassy considered it important that…

… persons holding genuine emigration documents should not be taken to the Buda brickworks, and unauthorised persons should not be admitted to those houses which are under Swiss protection. 

The note made it clear, in diplomatic language, that directions on this subject to the Arrow-Cross Party would be most helpful. By then, however, the Germans needed every able-bodied man and Eichmann’s staff cared nothing for their protected status, simply grabbing them off the streets, with the aid once more of the Hungarian gendarmerie. The Óbuda-Újlak brick-works on Bécsi út served as a mustering point for the November deportation march to Hegyeshalom and the fortifications ordered by the Germans in western Hungary and on the frontier. The Arrow-Cross used several buildings on Teleki tér for the same purpose. From there, the forced labourers were quickly and frequently transported from nearby Józsefváros station. At the station, Veres took photographs from Wallenberg’s car. Meanwhile, Wallenberg himself would extract people one by one from the crowd. Wallenberg’s mobility by car in Budapest, and his appearance on the highway and at Hegyeshalom, also gave courage and endurance to Foreign Service officials charged with rescuing Jews.

Wallenberg on the Road to Hegyeshalom:

On the road between Budapest and Hegyeshalom, he came to the aid of those forced on the deportation march and extricated holders of the Swedish protective document. In his book, Lévai tells of how, on the way, the Swedish secretary carried sacks and tinned food, unloading medicine for the sick and dying. At Mosonmagyaróvár he set up a first-aid post and a field kitchen. At Hegyeshalom he confronted the Arrow-Cross men, who terrorised even the gendarmes. The appearance on the road of foreign diplomats and their activity in helping Jews and rescuing them were reported to SS Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Sicherheitspolizei and SD in Berlin. He was also informed that escorting units of the Hungarian army had respected letters of protection issued by the Swiss. In his compilation of documentary evidence regarding several actions, Árje Bresslauer has written:

Without the help and, most of all, the personal courage of Raoul Wallenberg we would not have been able to save the lives of so many of our fellow men. The same goes for our own work.

One woman who constantly took an active part in the humanitarian work of the Swedish Embassy recalls: Swift decision, lightning action, coupled with keen perception and incredible stamina – such was Wallenberg. Likewise, some of the reports in Lévai’s book of Wallenberg’s activities are rather romanticised and exaggerated. The extant documents of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry contain a more believable account of the movements of Wallenberg and Per Anger on the road to Hegyeshalom on the 23rd-24th November. These are based on a memorandum that they themselves wrote for Baron Kemény, the Foreign Minister. It’s clear from their lines that they observed keenly the shocking sight of the deportation march, including the clothing, physical and spiritual conditions of the Jewish men, military labourers and displaced citizens of Budapest, mostly women, as they were led towards the frontier of the Reich. They refer to Gönyü, Mosonmagyaróvár and Hegyeshalom. It was at these sojourns that they were able to gather information on the circumstances of the eight-day November march. They stated that neither in Budapest nor at the hand-over at Hegyeshalom is 100% respect shown to foreign documents. In the context of an objective but no less shocking description of exhausted people reduced almost to a line of animals, they wrote that:

When the Commission tried to distribute among them some of its own provisions for the journey the crowd simply laid siege to them, people fought just to get the little packet of sandwiches. (It) was repeatedly denied permission to send lorries to feed the people, which only two days previously had been officially permissable.

The motorised life-saving on the Hegyeshalom road was in the historic trial of Adolf Eichmann, which took place in Jerusalem in April 1961. When the mass-murderer was called to account the charge stated that this relief operation in the autumn of 1944 had seriously irritated Eichmann, who had planned and organised the march. I’ll kill Wallenberg, this dog of the Jews, he had burst out, and the Foreign Ministry in Berlin had declared that the Swedish Embassy’s intervention in Jewish affairs is in all respects unlawful. On Wallenberg’s commission, Captain Gábor Alapy travelled a Steyr car with diplomatic markings and performed valuable and very risky life-saving work. In his reminiscences, he recalled how in Hegyeshalom they had managed, with Wallenberg’s help, to extricate another group and sent them back to Budapest. Wallenberg’s colleague Dr Iván Székely used an embassy car with Swedish markings in his rescue activity. In this, he went to workplaces and camps in the provinces and brought back to Budapest Jewish men who qualified as Swedish-protected in some way.  He went into several Arrow-Cross houses, and courageously appeared at the Józsefváros station, at Gestapo HQ on Svábhegy and elsewhere on behalf of protégés.

Rescuing the Jews of Budapest:

The rescue of Jews, or persons considered Jews, from deportation, known as ‘lending’ in the Szálasi period, was a hard and complex task. We can read in the registers of survivors made in 1945 that ‘sending them back’ unescorted was occasionally an exercise in futility. For example, Ferenc Weiss, who had been arrested in hiding, suffered imprisonment in the Csillag fortress at Komárom with a group of two hundred Jews. It members had been rescued from the deportation to Hegyeshalom by means of letters of protection, the arrested by the Arrow-Cross on the way back to Budapest. After they had been robbed they were deported as a ‘transport’ of the Sicherheitspolizei. Weiss and his companions reached Dachau camp by train on 28 November.

At dawn on 28 and 29 November, Hungarian Military Police with fixed bayonets appeared at the Jewish forced labourers’ barracks in Budapest and replaced the companies’ commanders. This was a tried and tested procedure, and without hindrance, the MPs escorted the companies of forced labourers, mostly two hundred strong, to be handed over to the SS at Ferencváros station. Among them now were those under Swedish ‘protection’. According to Jenő Lévai, Wallenberg somehow found out about this unexpected action, followed them in his little car and struggled all day to save them. His agents spent the time reading lists of names and identifying holders of Swedish documents torn up by the Arrow-Cross. He himself looked up the names in the embassy Schutz-Pass registers that were taken to the station. Those destined for deportation who were rescued that day were estimated at 411, while the number of ‘genuine Swedes’ came to 283, the remainder being ‘protégés’ of other embassies. This was reported to Theodor Dannecker, the very experienced officer of the Eichmann-Kommando, who had directed the mass transportation. He threatened Wallenberg with having his car smashed into. Wallenberg continued to drive out early in the morning to the Óbuda brick-works, in addition to appearing constantly on the Pest side and at Teleki tér on rescue missions.

By early December, Wallenberg had been in Budapest for six months and had a range of acquaintances and useful connections. His notebook was full of the names, addresses and telephone numbers of embassies and international aid organisations, and sometimes the contact details of those in charge of them, including Veesenmayer, the Reich’s representative, as well as Hungarian government leaders and high-ranking officials, leaders in public administration and the military, but not the names of leaders of the Hungarian churches. These last, with some notable exceptions, were incapable of responsibly assessing the inhuman, even murderous atmosphere in which they lived, which rejected the basic message of Christianity. Despite this, the spreading terror menaced the churches and their leaders in Budapest and the provinces just as it had the Jews.

Among Wallenberg’s new acquaintances were well-known journalists and newspaper leaders. His military contacts were mainly with those concerned with the Jewish forced labourers, some of which were in some way his ‘partners’ in matters to do with life-saving. Of those listed in his notebook, Lt. Col. Ferenczy frequently played a key role. Talks and negotiations with him and his immediate subordinates required a good deal of patience on the part of Wallenberg and his colleagues. He also noted down a number of the members of the Szálasi government. In addition, he listed numerous Jewish leaders and institutions. He included the telephone numbers of hospitals since he considered the assistance of these among his tasks, especially during the reign of the Arrow-Cross. In his memorandum of 1 December, he set out the unvarnished reality of the Arrow-Cross hegemony:

He sees his task rendered more difficult … he has to state with sincere regret that members of staff of the Royal Swedish Embassy and its protégés alike are constantly subjected a variety of atrocities. 

Even in the case of protected Jews, the threat was immediate, and for that reason, new protective passports were being distributed to those who had not yet received them and to persons of Jewish origin to whom Swedish interests are linked. He reported, without reference to previous talks or limits, the embassy has issued altogether 7,500 protective passports in this way.

The Battle for Zugló:

In the Zugló district of Budapest, a number of startling cases of persecution and rescued occurred. In the winter of 1944, several dozen Jews were hidden in the corner building of the Sisters of Social Service, with its tower, everywhere from the cellar to the attic. Raoul Wallenberg saved the convent, led by Margit Schlachta, and those hidden there. He arrived by car during an Arrow-Cross raid in response to a telephone request, accompanied by a man in army uniform. The convent was surrounded by the Arrow-Cross who had established their district headquarters on the opposite side of Thököly út. An eye-witness reported that Wallenberg glanced across at the convent and then hurried into the Arrow-Cross house:

We don’t know what was said in there, because then Wallenberg came out, got in his car and was immediately driven away. But all the Arrow-Cross men left the convent straight away…     

But other holders of Swedish letters of protection in the district were arrested by the Arrow-Cross, taken to the Danube Embankment and shot. The local Arrow-Cross chief László Szelepcsényi ordered the party servicemen to deny ‘the action’ should there be an enquiry from the embassy. In fact, when the embassy official protested on another occasion, Szelepcsényi ordered sanctioned the massacre of a group of Swedish-protected persons with a gesture of dismissal, maintaining his original position that all who held protective documents had succeeded in obtaining such protection either with their wealth or by conspiring with the enemy. The murderous intent of the Arrow-Cross in Zugló was proved by the fact that shortly afterwards, on the night of 28 November, they hung the bodies of ten Jews who had been shot after interrogation under torture in the party house cellar, head downwards on the convent fence. This appalling sight evoked horror in passers-by. Seventeen Jews were taken from a ‘protected house’ to the party house. The armed party servicemen did not regard the Jews being driven to their deaths as human beings and when tried twelve years later, they admitted to between a thousand and twelve hundred murders.

In Zugló, a mass life-saving action took place under the leadership of Captain László Ocskay, who had been re-activated from the retired list. The veteran First World War officer, aged fifty-one and closely connected to Wallenberg (with whom he had a meeting on 8 December) sheltered his protégés in an area which constituted a battle-ground between the bloodthirsty Arrow-Cross and the opposition facing them. At the request of his Jewish friends, Ocskay undertook the command of a Jewish labour company, whose ‘cover’ activity was the collection of clothing. This was a front for the Veterans’ Commission (HB), an active association of Jews who had fought in the First World War and when Hungary entered the second had begun collecting clothing for those in the labour corps, who served in their own civilian clothes. After the German occupation, its work extended to the Jews carrying out military work designated by the Hungarian and German authorities. Through the use of Captain Ocskay’s connections members of this unit had avoided deportation and were moved from Dohány utca in central Pest to Zugló, to the building of the Pest Israelite Faith Community Boys and Girls School, which had surrendered its premises to the International Red Cross in November in return for a guarantee of protection.

During the new wave of persecution, the manufacture of small items of military equipment, including clothing, the making and mending of boots, the collecting of worn equipment and its renovation offered many people a more or less secure refuge. They hoped that in the workshops in the Jewish school they would escape the fate intended for them, despatch to the death-camps. The workers were mainly those of the wives and female relatives of the forced labourers. Captain Ocskay authorised their employment, and by these means legalised the residence in the Zugló area of many famous Hungarian artists, musicians, dramatists, writers, translators and journalists. Many from the world of sport also found shelter. Members of the world-famous Hungarian water-polo team were forced into hiding, as was the three-times Olympic fencing champion Endre Kabos. In the immediate neighbourhood of Ocskay’s house in central Budapest, a ‘foreign worker’ company was established in early November. A Red Cross depot also moved into Benczúr utca, where a flag and a wooden plaque indicated the presence and ownership of the International Red Cross. In these ways, a base was established for the ‘protected’ Jewish forced labourers who had been extricated from deportation and to legalise the presence and movement of those in hiding or working in the collection and repair of clothing.

The development of tricks and tactics of survival were essential because the Arrow-Cross men spurned all legality and the admonitions of their superiors and engaged in widespread man and woman hunts. They picked people up at will and murdered them, putting several of their victims on public display in the squares and streets in order to intimidate.  At the end of November and in early December the Zugló detachment of the Arrow-Cross made an attempt to settle accounts with the Red Cross refuge in the Jewish School. They stormed the building and swarmed over it, though those living there were able to telephone Ocskay. He appeared after half an hour with a German Army motor-cycle escort which succeeded in driving off the ‘trouble-makers’. After that, a German guard ensured that ‘war-production’ was undisturbed. During these difficult, tragic weeks, fifteen hundred people lived in the school in fear of daily air-raids and Arrow-Cross massacres. Ocskay’s tactics were ultimately successful. Under the Arrow-Cross régime deportations by cattle-truck continued until Budapest was surrounded by the Soviets, but Ocskay’s protégés and members of the Labour Company 101/359, hidden in the ‘war factory’, escaped.

The Establishment of the Ghettoes:

But during Advent, the ‘Hungarista’ authorities continued to be unrestrainable and arrogant. On 10 December, on Szálasi’s orders, designated streets of central Pest, mostly occupied by Jews, became in their entirety Europe’s last Jewish ghetto. The quarter was marked off by wooden barricades and comprised 0.3 square km of the 207 square km of the capital. It was divided into zones, and the four gates were guarded by uniformed police and armed Arrow-Cross men. The Jews forced into the ghetto, officially 52,688, including 5,730 children, at the beginning of 1945, led a miserable existence, struggling to survive and crammed together in 243 apartment houses, including the cellars and wood-stores. Two of the leaders of the ghetto, Miksa Domonkos and Zoltán Rónai, displayed a Swedish Embassy work permit, according to which they had been on the permanent staff there since 30 November and a repatriation section of the Swedish Red Cross. With Wallenberg’s license, they saved numerous lives. On 2 December, Rónai acted successfully on behalf of the Olympic champion Alfréd Hajós, his family and close relations. Hajós later testified how Rónai had appeared in the central ghetto, as a man of authority. He had the Hajós family assembled by roll-call in the courtyard of the apartment house and marched them off with loud words of command:

He fooled the police and the Arrow-Cross guards by turning up unexpectedly and behaving like a policeman. That’s how he pulled off our escape.

The protection of the international, or ‘foreign’ ghetto, which had already come into being in mid-November, meant a new task for the Hungarian gendarme detachment under Captain Parádi, who had assisted Wallenberg from early November in his confrontations with the Arrow-Cross. Jews holding protective documents or passports or protection from the neutral nations had had to move there, but they had little peace, as they quickly became the targets of Arrow-Cross thefts and murders. Police or gendarme activity resulted in the saving of many lives every evening, but there were also unsuccessful actions. At the end of November, Parádi was unable to get into Józsefváros station to perform a rescue because, on this occasion, the Germans would not let him in. He aided the protection of Jewish orphanages and refuges and also provided protection for Raoul Wallenberg on his ever more hazardous car journeys. Another outstanding personality in the Hungarian resistance was Staff-Captain Zoltán Mikó, who was later shot by the Soviet terror authorities. He placed at Wallenberg’s disposal gendarmes who provided food and medicines. Before Christmas, he deposited certain papers in bank vaults, including documents on the underground resistance organisations in Poland.

The Rescuers:

In the winter of 1944, Per Anger was also involved in various risky affairs. In racing against time to save life hesitation and delay were out of the question. One night the attaché, responding to a call from Wallenberg’s secretary, undertook to see to the rescue of seven people who had been snatched in Buda:

At the time I had a Steyr car, and she and I went in that. I went into the robbers’ den and began talking to the chief. He was the sort of man that it didn’t do to shout at. Instead I behaved very courteously …

The terrifying conversation was not without its psychological elements and was successful. In the end, the Arrow-Cross man handed over the Swedish protégés – absolutely shattered, injured, bleeding and terrified – against an embassy acknowledgement of receipt. Anger continued his report:

I stood them in line. ‘Quick march,’ I gave the order, and out we went past the lads at the door with their sub-machine guns. I don’t know how, but we squeezed all seven into the car and drove off. I remember having to drive in first gear to Wallenberg’s house otherwise the car wouldn’t have stood the weight.

In stories of Wallenberg’s appearances on the spot and rescue operations, the name of Vilmos Langfelder (above) often crops up in recollections from mid-December on. The situation of the time and the courageous nature of the rescue operations were graphically summarised by Nina Langlet:

We discovered that the Arrow-Cross were out to get us.Wallenberg, my husband and I therefore became persecuted, and could have reckoned on being snatched on the pretext of questioning and shot in the back of the head. We tried not to think about it and did our best to go on working.

Wallenberg’s intimate associate Hugó Wohl related the events of a rescue on the night of 13 December when at two in the morning, they were informed by telephone that there was trouble at the Swedish Red Cross:

I immediately informed Wallenberg at his home in Buda. Half an hour later he appeared in his car, escorted by his driver Vilmos Langfelder, that loyal, decent engineer, who was for weeks his conscientious tool in the hard work of rescuing people day and night.

Wohl went with Wallenberg and on his orders, he and the driver stayed in the car. When he came back he told them what he had done and told Langfelder to take the car a little further and ‘hide with it’ so that they could tell whether the Arrow-Cross would keep their word. He recalled:

The engine started up quietly, and we waited on the corner of Revicky utca. Suddenly we saw a group of men come out, get into a big police car that was standing waiting outside the house, and drive off. On Wallenberg’s orders we began to follow them, hanging as far back as possible, to see if they were taking the protected persons to the international ghetto in Pozsonyi út.

György Libik refers to the combination of caution and courage shown by the Swedish Secretary when assisting the occupants of a protected house which was being stormed by the Arrow-Cross. Langfelder was out on another mission so that Per Anger took Wallenberg over Andrássy út into Benczúr utca in his DKW at the time of the nocturnal rescue. Wallenberg did not allow Libik near the building, sending him a hundred metres further on:

He asked me to wait outside; there would be nothing I could do to help, but if anything were to happen  I would at least be able to take back word; we shall get nowhere in this by force, only get myself and them in trouble; I was to take it easy, he would sort it out. 

Decades later, the Hungarian resistance activist continued to admire Wallenberg’s intervention, finding it embarrassing that a foreigner, a Swede, could be a more humane person and a better Hungarian than we. The Calvinist minister József Éliás, who made an important contribution to the rescue of the Jews of Budapest, also spoke of Wallenberg’s cautious nature. On one occasion he arrived unannounced to meet the pastor since he did not want to use the telephone in case it was tapped.

The Swiss and the Swedes under attack:

Vice-consul Carl Lutz wrote in a situation report dated 8 December that he had had to stop his car on a busy bridge. It was immediately surrounded by an unruly, hostile, whistling crowd. He had to endure his country and its embassy being abused. Curses were hurled, including Jew-loving Swiss rubbish, get out of Budapest! The Swiss diplomat Harald Feller also suffered the depravity and blood-lust of the Arrow-Cross. His movements were watched and he was threatened, and on 29 December was stopped on Rákoczi út. The diplomat produced his authority from Lt. General Vitéz Iván Hindy, permitting him to travel without restriction. This official document made no impression as Feller, Baroness Katalin Perényi and an embassy employee were marched off to Arrow-Cross house on Andrássy út amid furious shouts, heated cries of “Jews” and curses. Feller was stripped “to check whether he was a Jew” and beaten up. They were told that they would soon be done for and were locked in an ice-cold larder for five hours and finally taken out into the courtyard and again threatened with being shot. Humiliated and tormented, they were eventually released.

While violence raged unchecked, Gábor Vajna, Minister for the Interior, called on Himmler. The minutes for 10 December show that on most points the head of the SS in the Reich urged one of the leaders of grave atrocities and organised massacres to even harsher measures. Vajna gave a detailed account of the solution of the Jewish question in Hungary. He drew up a list of the Jews still to be found in Hungary:

Approximately 120,000 Jews in the (central) ghetto.

18,000 in the ‘foreign’ ghetto.

There were still protected Jews, against whom – even before they went to Germany – measures had been instituted.

Jews in hiding in the provinces, number unknown.

Jews granted exemption, approximately 1,000.

Half- and quarter- Jews, numbers unknown.

Seventy-eight Jewish labour companies, each 200 strong, were on their way to the Reich.

Vajna pointed out to the head of the SS in the Reich that recently the Germans, especially Veesenmayer, had not been accepting old and young Jews for labour. In contrast, the Szálasi government was working towards the total removal of Jews from the country. According to the record, Himmler agreed that, on his intervention, that a new chapter would open. In February 1946, Vajna lied to a Hungarian court that he had discussed, in Berlin, the transportation of Jews with Swiss and Swedish letters of protection to Sweden and Switzerland. The Hungarian Jews “could be grateful” to him for not letting the Germans take them out of the country.

At the end of December, a howling Arrow-Cross mob drove the Swedish diplomat Yngve Ekmark, together with the female employees Bauer and Nilsson, into the Radetzky Barracks in Buda. For hours they stood facing the wall, to make them give away the whereabouts of ambassador Danielsson’s home. As they did not know, the two women were dragged over to the central Pest ghetto from where Friedrich Born, the International Red Cross representative, released them. Neither were personalities in the churches spared this sort of intimidation. Jews were hunted day and night and faith organisations were raided more and more often. On 27 December, Sára Salkaházi, a member of the Sisters of Social Service, was shot into the Danube together with her three denounced protégés and the religious teacher Vilma Bernovits.

Protecting the Children:

The survival of children was, of course, a top priority for the rescuers, and deserves more attention from historians. Daisy Birnbaum’s eye-witness accounts provide a useful primary source in this respect. Wallenberg himself kept a watchful eye on the fate of the orphaned, abused Jewish children. His appearance by car and decisive measures that he took to rescue them are gratefully remembered to this day. Eleven-year-old Vera Kardós and her family had been evicted from their Buda home and were crowded with relatives in the starred house at Csáki utca 14. Her father László Kardos and her family had been kidnapped by the Arrow-Cross on 21 October and was never seen again. They had moved the little girl with her mother and uncle, a forced labourer who enjoyed Swedish protection, over the Danube to work at the notorious Óbuda brickworks. They were enabled, however, to return and find refuge in the Swedish protected house at Katona József utca 21. But they were not left in peace there either, for in an Arrow-Cross raid late at night on 30 December all the occupants, 170 in all, were ordered out into the street, made to undress and shot in groups into the Danube. According to the memoir Wallenberg was informed, and after he arrived the killing stopped. Vera and her mother escaped, but her uncle was killed. After that, they huddled together on an iron bed in a Swiss protected house in Hollán utca. Even there, an Arrow-Cross attack and line-up took place, but by that time Vera was in a Red Cross children’s home. Her mother and two other women escaped as the group was marched off, and after that, she had to find a new refuge every evening. Mother and daughter were eventually reunited under Swedish protection when a heating failure caused the children’s home to be evacuated.

Another memoir, that of Naomi Gur, tells us how their large family was split up in December 1944. Her father was taken to a labour camp and one of his friends obtained a Swiss letter of protection, so the five of them were camping on the floor of a crowded flat in a Swiss ‘protected house’. But an identity check by the SS and Arrow-Cross and all of their letters of protection were declared as forgeries. The little girl was left alone in the house as the other four members of the family were taken outside. She rushed weeping into the street and ran along the long column of Jews, calling out and looking for her mother, who was expecting the worst and so told the policeman escorting the column, this little girl’s gone mad: She thinks I’m her mother, but I’m not… Shoo her off! The policeman ‘obliged’ and the girl made her way back to the flat. The next day there was another raid, this time conducted only by the Arrow-Cross who wasted no time on another identity check but drove everybody into the courtyard and from there into the street. The assembled people were led to the Danube bank. Naomi recalled:

There were a lot of people, there was shoving and noise and it was freezing cold. I was standing there all by myself when a tall man appeared wearing a coat with the collar turned up. He was different from the others. He called out for any with Swedish letters of protection to say so. I knew that one of my aunts, Klára, had one, so I went up to him and told him her name.

I meant to say that I was talking about my aunt, but I couldn’t. The man looked at a piece of paper that he was holding , and said “That’s you.” He didn’t ask, just announced, and I answered ‘Yes’. I was a skinny little thing with pigtails, but my aunt was a married woman. The Arrow-Cross man by him asked for my papers. I hadn’t got them any more, but I looked in my bag. Then the Arrow-Cross man’s name must have been called on the loud-hailer, because he went away. First he said to me, ‘Find your papers. I’ll be back’.

As he turned, … Wallenberg almost grabbed me and rushed with me to the car. He pushed in and off we went straight away. 

I later found out that everybody on the riverside that time was either shot into the Danube or deported. … I’m sure that a miracle happened to me. There was a man who risked his life for me. Since then I’ve believed that everybody can do something of value, and that’s what makes life worthwhile.

It’ll always cause me pain that I did nothing to save Wallenberg.

In the final weeks of December, the armed Arrow-Cross mercilessly and pitilessly assaulted even the children’s homes maintained by the Swedish Red Cross. Wallenberg’s colleagues intervened several times in defence of the children and their carers, rescuing them all over the city. At midday on the 23rd, he tried personally to discover the whereabouts of the children that had been taken from the Swedish children’s home at Szent István körút 29 and of the Swedish Red Cross official Ferenc Schiller who had vanished with them. Per Anger, Vilmos Langfelder and the Swedish Secretary himself set off in Wallenberg’s car, with Langfelder driving. They first called in the Castle District in Buda, at the Foreign Ministry and then went on to see Péter Hain at ‘the Majestic’ on Svábhegy. Hain’s deputy, detective superintendent László Koltay met them there. They also went to the Papal Nuncio’s office, then back to the Foreign Ministry and on to the Buda home of Carl Lutz before going via Wallenberg’s home to the Arrow-Cross bases and the National Unit for Accountability HQ. He stepped unhesitatingly into the lions’ den, a risky business nonetheless. What happened was detailed by a colleague:

Afterwards Wallenberg actually confessed to me in the car that Lutz had told him beforehand that … the Arrow-Cross wanted to have action taken against foreign diplomats by the staff at the National Unit for Accountability HQ.

Both the Swedish Embassy and the International Red Cross were firmly opposed to orphaned children in care being moved from suburban children’s homes into the central ghetto. The Spanish Embassy too had a Hungarian organisation for extricating minors, which continued to function. They used their cars for unofficial rescue work, especially that conducted by their chargé d’affaires, Ángel Sanz-Briz (who left Budapest on 29 November) and his Italian assistant Giorgio Perlasca, together with a few courageous Hungarian Jews, the most zealous of whom was the legal advisor, Dr Zoltán Farkas. Perlasca and Farkas discussed what lies should be told to the Arrow-Cross about personal connections with Spain and how the Spanish-protected houses were to be supplied and supervised. In order to deceive the Arrow-Cross, Perlasca, who worked as a food salesman, became Spanish on paper and used the tactic of driving several times each day to see his protégés. In his notes, he wrote that:

To make my visits even more noticeable I go in the big Ford, on which there is, naturally, a Spanish flag. I chat with the officers on duty and give them presents.

In the ‘nick of time’:

Perlasca and his colleagues drove a five-seater American Buick with CD plates. His active assistant in rescue operations, Frenchman Gaston Tourne, regarded that as an essential means not just of transport but also of offsetting personal risk. On 31 December, just after delivering food, the Buick was damaged beyond repair by the blast from a bomb. Perlasca had some luck on his rescue missions and those whom he supported were certain that he would appear in his car in the nick of time and save those that needed help. By the end of 1944, the Arrow-Cross were hunting him too, and he required the protection of the gendarmerie. Four well-armed gendarmes guarded the embassy building and others defended him from possible attacks whether he went on foot or by car.

A certain distance had been developing between Wallenberg and the Swedish embassy organisation by mid-December. Giorgio Perlasca had noted that on 14 December he could scarcely contact the Swedish diplomats. He repeatedly had the same answer to telephone calls, that either there was no-one in the building or that they were terribly busy. He criticised Danielsson severely, as in his view when so many people expected him to free them he could not just run away, but added that doesn’t apply to Wallenberg, who’s been trying to do everything possible and impossible to help the unfortunate. On 24 December, a Sunday, the Arrow-Cross attacked the Jewish boys and girls orphanage, the children’s refuge.  The International Red Cross flag and the sign indicating protection meant nothing to them. They plundered it on the pretext of an identity check. Several, including children, were shot in the rooms, the courtyard and in the street, by way of intimidation. The desperate but inventive Jewish manager ran down the street with a Christmas tree on his shoulder, in order somehow to inform Wallenberg, who had left the embassy for the Déli (Southern) station because he had heard that a deportation train was being dispatched.

The rescue operations were also affected by the fact that from 24 December the Hungarian capital was completely surrounded by Soviet forces. The fighting in the air and on the streets was becoming increasingly intense adding to the many sufferings that afflicted the civilian population both in physical and spiritual terms. At this period, during the siege, air-raids and shelling presented a constant danger to traffic. It cannot be ruled out that the security forces would if given the order, have performed a ‘professional’ liquidation of Wallenberg and Langfelder while they were driving around the capital. One of the driving assistants, Tivadar Jobbágy, became a victory of military activity, though not while driving. From Gábor Forgacs’s memoirs we can read:

On 24 December 1944 I was in the Swedish embassy office at Üllői út 2-4 from half past three to half past five. Then the red Studebaker, driven by Tivadar Jobbágy, took Vilmos Forgács, Hugó Wohl and their wives to the Hazai Bank premises at Harmincad utca 6. As Jobbágy’s wife was pregnant, Langfelder took the car over. The Jobbágyes were staying there with other people in hiding. Nine days later shrapnel penetrated the drawn blind  and Jobbágy, who was standing nearby, received fatal injuries. 

Some of the children that had been turned out of the orphanage were shot the next day by the Arrow-Cross on the Danube embankment in Lipótváros or Újpest. By this time, they were having to conserve ammunition, so they stood several children one behind the other in order to use fewer bullets. Several of the children were not hit or jumped into the river before being shot and swam down the river to the bank by the Parliament building where they climbed out and survived. On the same day, Christmas Day, the Arrow-Cross attacked the Finnish and Swedish embassies. The rabble that went with them vented their spleen in unrestrained acts of robbery and destruction. One of the embassy drivers turned out to be a traitor to the rescue work, a snivelling, low-down type, as he was described by Nina Langlet. She claimed that he was in touch with the German secret police as an undercover informant. On 25 December, after the Arrow-Cross attack on the Swedish mission, he smiled with satisfaction at the sight of the plundered offices. Her feeling was that he was playing along with the SS and the Arrow-Cross and had stolen property deposited with the embassy.

Christmas Present:

Wallenberg’s Hungarian colleagues expressed their affection and regard for him with a Christmas present. They had made a hand-painted coloured album for him entitled, in German, The Schutzpass in the History of Art, a Collection of Reproductions. When Wallenberg appeared in his storm-coat and boots he was surprised to receive the forty-five-page compilation with lively drawings of the Schutzpass in historical settings. The gift contained nineteen full-page illustrations in colour and, as an endpiece, there was a Christmas elegy by Dr Péter Sugár about the Swedish letter of protection, written in excellent, erudite German. In the final section it expressed the hopes of Wallenberg’s protégés:

Though dark our heaven, the star gleams there above.

Now let us cheer him, the man who has brought peace 

To us, and has defended us.

There are many records of the last days of 1944 in the archives of the German Embassy in Budapest. On 28 December, counsellor Gerhart Feine, one of the embassy staff sent from Budapest to Szombathely, telegraphed to Berlin. He gave an account of the advance of the Soviet motorised units and the capture of the Danube bend at Esztergom by the enemy. Also, he provided details of the Soviet encirclement of the capital. The military attaché at the embassy informed Berlin of German counter-attacks, their purpose, according to the reports, being to maintain contact with Budapest “in all circumstances”. He stated that the Japanese chargé d’affaires had been trapped in the siege and was delayed and that the whereabouts of the Turkish embassy secretary was, for the time being, unknown. He was also aware that Szálasi’s Foreign Minister, Gábor Vajna, had left the city ‘in good time’.

Gerhart Feine had received information that the Swedish ambassador had gone into hiding in Budapest, his whereabouts unknown. He had also learnt that Wallenberg had placed himself under the protection of the Waffen SS, in connection with certain actions of the Hungarian police and the Arrow-Cross. Wallenberg and Langfelder were spending most of their nights at Captain Ocskay’s apartment. The company commander who had saved 1,500 Jews in Abonyi utca had German military credentials. On 30 December, Wallenberg took part in an official inspection with Dr Pál Hegedűs in the Jewish Council office in the big ghetto, together with police officers and representatives of the local government. Pál Szalai, who had offered Wallenberg secret and effective assistance in preventing any more Arrow-Cross atrocities, was also present. He proposed that Wallenberg should have food and raw materials delivered to the occupants of the ghetto as well as to the public kitchens of the city. On leaving the ghetto, the two men went to inspect the food stocks accumulated by the Swedish Embassy in the warehouse of the Stühmer chocolate factory. This stock, together with that of the Red Cross, helped to provide the two ghettoes with enough food to survive the siege.

The Hungarian staff of the Swedish Embassy’s humanitarian mission were, by now, almost all on the Pest side of the city and their offices had moved to Üllői út, one of the main roads into the city centre. But Wallenberg had also rented a number and variety of properties, parts of apartment houses, offices and flats in a number of places. In the ‘pressure cooker’ atmosphere created by the Arrow-Cross Terror and the Soviet Siege, the embassy staff were now exposed to even greater danger and, to a greater extent, to the vagueries of a war on two ‘fronts’ within the city. This was further complicated by the contrasting cowardice of the Hungarian political élite and the treachery of the Hungarian military staff as well as the stupid expectation of a miracle in which the Szálasi government persisted to the end and in parallel with Hitler, all of which led to the downfall, pillaging and devastation of Hungary.

Sources:

László Kontler (2009), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing House.

Marianna D. Birnbaum (2015), 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes. Budapest: Corvina.

Szabolcs Szita (2012), The Power of Humanity: Raoul Wallenberg and his Aides in Budapest. Budapest: Corvina.

 

Above: Diogo Jota fires a shot at goal during Wolves’ return to Europe against Crusaders. Jota scored Wolves’ first goal in European competition for 39 years in the 38th minute.

Picture: Matthew Childs/ Reuters

This summer, a sense of history has enveloped Molineux, the home of Wolverhampton Wanderers FC as ‘the Wolves’ returned to European football for the first time since they narrowly lost to PSV Eindhoven in the 1980/81 UEFA Cup. On the hottest July day on record, Wolves played the Belfast club Crusaders, who finished fourth in the Irish Premiership in the 2018/19 season, also winning the Irish Cup. Wolves won 2-0 and went through to the next round after winning by a similar margin in the return leg in Belfast the following week. Before the opening game, highlights of the Molineux team’s historic 1950s triumphs over the likes of Spartak Moscow and Budapest Honved were beamed on the big screens.

Fifties Floodlit Friendlies: Spartak & Honved.

Wolves’ first floodlit friendly against a European team at Molineux had resulted in a 2-0 victory over Glasgow Celtic on 14 October 1953, but their first match against continental opposition had been against the crack Austrian team, First Vienna FC. The match was played on Wednesday night, 13 October 1954, and ended in 0-0 draw. The match against Spartak Moscow had taken place on a foggy Wolverhampton evening of 16 November at Molineux, with the BBC broadcasting the game live. Spartak had recently crushed two of Belgium’s finest sides, Liége and Anderlecht. A week earlier they had beaten Arsenal 2-1 at Highbury, so Wolves knew that they were in for a tough night. Billy Wright led out the Wolves team clad in their fluorescent gold shirts and black shorts. The visitors moved the ball around the pitch with great skill, playing with unbounded enthusiasm and panache. Twice the ball had to be cleared from Wolves’ goal line with Bert Williams beaten. Bert then saved several more good attempts on his goal. Wolves countered with a display of fierce but fair tackling, moving the ball around with purpose, and they finally went ahead in the 62nd minute through the outstanding Dennis Wilshaw. Then, seven minutes from time, with the Russians noticeably tiring, Johnny Hancocks got Wolves’ second. It began to look good for the home team, and Wolves’ superior stamina now began to tell. In the eighty-eighth minute, Roy Swinbourne added a third, followed a minute later by Hancocks making it four. Wolves had scored three in a little over five minutes against one of the tightest defences in Europe. The 4-0 scoreline may have looked a little flattering, but Bill Shorthouse and Billy Wright broke up a series of threatening Russian attacks.

Next came the big one; the amazing Magyar soccer machine was coming to town. The ‘Mighty Magyars’ had burst onto the international scene in the early 1950s, and the Hungarian national team, already Olympic Champions, had been unlucky to lose 3-2 in the 1954 World Cup Final to West Germany. The Honved match was one of the first matches to be televised live the year after the ignominious defeat of the England teams 6-3 defeat to Ferenc Puskás’ crack Hungarian national side in 1953. Hungary was the first national team from outside the British Isles to beat England on home soil. If this wasn’t bad enough, it had been followed in the summer of 1954 by a 7-1 mauling in Budapest. These two humiliating results were still fresh in the minds of English fans, who saw Wolves’ forthcoming match as an opportunity for ‘revenge’. Honved were Hungary’s top team with many famous internationals in their side, including Lieutenant-Colonel Ferenc Puskás and his other well-drilled soldier stars: Bozsik, Kocsis, Grosics, Lóránt, Czibor and Budai; Kocsis having won the leading scorer prize in the World Cup finals in Switzerland. Billy Wright, captain of club and country, had a chance to atone against Puskás’ club side, the army team from the Hungarian capital which also contained the core of the country’s Arány csapat (‘golden team’).

 

Billy Wright & Ferenc Puskás lead their teams out at Molineux in December 1954.

European Cup Competitions:

The prospect of entertaining the tormentors of Billy Wright and England at Molineux was mouth-watering, especially following Wolves’ sensational win over Moscow Spartak a month earlier. I have written about the match itself and its outcome in more detail elsewhere on this site. Its significance was that on 13 December 1954, under the Molineux lights and in front of the BBC cameras, Wolves, then champions of England, played Hungarian champions Honved in a game many have viewed as being instrumental in the launch of European club competition nine months later. A crowd of 55,000 watched the home side secure a thrilling victory. Wolves went down 2-0 to Honved by half-time, before reviving to win 3-2. They were acclaimed as the champions of the world in the English media before the European Cup was established the following season. It may be thirty-nine years since their last proper European involvement, but Wolves can lay claim to being the pioneers of the former European Cup, now the Champions’ League, after their famous floodlit friendlies midway through the last century. Wolves then became the second English team – after Manchester United – to play in the European Cup in 1958-59 and 1959-60. They also reached the UEFA Cup final in 1972, beating Juventus in the quarter-final before losing to Tottenham in a two-legged final.

These European experiences form a significant part of the impressive Wolves museum at Molineux (pictured above). Back in 1980, the floodlights had gone out as Mel Eves (pictured below) scored but Wolves could not cancel out PSV’s 3-1 first-leg lead. That season they won the League Cup and finished sixth in what was then the Football League’s First Division.

After their victory over Crusaders in the Europa League earlier this summer, Wolves then went on to beat the Arminian club Pyunik, 8-0 on aggregate, and on 29 August, they booked their place in the Europa League group stage after beating Torino in front of a jubilant Molineux. The Black Country side are in the main stage of a European competition for the first time since 1980 after coming through three rounds of qualifiers. Their popular Portuguese manager, who has turned the club around since his 2017 appointment when they were in the Championship, named a strong team, making only four changes from Sunday’s home draw with Burnley. They started the game on the back foot, with Torino dominating possession and Wolves playing a counter-attacking game. But wing-back Traore was lively down the right and forced a save from Salvatore Sirigu after a sensational surging run – before setting up Jimenez for the opener. The Mexican has scored six goals in as many qualifiers this season.

Pictured above, Raoul Jimenez has scored six goals in as many Europa League qualifiers this season.

Raul Jimenez opened the scoring as he hooked home Adama Traore’s cross. Torino needed three goals at that stage and for about 60 seconds they seemed back in the tie when Italy international Belotti headed in Daniele Baselli’s free-kick. That made it 4-3 on aggregate, but before television replays of that goal were even shown, Leander Dendoncker put the game out of reach. Wolves had restored their two-goal aggregate advantage when Diogo Jota’s shot was saved and Dendoncker’s first-time shot from sixteen yards went in via the post. That goal meant Torino, who lost the previous week’s home leg 3-2, needed to score twice to force extra time, and, despite some late chances, a comeback never seemed likely. Wolves discovered their group opponents during last Friday’s draw in Monaco. Manchester United, Arsenal, Celtic and Rangers were also in the draw. No sides from the same country can be in one group, but an English team and Scottish team can be drawn together. United, the 2017 winners, and last season’s beaten finalists Arsenal are among the top seeds.

‘Massive’ Mission accomplished for Wolves:

Wolves’ European run may end up causing problems for their twenty-one-man first-team squad – this was their ninth game in thirty-six days – but that is a problem boss Nuno Espirito Santo wants. He has not bulked up his squad for Europa League action yet, with central defender Jésus Vallejo close to signing on loan from Real Madrid as a first summer signing, so Wolves have been fielding a similar line-up to that of last season. After finishing seventh in the Premier League in May and reaching Wembley for an FA Cup semi-final in which they led Watford 2-0 with eleven minutes remaining, Wolves look set to challenge towards the upper echelons of the Premiership this season, despite a series of tough early games running parallel to their qualifying games in Europe.

Below: Wolves manager Nuno Espirito Santo

After the Thursday night match, Wolves boss Nuno Espirito Santo, seen here saluting the crowd after his side qualified for the Europa League group stage, commented:

“Work started two years ago and this is the next step. This is massive for us.

“It has been tough so far. The way the fans push us, they are the 12th man.

“Tomorrow, after training, we will watch the draw. I don’t want to look too far ahead. We want to improve during the competition and use the games as a tool to improve the team.”

Following the draw on the 30th, Wolves discovered that they would face Besiktas, Braga and Slovan Bratislava in the group stage (Group K). In reaching the Europa League group stage, Wolves have returned to European competition they played a significant role in inspiring sixty-five years ago. Just reaching the Europa League group stage has not been an insignificant task for Wolves. Home and away victories in the play-off round against Torino represented only the 11th time an English club has beaten the same Italian opposition in back-to-back games in the entire history of European competition. It is a notable achievement for a side whose history is based around Europe and has happened in this of all weeks, when two of the oldest clubs in the Football League, Bolton Wanderers and Bury, have been threatened with closure, the latter being expelled from the League.

Mixed Fortunes to Fame Again, 1980-2019:

It is worth remembering that Wolverhampton Wanderers were themselves less than an hour away from going out of business in 1982. It turned out their supposed ‘saviours’, the Bhatti brothers, had had debatable motives in acquiring the famous club. After a land purchase went wrong, investment was cut off. Half of their ground was shut and Wolves were relegated to the fourth tier of English football for the first time before the long climb back to prominence began.

After beating all England’s top six at some stage last season, including the two sides that met in last year’s Europa League final, is it possible Wolves could go all the way and lift the trophy in Gdansk on 27, May 2020? Ex-players, still close to the club, feel it is a distinct possibility. “Yes, they are quite capable of doing it,” said Mel Eves, who made 214 appearances in nine years for his home town club from July 1975. From Darlaston in the Black Country, he grew up as a Wolves fan (see above). He was then eighteen when, on leaving Wolverhampton Grammar School, he joined the club as a professional player. He had already been ‘lucky enough’ to play for the youth team and the reserves. By the time he arrived, the famous players of the fifties had left the club. However, he met many of them when they visited the dressing room on match days and drew inspiration and advice from his heroes.

He did get the chance to play alongside one of Wolves’ ‘legends’ of the seventies, John Richards. Like me, he’d watched John’s career develop and blossom as he became one of the country’s leading goalscorers.  Prior to this season, Mel was the last Wolves player to score in Europe, in 1980, something he wrote about in his foreword for John Shipley’s 2003 book, Wolves Against the World, written for the fiftieth anniversary of Wolves’ first floodlit match against European competition.

In the 1979/80 season, Wolves had beaten Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest in the League Cup Final at Wembley. Forest had won the European Cup in 1979 and went on to retain it in 1980. Wolves also finished a creditable sixth in the First Division. So it was that, at the beginning of the 1980/81 season, that Wolves found themselves on another, fourth UEFA Cup adventure.

However, it was short-lived, as ‘Dutch masters’ PSV Eindhoven pretty much put an end to the club’s dreams on Wednesday 17 September by beating Wolves 3-1 in Holland. Just past the half-hour mark, PSV’s impressive trio of K’s: Kerkof, Koster and Kraay, combined well to tee-up the ball for Ernie Brandts. He walloped a twenty-five-yard cannonball that flew past Bradshaw. After that, the Wolves goalkeeper put on a superb display to keep the score to 1-0 at half-time. A minute after the restart Wolves got an equaliser when George Berry sent a looping cross over to Andy Gray, who met it cleanly to score with a great header. But then PSV moved up a gear and the speed of their attacks were at times breathtaking. Dutch international Adri Koster switched wings, creating many problems for Wolves. He fastened onto one of Van der Kerkof’s defence-splitting passes before beating Brazier to fire in a fabulous ball that Kraay put into the Wolves net. In the seventy-sixth minute, another of Koster’s mazy runs was foiled by a strong but seemingly legitimate challenge by Wolves’ Uruguayan centre-back Rafael Villazon. The referee pointed to the spot and the hotly-disputed penalty was converted by Willie Van de Kuylen to give PSV a 3-1 advantage.

That deficit was always going to be difficult to reverse, even at Molineux, where such things had happened before in European matches. Richards and Gray did everything they could to get the ball in the net, in spite of the fouls perpetrated against them. The Dutch ‘keeper stopped everything that came his way, but it looked as if Wolves might just come out on top. Then, in the 38th minute, the lights suddenly went out, as the stadium and much of Woverhampton’s town centre was thrown into darkness by a power-cut. The players and spectators stood around for twenty-five minutes until the game could be restarted, but it was not until the second half that a Wolves goal came, following a fiftieth-minute goalmouth melée, with Darlaston-born Mel Eves the scorer of what was destined to be the last Wolves’ goal to be scored in a European competition.

Wolves were denied two penalties and, urged on by Emlyn Hughes (above), they threw everything into attack, but failed to get another breakthrough. Once again, the dream was over. As Mel Eves later wrote, neither the players nor the fans envisaged the catastrophes that were looming on the horizon, nor that this would turn out to be their last European adventure for a very long time:

I often get asked what it was like to be the last Wolves player to score a goal in a European competition; the answer is simple: at the time, neither I, nor anyone else that I know of, could have imagined that this would be Wolves’ last European goal; I’d never have believed it if someone had told me that. I suppose my best answer is that it was great to score any goal for Wolves. Now I can’t wait to lose the tag because for someone to score a European goal would mean we’d have regained our rightful place in the top echelon of English football, back where Wolves belong.

Mel Eves has had to wait another sixteen years for this to happen when Diego Jota scored Wolves’ first goal against Crusaders in July 2019:

“Nobody under forty will have any recollection of Wolves being a European team but those who are older do and it is that success the current owners are trying to emulate.

“In the 1970s we were always capable of competing with the likes of Liverpool and Manchester United, even if we weren’t consistent enough to win league titles.

“This week, with all that has happened at Bury and Bolton, it has been easy to remember when it was us, when Wolves were the ones in trouble and falling down the leagues.

“Our owners now want to return us back to where we were in the glory days – and everyone is loving it.”

As a Wolves fan of fifty years, I hope the ‘glory days’ are finally back for the team in old gold and black. As the club and town motto attests, Out of Darkness Cometh Light!

Sources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport

The Sunday Times, July 2019

John Shipley (2003), Wolves Against the World: European Nights, 1953-1980. Stroud: Tempus Publishing.

Raoul Wallenberg’s Protective Passports:

After a month in the Hungarian capital, the Secretary of the Swedish Embassy there, Raoul Wallenberg, had to decide quickly on the form of Schutz Pass, or ‘protective passport’ (‘SP’) he would use in his humanitarian relief work with the Jews of Budapest. He attached a specimen to his report to Stockholm of 16 August. It was an important part of his assignment to provide 1,500 Hungarians with temporary passports as protective documents. These could be persons with very close family links with Sweden, or who had been for a long time closely connected to Swedish commercial life, a number that rose later to 4,500. The issue of the new Swedish protective document came with a structure:  a long-term Swedish connection had to be proved documentarily, while the Schutzbrief issued by Langlet had no such condition attached. Wallenberg quickly perceived the scope of humanitarian action. He was a good organiser and had numerous Hungarian colleagues in the accomplishment of tasks. He soon appreciated the unreliability of the Hungarian political élite and its tendency to vacillate, experiencing the many ways in which responsibility could be evaded. Most of his Hungarian acquaintances were ashamed of what was happening to the Jews but insisted that the brutality was exclusively the work of the Germans. Unlike them, he saw clearly what could be described as the Hungarian hara-kiri, and stressed the responsibility of Hungarians, making it clear that anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in Hungary. He pointed out that Jews on forced labour were not allowed to take shelter during air-raids, leading him to the conclusion that the Christian population evinced only a very luke-warm sympathy, and that it would be very difficult for the Jews to avoid their doom by flight.

The Swedish protective passport in Hungarian and German, with the holder’s photograph, was not acknowledged in international law and had no force. Nonetheless, its influence could not be underestimated. In the summer of 1944, it commanded a certain respect and carried a message. In the presence of immediate lethal danger, many saw in it the chance of escape, of organised defence and the embodiment of their hopes of survival. In August more and more groups of Jews in fear of deportation came to him. The news of his protective passport spread like wildfire and long queues waited on Gellérthegy outside the Humanitarian Section of the Swedish Embassy. From 16 August, a further building was rented and applicants were received from 4 p.m., with questionnaires filled in and six photographs. These were the conditions imposed by the Hungarian government for asylum documents. On the 22nd, the Ministry produced an order on the subject of the exemption of individuals from the regulations relating to Jews. By mid-September, the strength of Wallenberg’s Hungarian apparatus was approaching a hundred. He provided extra accommodation for them at Gellérthegy and also on Naphegy, where ten rooms and a cellar were rented, and round-the-clock shift-work was instituted.

The taking on of colleagues, the formation of an effective organisation and the thorough checking of the data submitted in applications for the Swedish document all took time. The apparatus required for this grew constantly. On 29 September, he reported to the Swedish Foreign Ministry that the entire staff including families number about three hundred persons and are exempt from wearing stars and forced labour. By that time 2,700 letters of protection had been issued and the numbers of those who had gained exemptions from wearing stars exceeded the original 4,500 by a further 1,100. For the first four months of the humanitarian action, it would have been impossible for the Swedish passport of protection to be handed out as a gift to those who did not have clear Swedish connections. That came later when the Arrow Cross reign of terror meant that people were in fear for their lives in an imminent sense. Then, resourceful Jews would copy names (similar to their own) and addresses from the Swedish telephone directories held in the Budapest head post office and send a ‘reply paid’ telegram. Kind-hearted Swedes, realising that the sender was pleading for his or her life, would then confirm the ‘relationship’ by return telegram. Wallenberg’s biographer, Jenő Lévai, has concluded that very many obtained protective passports and escaped through letters or reply telegrams from complete strangers.

The embassy’s work offered reasonable security against the constant threat of deportation. Those employed on humanitarian work received a legitimising card from the Embassy of the Kingdom of Sweden in Budapest and a special personal card from the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior. This exempted them from wearing the yellow Star of David and from the ever-more widespread duties of forced labour within the army. Wallenberg had essentially established a system of dual nationality, and this repeatedly aroused the suspicion of both the SS and the Hungarian authorities. According to a German Embassy note of 29 September, the director of the Budapest political section of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry was thinking that the Swedish Embassy should be called to order in a responsible, clear and sharp tone.

By mid-October, Vilmos Langfelder’s family had come under the protection of the Swedish Embassy and he moved to the central office of the Humanitarian Section at Űllői út on the Pest side of the city. Langfelder probably came into contact with Wallenberg because of his knowledge of German and his ability to drive. Within a short time, he had become the Swedish diplomat’s close associate as his chauffeur. His SP had been issued on 20 August, when he had belonged to a forced labour unit under Swedish protection. Langfelder took charge of Elek Kelecsényi’s Steyr car for the purpose of life-saving work. According to Lévai, Wallenberg sent out an Instruction which set out what had to be done to save holders of Swedish protective documents from the clutches of armed bandits, potentially a lethal undertaking. This summed up the dramatic essence of the immediate life-saving work:

Members of this section must be on constant duty day and night. There are no days off. If anyone is arrested, let them hope for much help, and if they do good work let them not expect thanks.

Langfelder frequently found himself driving Wallenberg, at night, to someplace where people needed his protection. Among the couriers and agents, disappearances were frequent, especially when they went into one of the Arrow Cross houses to inquire about a missing person, exposing themselves to a world of pain and indescribable horrors. Increasingly, abductions and murders were carried out in broad daylight. László Hollós and Ödön Ullman were on their way to inform Wallenberg of an Arrow Cross assault on a hospital when they were arrested and murdered.  In the countryside, the role of the Hungarian actress Vali Rácz has also been recognised by Israel. She hid many families from Budapest in her home in the countryside after the initial deportations but was denounced to the invading Red Army for fraternising with German soldiers (in order to protect her ‘guests’) and almost shot as a collaborator. A Red Army Colonel intervened to stop this and she was exonerated. There were also some members of the army and police who saved people (Pál Szalai, Károly Szabó, and other officers who took Jews out from camps with fake papers) as well as some local church institutions and personalities.

Rudolph Kasztner also deserves special attention because of his enduring negotiations with Eichmann to prevent deportations to Auschwitz, succeeding only minimally, by sending Jews to still horrific labour battalions in Austria and ultimately saving 1,680 Jews on what became known as ‘Kastner’s train’, which by the beginning of August had left Bergen-Belsen with its human ‘cargo’ bound for Palestine.

Those left in the ‘Jewish houses’ and the ghettoes were increasingly targeted for forced labour gangs. They were lined up in the streets, marched off, ceaselessly shouted at, trudging off to Óbuda in broad daylight. Klára Tüdős’ recollection draws a concise picture for posterity:

Dreadful rumours circulated about Jews interned at brick-works and cattle-trucks with barbed wire on them, and as dawn broke processions of people wearing stars would set off in the streets of Pest. These things are mixed up inside me together with the wailing of sirens, like a delirious dream.

The Extreme Right’s Reign of Terror begins:

The coming to power of Ferenc Szálasi and his followers on 15 October through the armed intervention of the SS was the nadir of the Horthy régime, its bloodstained final act. Under the Arrow Cross Party, terror became the tool of the totalitarianism of the extreme Right. Its ranks were swelled in particular by the lumpen elements of the underworld and misguided youth that could recognise the chance for unrestrained robbery and violence. On 15 October, Daisy Lászlo’s father, the tallest man in the apartment block, removed the yellow star from the front door. By the afternoon, however, he realised that with this act he had risked his life again. Since he was aware of the politics of the janitor’s wife, he secretly left the house in the dark, but before the doors would have been locked. She must have said something to the Arrow Cross thugs, however, because the following evening a heavily intoxicated young man, wearing the party uniform, kept banging on the Lászlo family’s door, looking for Mr Lászlo. The story continues below, in Daisy’s own words:

He searched every room, causing terrible alarm among the families placed there because he pushed and shoved everybody, shouted and took whatever he laid his eyes on. He was brandishing his revolver, and we were scared that he would start shooting. There was a large table in the entrance hall of the apartment, around which we took our meals, mostly together. He dragged off the tablecloth and packed in it the stuff he had collected from the various rooms. It seemed that he had forgotten why he had come and we were hoping that he would take the bundle and leave. He was proceeding toward the front door when he changed his mind, returned and demanded a drink. Jews were not permitted to purchase alcohol, but somebody must have had something stashed away, because after a short discussion, a bottle appeared on the table. While he was sipping from the bottle, he … informed us that he was an actor. He jumped on the dining room table, and began reciting Petőfi’s poem, ‘The Lunatic’. 

He got totally carried away, stomping with his feet, his face distorted; he seemed in a trance. I do not know how much of the poem he had recited, whether he knew it by heart, or made mistakes, but when he finished there was a thunderous applause and … bows on the table, surrounded by his terrified public. … He told us that he would go home … but would return the following day and continue the recital. He threw the bundle over his shoulder and staggered out the front door. … stumbling toward the street corner. He did not return, neither the following day, nor ever. We did not know what had happened to him, but for days we feared that he would reappear. 

After Szálasi and his men took over the government a rapid series of changes of personnel took place in the organisations providing the protection of the regime. New organisations were formed including, on 17 October, the State Security Police, the Hungarian Gestapo, was re-formed. Its activity extended to all opponents of the Germans and the Arrow Cross, irrespective of rank or status. On the 26th, the ‘National Unit for Accountability’ came into being, responsible for extinguishing the lives of many civilians. In the implementation of its laws, decrees and orders, the régime could rely on the gendarmerie, the police and the armed formations of the Arrow Cross Party. In what followed, those that belonged to the service slaughtered a large number of army deserters, Jewish forced labourers and people arrested during raids, increasingly and frequently on the spot. Apart from the scale of the violence, the deluge of accompanying decrees, renewed orders and contradictory instructions increased the turmoil. A wholesale breakdown occurred in the army, the police and public administration. From 28 October, Arrow Cross members received regular payments from the state to carry out robbery and murder on a grand scale. They not only had the right to bear arms but also formed the local detective, investigative, interrogation and enquiry squads. They could act on their own authority to create the ever more tragic and corrupt conditions which they considered ‘order’. In the practice of totalitarian dictatorship, the paramilitary members of the Party knew no bounds.

A typical element of the Hungarista programme was the widespread persecution and terrorising of the Jews. Following the assumption of power, party terrorists attacked starred houses in Budapest and Jewish forced labour barracks. For example, one of Daisy’s schoolfriends, Marika, lived with her mother in what became a ‘Jewish house’ after 19 March. Marika’s biological father was not Jewish but he refused to marry Marika’s Jewish mother because he was a close crony of Miklós Horthy, entitled as vitéz (‘man of valour’), a title he would have lost if he had been known to have married a ‘Jewess’. In June, Marika had been sent to a summer camp in Balatonboglár, run by Sisters in the Catholic Church. She was given a fictitious name and false papers, along with two other girls. One night they were awakened by gendarmes and pulled out of bed. She was so traumatised by this that thereafter she frequently peed herself. She ‘escaped’ and left for Budapest on foot, where she eventually returned to her house where she fell into the arms of her mother, kissed and cried, and ate sausage in the pantry. Her return lasted until 15 October, when her mother greeted Horthy’s abortive proclamation by opening a bottle of champagne. Happiness lasted a very short time. Marika’s mother helped to forge documents, while her mother was placed in one of the ‘protected houses’. Once, when Marika was visiting her with her aunt Duncy, Arrow Cross soldiers raided the area. Her aunt yelled at one of them, outraged that he had dared to ask for her papers.

Meanwhile, Marika’s mother became seriously ill with meningitis, and her sister arranged for her to be taken (with false papers) to the Szent István Kórház. Marika could still visit her there, where she eventually died. One night her uncle urged them to leave their new house in Benczúr utca, and they found refuge in the cellar of a nearby pharmacy owned by a relative. Next day the Arrow Cross raided the house, ordered everyone in it down to the courtyard and shot them all dead. When the siege of Budapest began, Marika, her aunt and her grandmother did not dare go down to the air-raid shelter. By that time, they were living in hiding alongside Polish and Czech refugees. One day the Arrow Cross soldiers marched the refugees down to the bank of the Danube and shot them into the river. Daisy herself narrowly escaped a similar fate during that autumn, when she spent several days wandering alone, stealing her food from outside grocery stores. She found herself in Szent István Park and was thrown into a column of thirty people being marched towards the lower embankment of the Danube under the guns of two young Arrow Cross hoodlums. She recalled:

We progressed silently, adults and children, without anyone protesting or crying. But when we reached the small underpass, and I was hit by the familiar stench of urine, without thinking about the consequences, I simply turned right and left the group.

Nothing happened and no one called out. I turned around the corner … Only after the Liberation did I hear that Jews had been shot into the Danube from the lower embankment of the Pest side … I never mentioned this episode to anyone fearing that people would think I had made it up out of a need to create a heroic story; that I was ashamed that while so many from our family had been murdered, I had not come close enough to death.    

Another of Daisy’s friends, Vera S, had already lost her relatives in the countryside to Auschwitz in the summer, but she still lived in Budapest with her parents and grandparents, where their apartment building had become a ‘Jewish house’ and their apartment filled up with strangers. The residents were ordered down into the courtyard several times and were threatened with deportation. On one such occasion, when they were permitted to return to their apartment, they found the rooms ransacked and most of their belongings missing, even Vera’s dolls were gone. Then, shortly after 15 October, the men in the house were rounded up. Running to the balcony, Vera and her mother tried to see where the group was being taken, but Vera’s father, looking up and fearing for their safety, motioned with his hand, urging them to go back inside. That was the last time they saw him. A postcard arrived from Valkó, where they had been taken on foot. From there, Vera’s father was deported to a concentration camp. They knew nothing more of his fate.

Shortly after that, Vera’s mother had to report to the Óbuda brick factory and the children were placed in a Jewish orphanage. Vera escaped and rejoined her brother when their grandparents found shelter in a Swedish ‘protected house’. Their mother escaped from the brick factory, bought false papers from their former janitor, and went into hiding. The following day, the Arrow Cross took the orphans from the ghetto and shot them all into the Danube. Thereafter, Vera and her brother stayed with their grandparents where they lived with twenty other surviving children, in one room. These children knew nothing of their parents and were starving. One day, Vera’s mother arrived at the ‘protected house’ but Vera couldn’t recognise her because she had dyed her hair to fit her false papers. Vera later recalled:

She said that when the Russians fully surround the city, and we will have to die, she will return that we should die together. She did come back, but fortunately we did not die.

On 30 October, German soldiers arrived in the house on the Pest side of the Danube where Iván lived with his family. They entered their apartment in the company of Miki, the janitor’s son who was wearing his Arrow Cross uniform. Although Miki had been Iván’s friend and playmate for the past decade, that did not prevent him from handing him over to the Nazis. Requiring additional labourers, the Germans had the help of the Arrow Cross in collecting men over sixty and boys under sixteen from the surrounding ‘starred houses’. By then Iván’s father had been away for years in a forced labour camp, and after their paint shop had been closed under anti-Jewish legislation, his mother had supported their two boys, her mother and herself by making artificial flower arrangements. Iván and his group of conscripted labourers were taken to Lepsény in western Hungary where they were made by the Wehrmacht to organise a military depot next to the local railroad station. They worked there throughout November, emptying trains that carried military supplies and filling military trucks with winter clothing for soldiers. Iván later learned that his brother Ervin, who had a weaker constitution, had also been sent to Transdanubia and had died while digging ditches. He was buried in a mass grave near Győr. Iván was the only survivor from those who were taken from his apartment house.

Ágnes B, another of Daisy’s friends was just ten years old when her father was drafted as a forced labourer. Soon after 15 October, Arrow Cross soldiers came to their apartment house, where they lived with her mother’s sister’s family. They rounded up all the women under forty, including her mother, who did not resist, despite being only weeks away from her fortieth birthday. Ági recalled her leaving:

My mother put on a fur-lined coat because it had been very cold. I followed her across the yard until the gate and I watched as she joined the group of Jewish women. She wrote one card from the road to Austria, telling me that they had been placed in a pigsty overnight. I never saw her again…

Life for all the remaining Jews in Budapest became increasingly difficult, but the access to Swiss and Swedish protection documents could provide some amelioration. Daisy’s friend’s mother was able to procure copies of the ‘protection documents’ Wallenberg had been handing out, but it was too late to use them because the Germans occupied their house and transported both sets of grandparents to the ghetto. Kati was sent to live with distant relatives, where she got false papers and a new name to learn, along with the names of her seven new ‘sisters and brothers’. She was with relatives, but still felt ‘terribly alone’. Although she looked ‘Aryan’ (see the picture below), she was not allowed out on the street. Another friend, Tomi, was twelve in 1944, by which time his entirely assimilated family had decided to convert to Catholicism, mainly to avoid the increasing restrictions placed upon Jews. In June, they had been forced to leave their apartment on the first floor of a Rózsadomb villa and moved to a ‘Jewish house’. By this time, Tomi’s father was in a forced labour camp and after 15 October, all three had to report to the brick family of Óbuda, from where they were supposed to be deported. Tomi’s father was able to provide them with Swiss protection documents and, therefore, three days later, they were moved to the overcrowded ghetto.

Wallenberg’s Responses and Reports:

The sudden turn of events took the Swedish embassy organisation by surprise, as it did the humanitarian activists too. Wallenberg himself had been expecting Hungary to pull out of the war, which had been much talked about in Budapest social circles as the government’s intention. He was also calculating when the Red Army would reach Budapest, and was thinking of going back to Stockholm a few days before it happened. Up to 15 October, the Swedish Embassy had received eight thousand applications and 3,500 had been granted the SP. A week after Szálasi’s rise to power Wallenberg reported that armed bandits have attacked those in possession of protective passports and torn them up. The Hungarian staff had reacted to this unexpected turn of events by going into hiding, as he noted:

The events have had a catastrophic effect on the section, the entire staff has absented itself, and a car which was placed at our disposal free of charge, together with the keys of various locked places and cupboards etc., have vanished.

In order to put some spirit and courage back into his dismayed colleagues, Wallenberg cycled through the bandit-infested streets in order to pick up the threads of his work again, a procedure which was fraught with risks. Instead of the peace that many had yearned and hoped for a fresh wave of destruction began. On 16 October the head of the Arrow Cross Party staff decreed that Jews were not to leave their homes until further notice. Buildings designated by stars of David were to be kept shut day and night. Until further notice, only non-Jews might go in and out. Non-Jews were not allowed to visit Jews. On 18 October, one of his Swedish officers reported that the new government had introduced strict anti-Jewish regulations and that the entire Jewish staff of the Embassy was in mortal danger. A crowd of Jews seeking revenge was besieging the embassy, which was incapable of accommodating them.

In the course of renewed the renewed persecutions, the previous forms of protection lost their usefulness. Beginning on 20 October, armed Arrow Cross men lined up tens of thousands of men aged between sixteen and sixty, on two trotting-tracks, dividing them into labour-companies and took them off. The one suburban sports ground, in Zugló, became the mustering place for Jewish women, as directed on posters. The assigned Jews of the city were made to work on fortifications, digging defensive ditches. Renewed talks with the black-uniformed, green-shirted Arrow Cross leaders were required, as were new methods of saving people. Wallenberg quickly made contact with Szálasi’s Foreign Minister, Baron Gábor Kemény. In matters of the “Jewish Question” and other ‘Jew-related’ topics he later had to deal with the Foreign Ministry. On 21st, he reached an agreement with Kemény that the Hungarian authorities would give the staff of the Royal Swedish Embassy and members of their families exceptional treatment. They were exempted from wearing the yellow star; from all kinds of forced labour; they were not obliged to live in starred houses, and allowed to go out onto the streets without curfew. This rapid agreement gave hope to several hundred people by officially extending the scope of Swedish protection. It also gave Wallenberg the room to prevent the complete destruction of the Budapest Jews.

This became known, along with the change of régime in Budapest, on 24 October in Bern, Washington and New York (World Jewish Congress), at the Red Cross International Council centre in Geneva and elsewhere. However, the Szálasi government quickly realised its mistake, and drastically reduced the scope of the exemption by the end of October. On 29th, it restricted the circle of those exempted by a ‘variation of decree’. For his part, Wallenberg worked at adding to the exemption that had been obtained and at retaining the greater and lesser fruits of the talks. Protection from the embassy was, in reality, frequently nothing more than a thread of hope. The ‘protected’ houses offered an unstable, relative refuge. Security and day-to-day survival were unpredictable and depended on luck and the movements and whims of the armed Arrow Cross men. Exactly a year later, on 24 October 1945, Béla Zsedenyi, President of the Provisional National Assembly, meeting in Debrecen, thanked King Gustav V of Sweden, the Swedish people and the Swedish diplomatic mission in the name of the Hungarian nation for their help in the humanitarian activity in 1944. He described the defensive stand taken by embassy secretary Wallenberg as “invaluable service”, emphasising that…

… he had taken a selfless and heroic part of decisive significance in warding off the acts of mass muder planned against innocent and defenceless citizens, and by his resolve had succeeded in saving the good name of the Hungarian people from further stain.

By that time, Wallenberg had disappeared at the end of a bitter winter during which he and his staff at the Swedish Embassy Annex had succeeded in saving the lives of thousands more, enabling them to survive the war and the terror in Budapest.

Return to Auschwitz:

Those already deported from the Hungarian countryside to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau had no means of protection, of course, and continued to face ‘extermination’ in the camps. Daisy Lászlo’s Uncle Samu and his family had been deported to Auschwitz from Dunaszerdahely in the summer. His wife, Aunt Berta was his second cousin, a fact which was constantly mentioned on the fringes of family visits and gatherings because both of their boys had disabilities. The older son, Nándi, had a speech impediment, and the younger one, Ármin, was almost totally deaf. All that was learnt of the family in 1945 was that they were among the hundreds of thousands of victims, but neither the place nor the time of their deaths was known. In 2010, an Israeli relative found the story of Ármin’s last months among the files of the International Tracing Service in Germany. This showed that on 25 October, he was transferred from Dachau back to Auschwitz.

During the last months of the war, thousands of Jews were returned to Auschwitz for extermination because they were considered too weak to work. As is shown below, Ármin’s physical description (including height, eye colour, the shape of mouth and ears) accompanied the transfer. His mother’s maiden name, his permanent domicile were also recorded. His signature at the bottom of this document led Daisy to believe that Ármin’s had been a special case, perhaps because of his deafness. However, she then found out that during the autumn of 1944, over five hundred inmates were returned to Auschwitz within a few weeks, accompanied by the exact same documents. Clearly, the Nazi coup in Budapest had had indirect effects in quickening the death machine of Auschwitz.

Sources:

Andrew J Chandler (2012), As the Land Remembers Them. Kecskemét: self-published, http://www.chandlerozconsultants.wordpress.com.

Anna Porter (2007), Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust. London: Constable (2008).

Nóra Szekér, Domokos Szent-Iványi and His Book, Part I, in Hungarian Review, Volume IV, No. 6. Budapest, November 2013

Domokos Szent-Iványi, The Hungarian Independence Movement, Excerpts, Descent into the Maelstrom, Hungarian Review, loc.cit.

Gyula Kodolányi & Nóra Szekér (2013), Domokos Szent-Iványi: The Hungarian Independence Movement, 1939-1946. Budapest: Hungarian Review Books.

James C Bennett & Michael J Lotus, America, England, Europe – Why do we differ? Hungarian Review, loc.cit.

Marc J Susser (ed.) (2007), The United States & Hungary; Paths of Diplomacy, 1848-2006. Washington: US Department of State.

István Lázár, (1989), The History of Hungary. Budapest: Corvina.

Szabolcs Szita (2012), The Power of Humanity. Budapest: Corvina.

Marianna D. Birnbaum & Judith Flesch Rose (ed.)(2016), 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes. Budapest: Corvina.

hmd_2013_-_vali_racz_case_study

The Eden Memorandum on Migration to Palestine:

The National Archives in London has recently released a secret document from 8 August 1944, a Memorandum prepared for the War Cabinet by Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, of an “offer” from Admiral Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, that, provided the United Kingdom and the United States governments could find sufficient accommodation, the Hungarian government would be prepared to allow all Jewish children under ten years of age, with visas for other countries, and all adults and children with Palestine immigration certificates, to leave Hungary. Horthy also announced that there would be no further transportations of Jews to Poland, i.e. to Auschwitz. This document, and the attached correspondence between Washington and Whitehall, is significant in that it clarifies the controversy about if, when and how Horthy acted to bring the deportations to an end, and to enable the remaining Jews (mainly trapped in Budapest, many of them refugees from other countries) to seek asylum elsewhere. The matter was discussed at the War Cabinet Committee on Refugees meeting on 4 June, although Eden himself was not present. The Government faced a dilemma, since refusing to accept this offer would result in a hostile public reaction both in the United States and Britain, but accepting it would be ‘risking civil war in Palestine owing to the inroad of Jews from Hungary into the Levant.’  Despite the obvious urgency of the situation, the Cabinet reached a ‘no-decision’. The proposal of the International Red Cross for the almost immediate removal of 41,000 Jews from Hungary to Romania alarmed the meeting, which was generally against joining the US in accepting. The Secretary of State for the Colonies argued that the British Empire would be signing a blank cheque which we could not honour.

Although both Foreign Office and Home Office secretaries argued that the offer should be accepted in concert with the USA, they felt that in doing so the US Government must accept that the British authorities should not be forced to deliver the impossible in terms of accommodating the refugees, and it was eventually agreed to extend the transit camp originally established for Yugoslav refugees, especially to contain a potential sudden influx of immigrants to Palestine. There had even been suspicions expressed within the Cabinet that Hitler himself had inspired Horthy’s offer in order to create fundamental difficulties for the Allies in the Near East by allowing an exodus of Jews. Certainly, at this point, we know that the Regency in Budapest was incapable of acting independently from the occupying Nazi forces and Hitler’s all-powerful agent in the capital, Veesenmayer. It was not until the end of the month that the Romanians defected from the Axis camp and it became possible for a more independent Hungarian government to be formed again, so the Allies were rightly cautious about any overtures from Budapest at this stage.

Colonel Koszorús’ Unparalleled Action:

However, not to accept the offer would give the Nazis and the pro-Nazi Hungarian government a propaganda coup, and Eden agreed that the acceptance of the offer should be widely publicised and that the Dominion governments should be asked to help in receiving some of the refugees. He also suggested that it might be necessary to establish a transit camp in Syria in order to prevent the situation in Palestine from becoming ‘acute’. In a flurry of telegrams, the US Government agreed to wait before accepting the offer until after the full British War Cabinet on 8th, although before writing his Cabinet memorandum, Eden had already sent a third telegram to Washington signalling the British Government’s acceptance, subject to the detailed terms of transport and accommodation being agreed by the two governments. What effect this agreement had in Hungary we do not yet know, neither can we say that the deportations had been ended by this time, whatever the Regent’s intentions might have been. Horthy had originally ordered their suspension on 6 July, but a further 45,000 Jews from Transdanubia and the County of Pest had continued to be deported after that date. The most effective action to shield the Jews of Budapest had been taken on the initiative of Colonel Ferenc Koszorús in July, having important consequences for the survival of the Regency into the later summer and autumn:

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Holocaust, Congressman Tom Lantos, a survivor of the Holocaust himself and a liberal Democrat who served as Chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, recognised Colonel Ferenc Koszorús:

‘Colonel Koszorús’ unparalleled action (in July 1944) was the only case in which Axis powers used military force for the purpose of preventing the deportation of the Jews. As a result of his extraordinarily brave efforts, taken at great risk in an extremely volatile situation, the eventual takeover of Budapest by the Nazis was delayed by three and a half months. This hiatus allowed thousands of Jews to seek safety in Budapest, thus sparing them from certain execution. It also permitted the famous Raoul Wallenberg , who arrived in Budapest on 9 July 1944, to coordinate his successful and effective rescue mission…’

(Hon. Tom Lantos, ‘Ferenc Koszurús: A Hero of the Hungarian Holocaust’, Congressional Record, 26 May 1994.)

We know that the Sztójay Government had rescheduled the deportation of the Budapest Jews for 27 August, but the Romanians switched sides on 23rd, and it was Himmler who cancelled any further deportations on 27th.

Raids on the Roma & Horthy’s ‘Hiatus’:

Throughout August and September, the horrors of ‘all-out’ warfare had continued within Hungary and its occupied territories, with massacres by government troops and continued forced marches. These were also experienced increasingly by the Roma communities (pictured above). In August and September, the remaining Roma were subjected to raids on their villages, pressing the men into forced labour companies. The first massacre of gipsies took place on 5 October in Doboz, Békés County, where twenty Roma, including women and children, were killed by hand grenades and machine-guns of the Hungarian first armoured division’s military police, acting together with the local gendarmes. Later that month, the Roma were ordered not to leave their permanent residences. At the same time, there were some signs of hopes for peace that late summer. Regent Miklós Horthy could no longer stomach the activities of Eichmann’s SS, and this led to a ‘hiatus’ in the anti-Jewish campaign. On 29 August he sent word to Edmund Veesenmayer that he had decided there would be no more deportations, at least for the time being. With the transportation of Jews from the provinces completed, there were only the Jews in the capital left. Himmler approved the suspension of deportations and the continuation of negotiations through Kasztner and Brand. Himmler, like the Hungarian government itself, had been thinking of an acceptable way of bringing the war to an end. Once back in his office in Budapest, Kasztner was astonished to learn from Dieter Wisliceny that Eichmann and his unit had been ordered out of Hungary. You have won, the Nazi officer told him, the Sonderkommando is leaving. Eichmann, furious with Himmler’s vacillations, retired to sulk at his estate near Linz. The latter later compensated him with the order of an Iron Cross, ‘Second Class’.

In spite of the change to a more ‘neutral’ government under General Lakatos, Hungarian troops occupied parts of Southern Transylvania, Romania, and massacred hundreds of Jews, starting on 4 September. Soviet units then reached the borders established by Trianon later that month and then moved across these into Szeged, where Horthy had begun his journey to power twenty-five years earlier. His failure as an Axis ally was now complete as a gigantic tank battle took place around Debrecen in early October. By mid-October, the Soviet Red Army entered the outskirts of Pest and Horthy, finally, tried desperately to agree on an armistice. Throughout the short period of Géza Lakatos’ premiership, rumours had abounded in Budapest that Horthy was getting ready to exit the war and that all he needed was an honourable way out. He wanted to sue for peace, but not if that peace included Stalin. The British and the Americans were not interested and insisted that nothing less than unconditional surrender would do. Horthy’s insistence on hanging onto his German alliance, however reluctantly, did not help his country’s cause. In final desperation, Horthy sent Lieutenant General Gábor Faragho across the front lines to present Hungary’s case to the Russians. On 11 October, Faragho cabled a draft armistice agreement from Moscow requiring Hungary to give up, once again, its historic territories in Transylvania, everything he had fought for during his years as head of state. Horthy’s hesitation over this gave the Germans the time they needed to prepare a coup.

On Sunday morning, 15 October, there were rumours that the Regent’s son had been abducted, together with a general and two senior officers. It was a warm, sunny autumn morning. German planes had dropped leaflets over the city urging a rebellion against the government. Politicians had also been arrested. Hungarian Radio announced that the Regent would make a general proclamation at 1 p.m. In a soft and shaky voice, Horthy gave a long, detailed statement, in which he announced his decision to sign a separate peace treaty with the Allies, that Hungary had withdrawn from the war and had declared that it is returning to its neutral status. All laws relating to the repression of the Jewish population were revoked. The Reich had lost the war and had also broken its obligations to its Hungarian partner when it had occupied the country in March and arrested many Hungarian citizens. He blamed the Gestapo for dealing with the “Jewish problem” in an inhumane way and claimed that his nation had been forced to persecute the Jews.  The news spread like wildfire on what was a glorious autumn afternoon: Anna Porter has described the scenes…

…the sun was shining and the trees along the boulevards displayed their startling red, yellow and deep-purple colours as if the horrors of the past few weeks had not happened, as if the houses lining the avenues had not been turned into rubble. People came out of their cellars, put on their best clothes and walked, holding hands and greeting each other as in peacetime. Many Jews who had been in hiding paraded their newfound freedom; some tore the yellow stars off their breasts and ordered shots of pálinka in bars where they used to go, or dared to use a public telephone and take rides on streetcars where the tracks had not yet been bombed..

But the atmosphere of general euphoria did not last long. The Germans had listened into every conversation in Buda Castle and were not surprised by the attempt to break free. They were aware of the plan to bring two Hungarian regiments into the city and knew of the arming of the Jewish battalions. German troops and armoured vehicles appeared on the streets of Budapest and set up control points. A further announcement came over the waves: Horthy had been forced to abdicate, and the Hungarian Arrow Cross (Nazi) party has formed a government under its leader Ferenc Szálasi. Hungary was back in the war on the Axis side, and all anti-Jewish legislation was back in force. With the Arrow Cross in charge, the Jews realised that Eichmann would be back to complete their transportation and that random killings would be carried out by the Arrow Cross units themselves. Tom Leimdörfer recalls his family’s fears:

The lives of all of us were in immediate danger. What followed was six months of hell redeemed by some amazing bravery and kindness on the part of some who were willing to risk their lives for us.

Rudolph (Rézső) Kasztner, unlike the members of the Jewish Council, had no faith in Horthy’s protestations that he had been duped into allowing deportations in the first place and even less faith in Himmler’s change of heart. He pressed on with his negotiations for the lives of the remaining Jews of Budapest, Bratislava and Kolozsvár. In the late summer of 1944, a bloody insurrection erupted in Slovakia. A few parachutists from Britain and two Soviet airborne brigades also took part in the uprising, as did some Jewish partisans, including Rudolf Vrba, one of the authors of The Auschwitz Protocols. The uprising failed and led to further reprisals against Bratislava’s Jewish community. In Budapest itself, there was what Kasztner described as a brief lull in the terror in the early autumn. Nevertheless, there was a widespread belief that the Germans would pack up and go home. The cafés and restaurants were full, and no-one left even when the sirens sounded. By mid-October, the Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts were ready to execute Stalin’s order to take Budapest quickly. Arrow Cross newspapers accused the Jews of signalling bombers from rooftops, directing bombs to specific targets. Raoul Wallenberg had opened the door of the Swedish Embassy and directed his staff to hand out Swedish protection papers to all Jewish applicants. The certificates claimed that the holders were Swedish citizens awaiting exit visas. The number of Jews with official Swedish papers exceeded 4,500 by the end of October, and another three thousand fake Swedish certificates were handed out by the Rescue Committee and its Halutz workers. They all waited for permits to leave the country and be allowed into Palestine. The Swiss Red Cross had received over three million Swiss francs from the Jewish ‘Joint’ in the US to pay for food in the protected Star Houses bearing the Swedish colours and in the Columbus Street camp.

Victims, Survivors and Heroes:

Tom Leimdorfer, pictured here as a young child during the war, has narrated the effect of the events of 15 October on his family’s struggle to survive in Budapest, and especially in terms of their decision to go into hiding:

By now, my grandparents (Sári and Ármin) and my aunt Juci all lived in our flat. Juci’s husband Gyuri was in a labour camp. He had a dreadful accident there in March 1943 when he fell off a scaffolding. For some time, his life was in the balance, but he recovered albeit with a back injury which gave him much pain for the rest of his life. He was allowed home when he was in plaster recuperating, but was then back again in the forced labour camp outside Budapest. As the family wondered what to do on the evening of my eventful second birthday, Dr. Groh arrived. A kindly medical consultant, he was one of my grandfather’s customers who became a friend. He was a Roman Catholic who was appalled by the treatment of Jews and by the apparent acquiescence of his church. He said we were in danger and should leave our home immediately as Jews were being herded from ‘marked’ houses to designated ghettos. He insisted that we should all (15 of us!) go into hiding with his family even though that risked their lives.

Dr. Groh and his wife had six children. They made a room available for us and kept its shutters closed. For the next eight days we huddled together in that room, joining the family when there was nobody around who might report our presence. With Arrow Cross gangs and police raids everywhere, this was not a safe hiding place and the Groh family were at great risk. In spite of their protests, we crept back to our home one night to pick up some essentials and left for different destinations. Soon after we left, an Allied air raid hit the Groh’s house and tragically one of their daughters was killed. The room where we had been hiding was a pile of rubble.

My mother and I first headed across the Danube to the Pest side, to a house protected by the Swedish Embassy, where ‘Feri bácsi’ and ‘Manci néni’ (my grandparents younger siblings) were already staying. The Swiss and Swedish embassies as well as some churches had tried to set up ‘protected houses’ outside the overcrowded main Jewish ghettos. These were not always ‘safe’ as the Arrow Cross raids were unpredictable and (depending on the particular gang commander) would carry out atrocities without respect for any foreign diplomacy or even orders from their own Nazi puppet government, with its very thin veneer of legality. There were no more trains for Auschwitz, but there were the ‘death marches’ towards Austria organised by Eichmann as well as the random Arrow Cross raids. Diplomats such as Raoul Wallenberg did all they could to thwart the murderous onslaught by distributing Swedish and Swiss passports and demanding safety for their ‘citizens’, by declaring houses as being under their protection and by threatening allied retribution after the war. With the Russian army advancing, this had some effect.

 

After the Arrow Cross coup d’état on 15 October, tens of thousands of Jews of Budapest were sent on foot to the Austrian border in death marches, and most of the remaining forced labourers under Hungarian Army command were deported to Bergen-Belsen. One of these forced labourers was the poet, Miklós Radnóti.

 

On the same day the War Cabinet met in London, 8 August to discuss the proposed evacuation of Jewish children from Budapest, Miklós Radnóti wrote the following from his work camp in the mountains above Zagubica in Yugoslavia:

ROOT 

Root, now, gushes with its power, 

rain to drink and earth to grow,

and its dream is white as snow.

Earthed, it heaves above the earthly,

crafty in its clamberings,

arm clamped like a cable’s strings.

On its wrists pale worms are sleeping,

and its ankles worms caress;

world is but  wormeatenness.

Root, though, for the world cares nothing,

thrives and labours there below,

labours for the leafthick bough;

marvels at the bough it nurses,

liquors succulent and sweet,

feeds celestially sweet.

Root is what I am, rootpoet,

here at home among the worms,

finding here the poem’s terms.

I the root was once the flower,

under these dim tons my bower,

comes the shearing of the thread,

deathsaw wailing overhead.

Radnóti’s words continued to be prophetic. The death saw continued to ‘wail overhead’ for many caught up in the Hungarian holocaust. Miklós Radnóti himself was one of these, and one of Hungary’s greatest poets of the twentieth century. Born in Budapest in 1909, from its very beginning, Radnóti’s life was overshadowed by tragedy. At his birth, both his mother and twin brother died. The ‘Numerus Clausus Act’ of September 1920, the first anti-Semitic law in Europe, required that the number of Jews in Hungarian universities be reduced to six per cent. Barred from the University of Budapest, Radnóti enrolled at Szeged University, where he read French and Hungarian literature and was awarded a PhD in 1934. In response to the country’s shift to the right, there were a number of groups arising on the centre-left, liberal, populist and social democratic. Continuing in the liberal tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Hungarian poets, Radnóti was among the young people in favour of social change. He joined the Art Forum of Szeged Youth, a populist movement addressing the plight of Hungarian peasants, supporting agrarian reform. Drawing on Hungarian folklore, they identified with the national poet Sándor Petőfi and musicians like Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály.  Inspired by the left-wing idealism common among writers and artists of the time, both inside Hungary and from outside, Radnóti cherished the values he developed in this group for the rest of his life. He also insisted on his identity as a Catholic and a Hungarian poet for the rest of his life, though his country branded him as a Jew. Once identified as such, regardless of his own detentions, he was effectively sentenced to death.

Despite his darkest premonitions, Radnóti’s work also continued to flourish, especially after his marriage to his high school sweetheart, Fanni Gyarmati, who had been the central focus of his love poems since the late twenties. By the late thirties, he was widely recognised in literary circles. However, within three years, from 1938-41, three sequences of anti-Jewish laws were introduced. The first two defined who was Jewish and regulated the percentage of Jewish participation in various economic activities. The third created a forced labour system that became responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, including that of Radnóti himself. Following the Nazi blitzkrieg on Poland, he anticipated the full-scale destruction of Hungary, and became sick in the stomach, ridden by insomnia and near to collapse. Nevertheless, he recovered sufficiently to produce work of great innovation in the lyrical tradition, combining the classical forms of the ancients with modern sensibilities. In 1938 he published a collection of poems, Steep Road, and in 1940, three more collections, including a volume of prose writing, a selection of translations and his own Selected Poetry. Two more volumes followed in his lifetime.

He was caught up in the whirlwind of the Hungarian Holocaust which followed the Nazi takeover of the country in March 1944. He suffered unspeakable deprivation and died a horrifying, anonymous death. Taken by a freight train from Hungary to Yugoslavia in May 1944, he was shot and buried in a mass grave with twenty-one other forced labourers, on an unknown date between the sixth and tenth of November. He left behind poems of the utmost beauty and rarity that both express and illuminate Hungarian culture. Many of them convey moods and perceptions untainted by the horrors, while others offer first-hand accounts of the wholesale murder. Taken as a whole, they reveal the wide range of Radnóti’s imagination and the obligation he felt to give testimony to an existence engulfed by catastrophe. As well as being masterworks in the annals of the poetry of the last century, they are also documents of destruction. Through them, Radnóti subverted the horror of the Holocaust, in helping us to understand it.

Much of what he started, however, he was unable to finish, as from 1940 he was called up three times into slave labour units. He was worked to exhaustion in coalfields, sugar plants and ammunition factories during his first two call-ups and in his last, he was taken to the copper mines in Bor, Yugoslavia. However, under pressure from Soviet and Partisan forces, the German Army was forced to evacuate the Balkans. Radnóti’s squad was force-marched back to Hungary, to be transferred from there to slave-labour camps in Germany. Cold weather, exhaustion, hunger, savage beatings and killings meant that of marching column which contained 3,600 men on leaving Bor, only eight hundred crossed the Hungarian border. Marching on through Western Hungary in November, Radnóti began to lose his strength. His feet were covered with open blisters, such that he could no longer walk. It was probably on 8 November that the squad reached a brickyard in a town near Győr, where they spent the night. Next day three NCOs of the Hungarian Armed Forces separated Radnóti and twenty-one others from the column. Crowding them onto two borrowed carts, they took them first to a hospital, then to a school housing refugees. Neither had room for them, so the soldiers took them to the dam near Abda, where they were ordered to dig a ditch. The guards then shot them one by one into the ditch.

When his body was exhumed a year and a half later, his last poems, stained by dirt and blood, were found in the pocket of his raincoat. Within a few years of the end of the war, his poems, including these resurrected ones, became well-known to Hungarians, exalting and moving millions of them in the continuing gloom which followed. Radnóti’s place among the Hungarian masters was confirmed. Until now, they have not been so well-known outside Hungary, but Ozsváth and Turner’s recent volume seeks to call the attention of the English-speaking world to them, giving them the means to resound… and communicate the vital, immediate sense which characterizes the original. Radnóti’s last volume of poetry, Foamy Sky, was published posthumously in 1946, a volume which did not then contain the last five poems. Only after his body was exhumed were these five poems found, inscribed in the small camp notebook (pages of which are shown below) he had obtained in Bor. Two years later, the entire and complete volume was re-published. Since then it has been re-published many times in Hungary, but never in English, until now. Ozsváth concludes:

…the unforgettable formal music of his poems not only preserves his most personal perceptions but also echoes the lives and culture of all those who were murdered in the Holocaust.  And while they give account of the darkest hours of history, they also demonstrate the tremendous power of the human spirit to triumph over death.

The Swiss & Swedish Missions:

Meanwhile, the remaining Jewish population of Budapest were living at the same subsistence level as the general population, despite the claims of the political far right that they were having a cushy time. As a result of the persistent removals of rights, men away on compulsory forced labour, and the deaths of many in the process, mass impoverishment and demoralisation were more and more in evidence. Applications to officialdom from widows who had lost husbands went unanswered. The Jews’ yellow ration cards bought less food of inferior quality in the shops.

The Swedish and Swiss embassies and their diplomats Wallenberg, Anger and Lutz did all they could to ameliorate these conditions and to protect the Jews against recurrent threats of deportation, providing safe houses, exemptions from wearing yellow stars and from forced labour in the army. Wallenberg was appaled at the helplessness of the Jews crammed into the starred houses. Those in need were quickly given financial assistance. A wide range of Jews doing forced labour, who were reduced to rags, were helped and enabled to obtain shoes and clothing. A separate purchasing section of the Swedish Embassy was set up for this purpose.

Wallenberg had arrived in Budapest on 9 July with a brief as embassy secretary of assessing and reporting on conditions in Hungary with a view to the organisation of further ‘humanitarian’ action. The director of the American War Refugee Bureau (WRB) and of OSS, Iver C Olsen, had chosen him for the mission in Hungary. He also had the backing of the US ambassador in Stockholm and the Swedish Foreign Ministry. He was charged with a number of tasks: in addition to reporting on the situation in the country, he was to build up and run a Swedish relief organisation, and to support persecuted Jews and registered persons in Budapest with a view to their rescue. He was to collaborate closely with the International Red Cross, thereby to organise escape routes in various directions. In this matter, from mid-July, he called on the services of Carl Lutz at the Swiss Consulate, from whom he learnt of the talks between the officials of the ‘Reich’ and the Hungarian authorities, and of the purpose and text of the Swiss protective documents.

Carl Lutz, Switzerland’s Vice-Consul, worked from the US Legation, declaring seventy-two buildings in Budapest as annexes of the Swiss Legation, thereby saving over sixty thousand Jews. On 24 July, Lutz moved the Emigration Section to a building in the old business quarter of Pest. It was granted extra-territorial status, and the series of numbered emigration documents prepared in its offices was called a ‘collective passport’. This originally contained the names of 7,800 ’emigrating’ Hungarian Jews. From October, Swiss protective letters (Schutzbrief) in Hungarian and German were also issued. With the assistance of Zionist members of the opposition, these were steadily circulated to the nominated Jewish families, who also received certificates like the one pictured below which they could display on doors and in windows to declare their protection by the Swiss Consulate. When Szálasi came to power, these were mostly of symbolic value. Lutz’s wife, Gertrud Frankhauser was also devoted to this humanitarian work, and both of them were awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations in Jerusalem later in their lives.

Above: Daisy Lászlo, as named on her letter of protection

(to be continued)

above: a street in Warsaw. The Germans destroyed the city in the summer and autumn of 1944.

Introduction – An Appalling Martyrdom:

The approach of the Red Army to Warsaw at the end of July had encouraged the anti-Communist ‘Armia Krajowa’, the Polish Home Army, to attempt an uprising at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, 1 August 1944, under their Generals Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski and Antoni Chrusciel. As a consequence of this decision, for more than the full two months of August and September 1944, Warsaw suffered an appalling martyrdom as the SS moved in to destroy the Polish insurgents with every kind of inhumane warfare. The result was a desperate and tragic struggle by the Warsaw Poles, just as the Warsaw Ghetto Rising of April 1943 had been for the Polish Jews. The Uprising was crushed with maximum ferocity by the SS in just sixty-three days, which was nonetheless a remarkable length of time for resistance when it is considered that only fourteen per cent of the Home Army were even armed when it began, with only 108 machine guns, 844 sub-machine guns and 1,386 rifles. Warsaw became a city reduced to ruins, where even the ruins were blasted by German guns and aircraft: the dead lay entombed in the ruins and the wounded lay untended on roads or suffered their last agonies in gloomy cellars. Those fighting from the sewers were finished off by gas grenades flung on them by German troops.

The Poles, understandably, had wanted to wrest control of their capital and the sovereignty of their country, away from the Germans before the arrival of the Russians, who they correctly assumed to have no more desire for genuine Polish independence than the Nazis. So, while the Uprising was aimed militarily against the Germans, it was also aimed politically at the Soviets, something that Stalin understood only too well. Appeals for Soviet aid fell on deaf ears, giving the impression at first of glacial indifference and latterly of unbending hostility. The Soviet policy seemed to soften somewhat in mid-September, but by that time the underground army had been throttled. Meanwhile, of lesser note but no less tragic, the rising in Slovakia petered out, though on this occasion Soviet troops fought as best they could to bring direct military aid to the insurgents: the gamble did not come off, however, as Koniev failed to break through to rebel-held territory and Soviet units were left to fight gruelling battles in the Carpathians until late November 1944.

Laurence Rees’ recent book Behind Closed Doors (2008), drawing on material only available since the opening of the Kremlin archives, provides a detailed account of the Moscow meeting between Prime Minister Mikolajczyk and other representatives of the Polish government in exile in London on the one side and Stalin and Molotov on the other. Given the entrenched positions of each of the parties and the massive disparity in real power, the meeting held on 3rd August was destined to be a failure. What was most remarkable, however, was the manner in which Mikolajczyk misjudged the situation. He knew that, as he talked with Stalin in the Kremlin, the fate of millions in Warsaw rested on the result. But despite the urgency of the situation there, the Uprising was the fourth point on his agenda, following a series of points referring back to the Soviet invasion of 1941. Even then, it was dealt with within the context of the exiled Poles’ desire to carry out elections in Poland based on universal suffrage. However, at the end of this all this verbiage, Mikolajczyk finally came directly to the most pressing point: I now have to ask you to order help to be given to our units fighting in Warsaw.  Stalin replied that he would ‘give the necessary orders’, by which he meant that he alone would decide what was required, and he then remarked that he had noticed the absence in Mikolajczyk’s remarks of any reference to the Lublin Poles, the Committee of National Liberation, with whom the Soviets had already concluded an agreement. Mikolajczyk gave a lengthy and emotional response to this, including the plea that:

The four main Polish political parties which are represented in this government (the London Poles) and have for five years carried on the struggle against Germany should have a say in the matter.

Stalin dismissed this view, saying that he had agreed to meet the London Poles, at Churchill’s request, in order to discuss a ‘union’ with the Lublin Poles. Mikolajczyk then made the extraordinary request that he be allowed ‘to go to Warsaw’. Stalin had to remind him that ‘the Germans are there’. The two men then reiterated their respective positions. Stalin wanted the London Poles to deal with the Lublin Poles, and Mikolajczyk restated that, though he would co-operate with the Lublin Poles, they represented a very small section of Polish opinion. While the two ‘sides’ may have been talking to each other, there was certainly no meeting of minds. Stalin spoke increasingly more directly, openly revealing his scorn for the Polish Home Army:

What is an army without artillery, tanks and an air force? They are often short of rifles. In modern warfare such an army is of little use. They are small partisan units, not a regular army. I was told that the Polish government had ordered these units to drive the Germans out of Warsaw. I wonder how they could possibly do this – their forces are not up to that task. As a matter of fact these people do not fight against the Germans, but only hide in woods, being unable to do anything else.

He added, ominously, that ‘the Poles quarrel among themselves’ and that this was something that, in the future, the Soviets would not allow to continue. Of course, there was no real comparison to be made between the representatives of the Polish government in exile and the group that the Soviets had set up in Lublin. But Stalin became so intransigent on the question of the recognition of the Lublin Poles that the minute-taker felt compelled to write: There is a general feeling that the discussion has become futile… The meeting ended just before midnight. Mikolajczyk was partly to blame for his own humiliation at Stalin’s hands, simply because instead of focusing the agenda on the one practical measure that needed at that moment, support for the Warsaw Uprising, he tried to pretend that he was dealing with an equal and to discuss matters which the Soviet leadership did not want to discuss. In sharp contrast to Stalin’s reticence to help the Poles, Churchill reacted quickly to the plight of Warsaw’s inhabitants. Their fight in the streets and parks of the city was precisely the sort of romantic endeavour that appealed to him. On 4th August, the day after Stalin’s meeting with the Polish delegation in Moscow, Churchill sent a cable to the Soviet leader which read:

At the urgent request of the Polish underground army, we are dropping, subject to the weather, about sixty tons of equipment and ammunition into the south-western corner of the city where, it is said, a Polish revolt against the Germans is in fierce struggle. They also say that they appeal for Russian aid, which seems very near. They are being attacked by one and a half German divisions.  This may be of help to your operations. 

Heroes and Villains:

Tadeusz Roman was one of the Polish RAF pilots who tried to help the insurgents in Warsaw. Twenty-five years old, he had served time in a Soviet prison after being caught trying to flee from eastern Poland. After the armistice of 1941, he had made his way west and joined RAF Bomber Command. Now based at Brindisi in southern Italy as part of the Polish Flight, it was not just a matter of honour to help the insurrection. His brother was in the underground army, and Tadeusz thought, mistakenly as it happened, that he was in Warsaw, but, in any case, all the Polish pilots volunteered to take part in the long flight, one of the most dangerous of the war, taking between ten and eleven hours. Starting on 4th August, flights left both Bari and Brindisi, with the airmen of the Polish Flight initially dominating the operation. Between then and the end of September more than two hundred flights were made, dropping a total of more than a hundred tons of supplies. Around eighty Polish airmen lost their lives in the operation, together with more than a hundred other Allied flyers, many of whom were South African. The dangers confronting the bombers were not just from the air defences around Warsaw but from the lengthy and tortuous route over German-occupied territory on the way to the Polish capital and back. Tadeusz’s own luck ran out on 28 August, just after he and his comrades had dropped their supplies over Warsaw. Flying low, at two thousand feet, anti-aircraft fire smashed into one of their engines. Over Krakow, they were hit again, but they managed to coax the plane back to Italy, where they crash-landed on the airport’s perimeter. The other three planes that accompanied him on that night’s mission never returned.

Meanwhile, Mikolajczyk had left Moscow and returned to London. At his last meeting with Stalin, in the Kremlin on the evening of 9 August, he told the Soviet leader that his talks with the Lublin Poles had convinced him that they would eventually reach an agreement. But when he asked Stalin again for ‘immediate assistance’ for Warsaw, he was met with obfuscation: It would be different if our armies were approaching Warsaw, Stalin told him, but unfortunately, this is not the case. He went on to explain that a vigorous counter-attack by the Germans had forced the Red Army to delay their move on the Polish capital. He was sorry for your men who started the battle in Warsaw prematurely. The discussion then moved on to examine the practicalities of an airdrop, about which Stalin was sceptical, but he nevertheless again promised to help the Home Army in Warsaw. However, towards the end of the meeting, when the Polish PM asked if Stalin would tell us something to comfort the Polish hearts at this difficult time, Stalin replied that Mikolajczyk that he was attaching too much importance to words: One should distrust words. Deeds are more important than words. Just four days later the TASS news agency announced that, since the London Poles had not notified the Soviets in advance about the uprising, all responsibility for what was happening in the city lay with them. On the night of 15 August, the American Ambassador had a meeting at the Kremlin with Soviet Foreign Ministry officials, after which he sent a cable back to the USA, reporting:

The Soviet Government’s refusal (to help the uprising) is not based on operational difficulties, nor on a denial of the conflict, but on ruthless political calculations.

Clearly, as far as ‘deeds’ were concerned, Stalin failed the Poles in Warsaw. But it is still possible that when he had met Mikolajczyk on 9 August, he had not definitely made up his mind. He had, as yet, given no reply to the Western Allies about his position on the uprising. One possible interpretation is that between the meeting and the TASS statement on the 13th, he changed his mind. On 9th he was inclined to help, but by 13th he had decided that he wouldn’t. Although he had already demonstrated that his determination to disband the Home Army, in these days he knew he faced battles ahead with the Western Allies over the composition of any future Polish administration. He had no reason to expect at this point that the Allies would eventually go along with his wishes and recognize a modified version of his puppet government, and may have calculated in early August that, if he was to be successful in getting the London Poles to agree to be subsumed by the Lublin Poles, he would need to offer some kind of assistance to the Warsaw Uprising. Laurence Rees has concluded that Stalin was always inclined to act as he did and refuse to help the Poles in Warsaw, a refusal which fitted a pattern of behaviour in which the Soviet leader had demonstrated time and again his distrust of the Poles and his desire to see the Home Army ‘neutralised’.

In any event, by 13 August, Stalin had made up his mind and, during the rest of August, the crucial period of the rising, the Soviets gave no assistance, not even with dropping air supplies. Although it is arguable whether the Red Army would have reached Warsaw in August, they faced a counter-attack from the Germans on the 2nd on the front line east of the city, they could have made the air bridge more successful if they had wanted to. In fact, a statement from the Soviet Commissariat for Foreign Affairs to the US’ Moscow Ambassador on 18 August made their policy quite clear:

The Soviet government cannot, of course, object to British or American aircraft dropping arms in the region of Warsaw, since this is an American and British affair. But they decidedly object to British or American aircraft, after dropping arms in the region of Warsaw, landing on Soviet Territory, since the Soviet Government do not wish to associate themselves either directly or indirectly with the adventure in Warsaw. 

Finally, on 22nd, Stalin himself reiterated this message in the clearest, most strident and insulting terms possible. He described the Home Army as a ‘bunch of criminals’, and stated that the Soviets would refuse to help the Western Allies with the airlift. Churchill tried to enlist Roosevelt’s support in sending a combative reply, only to be told by the American President on 26 August that he did not consider that it would prove advantageous to the long-range general war prospect for me to join you in the proposed message to UJ (‘Uncle Joe’ or Stalin). Hugh Lunghi, a member of the British military mission to Moscow, went with the chief of staff of the mission to the Soviet Ministry of Defence to try to get the Soviets to help with the air supplies:

I must have gone there with him almost daily for the first two weeks, and afterwards it became sort of hopeless. We realised they were not going to allow either us or the Americans to land on Soviet territory. And this seemed to us to be the most terrible betrayal, not only of the Poles, but of the Allies. And again, another example of Stalin cutting off his nose to spite his own face, because it meant the Germans would put down this uprising more easily and then the remaining Germans would be available to oppose the Soviet Army. So it seemed quite crazy to us, but also terrible. We were fuming. We were absolutely furious in the military mission.

In reality, however, Stalin had calculated that if he stood back and did nothing, the Home Army would almost certainly be annihilated. And that was what was then happening inside Warsaw. During August, German SS soldiers, supported by various collaborators – including Cossacks from the 15th Cossack Cavalry Corps – conducted a brutal house to house war in the Polish capital. The most notorious SS unit in Warsaw was led by Oskar Dirlewanger. Although he himself had gained a PhD in political science in the 1920s, he presided over a gang of ill-disciplined and bloodthirsty soldiers, most of whom were convicted criminals released from captivity. They were already notorious for their mistreatment of civilians in the occupied Soviet Union. Matthias Schenk, an eighteen-year-old Belgian conscripted into the German Army, served as a demolition engineer in Warsaw alongside Dirlewanger’s Sturmbrigade. In 2008, he was still haunted by what he saw:

Once we went towards a house (which served as a school) with 350 children. We went upstairs and the children came down – children of nine to thirteen years old. They held up their hands … “Nicht Partisan!” … and they stood on the steps. And the SS started to shoot. And then the commander said: “No ammunition – use the butt of the gun!” And the blood spilled down the stairs.

This was by no means an isolated crime, for the Axis units in the city committed a whole series of atrocities. Many of those witnessed by Matthias Schenk seem purely sadistic, like the point-blank shooting of a little girl and the blowing-up of a thirteen-year-old disabled boy by placing hand grenades in his pocket. Every day in Warsaw, women and children were slaughtered by the occupiers out of their warped sense of ‘fun’. When a hospital held by the Home Army was stormed by the Dirlewanger brigade, Schenk saw, in the aftermath, Polish nurses being sexually assaulted by the SS:

They tore the clothes off these women and jumped on top of them, held them down by means of force … then they were raped … Then Dirlewanger drove them through the (German) crowd, which cajoled and applauded them to the gallows.

These appalling actions were part of a systematic Nazi plan to crush the uprising with brutality. Under the overall command of SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who had previously supervised the shooting of Jews and partisans in the occupied Soviet Union, the Germans targeted civilians as well as members of the Home Army. By 8 August, in one district of the city alone, the Germans had killed at least forty thousand civilians. The overall atmosphere of the German action against the Poles was captured by the SS commander-in-chief Heinrich Himmler, who later stated that he had told Hitler at the time of the rising that:

From the historical point of view the action of the Poles is a blessing … Warsaw will be liquidated; and this city which is the intellectual capital of a sixteen to seventeen million strong nation that has blocked our path to the east for seven hundred years … will have ceased to exist. By the same token… the Poles themselves will cease to be a problem, for our children and for all who follow us. 

Himmler’s use of language is significant. It is reminiscent of the ‘justification’ he gave to senior Nazis for the extermination of Jewish children. They had to be killed along with their parents, he said, because otherwise, they would only cause problems for future German generations. He had previously told SS officers that there was no point in killing Jewish men and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandsons. On 2 September, German troops and their auxiliaries stormed a makeshift hospital treating wounded Home Army fighters. At first, the soldiers took valuables from the wounded, such as gold crosses and watches, but those that followed, many of whom were drunk, raped the women. Twenty-year-old Danuta Galkowa, hiding on a stretcher in the basement, under a blanket, heard the horror being enacted all around her:

It was for them entertainment. They were excited by the fact that the people were yelling. … I was in despair, I was afraid only of rape, because I wouldn’t be able to live through that. 

The wounded men of the Home Army who were present in the cellar could do nothing to protect the women. They had serious stomach wounds, broken legs and arms, and could not move. The horror lasted from eight in the morning until dark, when the troops finally left, setting fire to the hospital as they went. Danuta tried to escape, dragging the wounded Home Army officer who had protected her on the stretcher. She pulled him to the entrance, where the Nazis were shooting those trying to escape. A German auxiliary turned his gun on Danuta but it jammed, and in the smoke, darkness and chaos she managed to get away, over the bodies of those who had been murdered in the courtyard, together with the wounded fighter. Eventually, this man who had saved her life became her husband.

Conflict Among Allies:

The summer and early autumn of 1944 were, therefore, a time of conflict between the Allies, not only over what seemed to be the eternal question of Poland but also over the post-war shape of Europe, and, most particularly, Soviet intentions towards the eastern European countries that they were shortly to occupy. Towards the middle of August 1944, the Soviet general offensive began to slacken, Soviet armies outrunning their supplies since behind them lay an advance of some 350 miles. Soviet troops were on the East Prussian frontier and had bridgeheads on the Vistula and the Narew, while the Soviet command planned to wipe Army Group North off the map. The Finns
had already abandoned the German-Finnish compact and late in August were suing for peace, harsh though the terms proved to be.
In the event, the Romanians beat the Finns in the race to make peace. The Soviet hammer having battered three German Army Groups (North Centre and North Ukraine), it was now the turn of Army Group South Ukraine to fall under it. Even before a shot was fired, however, this Army Group faced disaster, hemmed in as it was between the
Red Army eager to fall on it and the Romanians, who were even more eager to betray it.

On 20 August, Malinovskii’s 2nd Ukrainian Front launched its attack, encircling five German corps in the Jassy-Kishinev operation, while Tolbukhin’s forces trapped the Romanian 3rd Army. But defeat
in the field was outmatched and outpaced by political events when on August 23rd a coup in Bucharest knocked Romania out of the war with King Michael’s unconditional surrender to the Allies. Romania’s declaration of war on Germany followed in a trice and Romanian troops were ordered not to open fire on the Red Army. The Romanian defection had cataclysmic consequences for Germany with far more
than the fate of an Army Group involved: the fortunes of war in the entire south-eastern theatre had changed virtually overnight. With a German army hopelessly trapped and what was left of two Romanian armies laying down their arms, the whole of southern Bessarabia, the Danube delta and the Carpathian passes lay open to the Red Army. Henceforth neither the Danube nor the Carpathians could bar the Soviet advance and ahead of the Soviet armies lay the route to the Hungarian plains, the gateway to Czechoslovakia and Austria, as well as a highway to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.

While these battles and the battle for Warsaw raged on, Winston Churchill met with General Wladyslaw Anders, Commander-in-Chief of the free Polish Army, at Polish military headquarters in northern Italy. In the context of the controversy over the future of Poland, this meeting, on 26 August, was one of the most revealing of the war. Churchill began by congratulating Anders on the performance of the Polish II Corps during the campaign in Italy. He also enquired about the ‘mood’ of the soldiers, given what they are going through at the moment. Anders replied that, while the spirit of his men was ‘excellent’, their great concern is for the future of Poland, and at the moment, the current situation in Warsaw. Churchill said that he and President Roosevelt had asked Stalin to help those fighting in Warsaw, but their request had met with a negative response. Churchill assured him that while they were not ready for joint action over Warsaw, the Allies were doing everything they could to provide aid via the air route. After some argument over the future of Poland’s eastern borders with the Soviet Union, Churchill promised that…

… since Great Britain entered this war to defend your independence, then I can assure you that we will never abandon you.

These words were similar to those he had used at the previous meeting of the two men in Cairo, immediately after the Tehran Conference. Anders himself had been imprisoned in Moscow’s Lubyanska prison during the earlier partition of Poland in 1939, and was under no illusions: as he told Churchill, Stalin’s declarations that he wants a free and strong Poland are lies and fundamentally false. Once again, Anders voiced his serious concerns about Soviet intentions based on current as well as past experience, including the massacre at Katyn:

As they enter Poland, the Soviets arrest and deport our women and children deep into Russia as they did in 1939; they disarm the soldiers of our Home Army, they shoot dead our officers and arrest our civil administration, destroying those who fought the Germans continuously since 1939 and fight them still. We have our wives and children in Warsaw, but we would rather they perish than have to live under the Bolsheviks. All of us prefer to perish fighting than to live on our knees.

According to the minutes recorded by camp, Lieutenant Prince Eugene Lubomirski, Churchill was ‘very moved’ by Anders’ words and added to his earlier declaration:

I know that the Germans and Russians are destroying all of your best elements, especially intellectual spheres. … But you must trust – we will not abandon you and Poland will be happy.

Anders, not surprisingly, was somewhat suspicious of Churchill’s words. He was right to be, not because Churchill was being disingenuous, but because Anders knew he was no longer in a position to make such a promise, considering that a Red Army of 6.7 million was already marching into his country. He reminded the British PM that the Soviet Union would be immensely strong after the war; he was sceptical of Churchill’s view that Britain and the United States would be able to restrain the USSR after the war through their superior supplies of planes, tanks and guns. Churchill was not promising that the Western Allies would be prepared to go to war with the Soviet Union if Stalin refused to guarantee Poland’s independence, but his reply implied the possibility of military action, something that he had explicitly ruled out earlier in the year.

Collapse, Courage and Conflict:

By the beginning of September, the entire German defensive system was on the point of collapse. At that point, Bulgaria, which up to this point had been at war solely with Britain and France, made the inexplicable and suicidal decision also to declare war against the USSR on 5 September, only to collapse within twenty-four hours after the Russians crossed the Danube. Bulgaria, Axis ally of Germany but at heart pro-Russian and Slavophile, received Soviet armies without a shot being fired and duly declared war on Germany on 8 September. Hitler still fed on hopes that the entry of Soviet troops into Bulgaria might well speed an Anglo-Soviet collision, as the Red Army made for the Dardanelles – whereupon German troops in Army Group E might act as a ‘kind of police’ (with British approval) to hold the line against Bolshevism. There was certainly Anglo-Soviet rivalry in the Balkans, involving both Yugoslavia and Greece, but nothing to precipitate outright conflict.

The courage and ingenuity of the Poles during the Uprising were truly remarkable. When the Germans cut off the water supply to the city, the Poles bored wells by hand. Then, on 1 September 1,500 defenders had to retreat from a position at State Miasto (Old Town), using the sewers accessible from a single manhole in Krasinski Square. This lay only two hundred and fifty metres from German positions, and General Bór-Komorowski, the Home Army commander, knew that a few gas-bombs through the manholes or an outbreak of panic in the tunnels would prevent anyone from getting out alive. He nonetheless gave the order, since the defenders had nothing more to lose. So, leaving the Old Town completely defenceless in the event of a surprise German attack, the entire force, along with five hundred civilians, including the wounded and a hundred German prisoners, went down the manhole. As Bór-Komorowski wrote:

Slowly, very slowly, the queue of waiting people disappeared … Each person held on to the one ahead. The human serpent was about one and a half miles in length. … There was no time for rest periods, because room had to be made for others who were waiting by the manhole. It was only with the greatest difficulty that the line moved forward, for the water had now almost completely drained away and the mud had been replaced by a thick slime which gripped their legs up to the calf. The soldiers had no sleep at all for several days and their only food had been dry potato flakes. The rifles slung around their necks seemed unbearably heavy and kept clattering along the tunnel walls … The last soldier in the queue entered the manhole just before dawn.

When the Stukas, artillery, tanks and finally infantry attacked the positions the next morning, initially believing the Poles’ silence to be merely a ruse to conserve ammunition, the Germans found their quarry gone. The Poles had escaped, at least for the present.

By this time, and in contrast with Warsaw’s impending fate, the Allied forces had succeeded in liberating Paris, though not without cost in terms of both men and machinery. The Americans had poured forward through gaps in the German defences which had been created by the carpet bombing of Brittany at the end of July. Collins’ VII Corps took Avranches and allowed US forces to attack westwards into the Breton hinterland and eastwards towards Le Mans, proving the value of Patton’s eve-of-battle observation to his Third Army that flanks are something for the enemy to worry about, not us. 

Better communications and better inter-personal relations might have led to an even greater victory at ‘the Falaise Gap’, the mouth of an area eighteen miles wide by ten miles deep known as the Falaise-Argentan pocket, than the one gained by Montgomery, Bradley and Patton between 13 and 19 August. It was the news of a large Allied invasion of the south of France on 15 August, Operation Anvil, with 86,000 troops going ashore on the first day alone. That had persuaded Field Marshal von Kluge to withdraw from the Falaise pocket. The next day, Kluge ordered a general retreat out of the pocket, warning Jodl at the Army Headquarters that it would be a disastrous mistake to entertain hopes that cannot be fulfilled. Panzer Group West, comprising the Seventh and Fifth Panzer Armies, sustained around fifty thousand casualties, while the Allies lost twenty-nine thousand at the Falaise. Eisenhower visited the pocket forty-eight hours after the battle and later described the scene it as…

… unquestionably one of the greatest “killing grounds” of any of the war areas … It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.

With Allied fighter-bombers flying three thousand sorties a day, the twenty thousand German soldiers who did escape, the shattered remnants of the hitherto formidable Panzer Armies including Group Eberbach, did so with their 88mm guns intact. After the war, Bradley and Montgomery blamed each other for the over-caution at Falaise, but Kluge’s defeat there led to his replacement by Field Marshal Model on 17 August and enabled the Allies to make for the Seine and to liberate Paris, which had risen on 23 August. Out of the thirty-nine divisions which took part in the Normandy landings, just one was French, 2e Division Blandée (Armoured) under General Leclerc. It fought very bravely in the battle to close the Falaise Gap, and entered Paris first on 25th, as part of the US Fifth Army, although this did not elicit any noticeable gratitude from the Free French leader, General de Gaulle. He had set foot in France for the first time since 1940 on 14 June, more than a week after D-Day, and only then for a one-day visit to Bayeux, after which he had left for Algiers and did not return to French soil until 20 August. In the meantime, Patton’s Third Army had broken out of Avranches at the end of July and had driven through Brittany.  While the French Resistance, the résistants and maquisards, under a separate command from the Free French forces were hampering German armoured retaliation, de Gaulle played little part in any of this from his base in North Africa.

In Paris, the German commander General Dietrich von Choltitz took the humane and historic decision not to set fire to the city. Hitler had demanded of him that Paris must be destroyed from the top to the bottom, that he should not leave a single church or monument standing. The German High Command earmarked seventy bridges, factories and national landmarks – including the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe and Notre-Dame Cathedral – for destruction. But Choltitz deliberately disobeyed these barbaric instructions and continued to ignore Hitler’s enquiries as to whether Paris was burning. The Germans did not, therefore, fight in the French capital the battle of extirpation that they were simultaneously fighting in Warsaw, bringing about the utter destruction of the Polish capital and two hundred thousand of its people. Instead, Choltitz surrendered and went into captivity as soon as he decently could once the Allied forces arrived. He told the Swedish diplomat who negotiated the terms that he had no wish to be remembered as the man who destroyed Paris. In all, the French lost only seventy-six soldiers in the liberation of Paris, although 1,600 inhabitants were killed in the uprising, six hundred of whom were non-combatants. De Gaulle had asked Eisenhower to allow the French troops to be the first to into the capital, and the Supreme Commander duly gave the order to Leclerc to advance on the city on 22 August.

In any case, the Allies did not see Paris as a prime military objective rather than a purely political one. Eisenhower could spare the French 2e Division from the far greater battles that were taking place right across northern and southern France, fought by British, American and Canadian forces against crack German units. Omar Bradley in his memoirs dismissed Paris as a pen and ink job on the map. The first of Leclerc’s Sherman tanks rolled up the rue de Rivoli at 9.30 a.m. on Friday, 25 August. In the surrender document signed that afternoon by Choltitz and Leclerc, there was no mention of either Great Britain or the United States; the Germans surrendered the city to the French alone. De Gaulle arrived in Paris soon afterwards to make a speech at the Hotel de Ville in which he proclaimed that Paris had been liberated by her own people, with the help of the armies of France, with the help and support of the whole of France, … eternal France. The Allied contribution was summed up in a single phrase. Putting the ‘Liberation’ in context, however, the historian of the Occupation, Ian Ousby, later wrote:

Paris’s concentration of both people and cultural monuments ruled out aerial bombardment and heavy artillery barrages, so taking the city would soak up time and lives in a campaign already behind schedule and high in casualties. Besides, the capture of Paris was not tactically essential.

On the morning of 26 August, de Gaulle led a parade from the Arc de Triomphe down the Champs-Elysées to a thanksgiving service in Notre-Dame. When the head of the National Council of Resistance, Georges Bidault, came up abreast in the parade he hissed, ‘A little to the rear if you please.’ The glory was to be de Gaulle’s alone. Since he did not wish to steal de Gaulle’s limelight, Eisenhower himself did not enter the capital until the following day, five days after he had given the order for the 2e Division to take it.

The Challenge of Leadership:

For his part, although Stalin had decided by the middle of August that the Soviet forces would not support the Home Army in Warsaw, his policy towards the uprising was still not entirely transparent. On 18 September the Soviet authorities overturned their earlier decision and allowed one flight of American bombers en route to Warsaw to refuel on Soviet territory. Also, in the two weeks from 14-28 September, the Soviets themselves dropped supplies on Warsaw. However, since these drops did not involve the use of parachutes, much of the fifty tons of aid provided was destroyed on landing. They were conducted mainly for propaganda purposes so that Stalin could counter the growing outcry of world opinion about Soviet inaction in the face of the destruction of Warsaw, enabling him to demonstrate his public support to the Home Army without offering any effective assistance. Halina Szopinska, a twenty-four-year-old fighter with the Home Army in Warsaw, later testified as to how the airdrops had been a sham:

They had these small planes and would throw dry bread without a parachute and when it fell down it would just break into powder. … They would drop guns without a parachute – ammunition as well. There was no way we could repair it. So they pretended they were helping. They were doing it in such a way that it wouldn’t really help us.

Above: Halina Szopinska, a member of the Polish underground Home Army (AK), who was captured and tortured by the NKVD in December 1944. She then served ten years in prison.

By the end of August, the NKVD had been told to detain and interrogate all Poles who had taken part in the uprising and who had managed to ‘escape’ into the Soviet part of occupied Poland. These interrogations included brutal beatings and humiliations, such as those endured and testified to by Halina Szopinska. The NKVD regarded them as spies for ‘the English’ as well as for the Germans. Halina was sentenced to ten years in prison and in Lublin Castle, she learnt how former members of the Home Army were executed by firing squad as traitors ‘to the motherland’.

In the West, on 1 September, Eisenhower took over day-to-day control of all ground forces from Montgomery, much to the latter’s chagrin. Eisenhower’s plan was for a broad advance into Germany, whereas Montgomery wanted a narrow ‘single thrust’ into the heart of the Reich, spearheaded by his 21st Army Group. On the same day that Montgomery put forward his plan, Patton produced one in which his Third Army led the way instead, with characteristic immodesty, calling it the best strategical idea I’ve ever had. Omar Bradley, meanwhile, felt that his drive on Frankfurt ought to be the centre of operations. It is sadly impossible to believe that the best demands of grand strategy, rather than their own egos, actuated these soldiers, and Eisenhower had the difficult task of holding the ring between them and imposing his own view. His greatness, though doubted by Brooke and Montgomery, stems partly from his success in achieving that. Montgomery’s scheme would have required the Scheldt estuary to have been used as a direct supply route into the Rhine, but the Germans continued to hold it long after the fall of Antwerp in September, with the largely undamaged Fifteenth Army to the north of it. His plan to strike off across the North German Plain towards Berlin, crossing the Weser and the Elbe, made little military sense considering the level of resistance offered by the Germans until as late as April 1945 in this territory. It would also have reduced the US Third Army to the minor role of protecting the flank of the British forces.

Instead, the Supreme Commander stuck with his ‘broad front’ approach to the invasion of the Reich, which he believed would bring all our strength against the enemy, all of it mobile, and all of it contributing directly to the complete annihilation of his field forces. Partly because of the efficacy of the V-weapon flying bomb and rocket campaign against Britain, which could be ended only by occupying the launching sites, the main part was still to be the 21st Army Group’s advance through Belgium north of the Ardennes forest and into the Ruhr Valley, which would also close off Germany’s industrial heartland, and thus deny Hitler the resources to carry on the fight. Eisenhower split the 12th Army Group commanded by Bradley in two and sent most of the First Army north of the Ardennes to support Montgomery, leaving Patton’s Third Army to march on the Saar, covered to the south by the 6th Army Group which had made its way up from the Anvil landings in the south of France. By the end of August, Patton had crossed the Marne and was soon able to threaten Metz and the Siegfried Line. To his intense frustration, his advance was halted by running out of petrol due to the four-hundred mile supply lines to Cherbourg. However, Brussels fell to the 21st Army Group on 3 September and Antwerp the next day, but, as already mentioned, Antwerp was useless to the Allies without the control of the Scheldt estuary.

In September, two months after his sacking, Rundstedt was recalled as Commander-in-Chief West. Watching the Hitler Youth Division retreating over the River Meuse near Yvoir on 4 September, Rundstedt said what many German officers were thinking, but few dared state, that it is a pity that this faithful youth is sacrificed in a hopeless situation. On 11 September, the Allies set foot on German soil for the first time, when American troops crossed the frontier near Trier, yet Hitler still had armies numbering several million men, albeit far too widely dispersed. His ‘Western Wall’, the Siegfried Line, seemed formidable, and his reappointment of Rundstedt was good for the Wehrmacht’s morale, with Field Marshal Model remaining in charge of Army Group B, Rommel and Kluge both having committed suicide, after having been implicated in the Bomb Plot. Later in the month, Churchill – convinced that Hitler was a hopeless strategist – ridiculed him in the House of Commons:

We must not forget that we owe a great debt to the blunders – the extraordinary blunders – of the Germans. I always hate to compare Napoleon with Hitler, as it seems an insult to the great Emperor and warrior to connecthim in any way with a squalid caucus boss and butcher. But there is one respect in which I must draw a parallel. Both these men were temperamentally unable to give up the tiniest scrap of any territory to which the high water mark of their hectic fortunes had carried them. … he (Hitler) has successfully scattered the German armies all over Europe, and by obstination at every point from Stalingrad and Tunis down to the present moment, … has stripped himself of the power to concentrate his main strength for the final struggle.

Yet even while the House of Commons was laughing at Hitler’s strategic blunders, the Führer was planning a concentration of German forces in the Ardennes that would once again astonish the world. Montgomery’s bold scheme to use the British 1st and the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions to try to capture the bridges over the Meuse and Rhine and thereby ensure the encirclement of the Ruhr to the north came to grief in mid-September in and around the Dutch towns of Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem. Despite the highest order of heroism, mistakes were made in the planning stages which meant that it was doomed before it began. It was the largest airborne assault in history, but the intelligence that should have warned the 1st Airborne Division of two Panzer divisions that were refitting near Arnhem was given insufficient weight so that it did not take enough anti-tank weaponry to the drop zones. Operation Market, the airborne assault of Friday, 17 September, was initially successful, but the simultaneous ground attack, Operation Garden, reached Eindhoven and Nijmegen on the 18th and 19th respectively, but could not break through determined German resistance in time to relieve the paratroopers at Arnhem.

(to be continued…)

 

Surviving Auschwitz and the Budapest Ghettos:

Susan (Zsuzsa) Pollock was deported as a child of fourteen to Auschwitz from the Hungarian countryside in 1944. Her story is available to read and download at https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/susan-pollack/. Apart from those who survived Auschwitz, there were many children who escaped the death marches and Arrow Cross terror in Budapest, and survived, scarred by the experience of loss of family and friends. Here, I quote published and unpublished testimony from these children remembering that dreadful summer of 1944.

Tom’s Tale – Air Raids on Budapest:

The German occupation and the collaboration of the Hungarian state in it meant that the previous agreement with the Allies not to bomb the country was negated. The bombardment of Hungary began in the summer of 1944. The warm summer of 1944 was a summer of allied (mainly RAF) airstrikes. Two-year-old Tom Leimdorfer (whom I first met in the UK in 1987) often played outside in their small but secluded front garden on the Pest side of Budapest. They had a radio and were generally the first to hear the air raid warnings. The bombers normally came from the south and the direction given over the airwaves was: ‘Baja, Bácska, Budapest’.

These were amongst Tom’s first words, acting as an air raid warning to people in the flats above us as he ran around naked in the garden shouting ‘Baja, Bácska, Budapest!’ They would then all go down to the cellar, which served as a very inadequate air raid shelter.

The RAF was bombing them and their lives were under threat from them, but they were not ‘the enemy’ as far as Tom’s family was concerned. Tom’s father was ‘missing’ on the Russian front (pictured above with his unit) and Russian troops were advancing towards Hungary with all the uncertainties and horrors of a siege of Budapest approaching, but they were not their ‘enemy’ either, but their hoped-for liberators. Yet Tom’s maternal grandparents were taken by Hungarian special forces on the orders of the Gestapo with no objection or resistance from their neighbours. Looking back, Tom wrote that the ‘enemy’ was war and inhumanity, hatred and anti-Semitism.

Tom’s ‘official’ baby picture.

Tom Leimdorfer’s grandfather Aladár spent much of his time on his allotment just outside the small town of Szécsény, where he also kept bees, enjoying the simple life in retirement. Tom’s mother later told him that they last visited the elderly couple in early May 1944 (as shown in the picture of her with her mother, right), when Tom was 18 months old, just a few weeks before they were deported to Auschwitz. Tom is in no doubt that his grandparents would have been taken straight to the gas chambers on arrival. The story of the lively Jewish community in Szécsény was later told by the photographer Irén Ács in a moving account and photos of her friends and family. She also survived in Budapest, but nearly all her friends and family perished.

The Long Shadow of Auschwitz from Szécsény to Pest:

Early in May, the Jews of Szécsény were ordered to leave their homes and belongings apart from a small case with a change of clothes and essentials. They were restricted to a ghetto of a few houses near the school. On the 10 June 1944, they were taken under special forces’ escort to the county town of Balassagyarmat, some 20 km away. There were no Germans in Szécsény, the whole operation being carried out by Hungarian special forces. In Balassagyarmat, the Germans supervised the loading of the wagons from the whole region with ruthless efficiency. By nightfall, the long train of cattle wagons carrying over 2,500 men, women and children were on their way to Auschwitz. The memorial in the Jewish cemetery of Szécsény has 303 names of those killed in the Holocaust from that town of around 6,000 people. A similar fate befell villages across Hungary, where there was no time for any reaction, let alone organised resistance, by the Jewish families or their Christian neighbours.

Another ‘Jewish’ child in Budapest in 1944 was Marianna (‘Daisy’) Birnbaum (née László), who wrote up her family and friends’ stories in her 2016 volume, 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes. In her introduction to this, she wrote:

1944 was the most important year of my life. My childhood ended in 1944 and what I experienced during that time determined the decades that were to follow. Ever since the age of ten, I see the world as I then saw it. In the battle between God and Satan. Satan won, but we have not been told. By now, I know that the perpetrator can be a victim at the same time. However, this awareness does not help me to give up that hopelessly ‘Manichaean’ view of the world that the year 1944 had created in me.

Due to luck and the bravery of my father, my parents… survived, but many of my relatives became the victims of German and Hungarian Nazism. … I also want to report on those who by some miracle had survived those terrible times, because their lives too had irrevocably changed.

In the summer of 1944, she and her mother rushed to her Uncle Lajos Benke (formerly Blau, pictured below) for advice when her father was taken by the Gestapo. For a while, having an ‘Aryan’ spouse exempted Jews from racial legislation. Although her Aunt Juliska was non-Jewish, Uncle Lajos was registered as a Jew. They lived in an elegant apartment in Buda. He could give them no advice, but would not allow his sister and niece to return to Pest due to the allied bombing. They spent three days there, but Daisy’s mother grew nervous and worried that they would cause trouble for their hosts. In order to take up residence, even temporarily, they should have registered with the local police, but Jews were not permitted to change residence and so it was safer for them to leave. Daisy became six that summer, so she had to wear a yellow star. By then, her father, who had paid a large bribe to a Gestapo officer, was temporarily free.

He also arranged Swiss protection for Uncle Lajos, who came to live with them in the apartment they shared with about twenty other people. In order to be with her husband, Aunt Juliska appeared daily in the house, despite exposing herself to the constant danger of air raids through these visits to the Jewish neighbourhood. Martial law was put into effect: Jews could only leave their so-called ‘protected houses’ for only two hours per day. In any case, she was never allowed to leave the house alone, though she sometimes rushed out in secret when she could no longer bear such a large number of people packed into the house, the permanent loud yelling and various other noises. Once outside, she walked down one of the main streets until stopping in front of the local patisserie. What happened next was one of those peculiar small acts of human compassion which randomly punctuated life during wartime:

… swallowing hard, I watched the children inside, sitting in the booths, licking their ice creams. Jews were banned from there, too, and I had not had ice cream since the summer before, because … by the time spring came, I was no longer permitted to enter such places.

Suddenly a shadow was cast upon the shop window and when I turned around, I saw a German soldier standing next to me. He must have been an officer because there were stars on his uniform. “Was magst du? Willst du ein buntes?” he asked. … Frightened, my response was barely audible. He took my hand and walked me with the yellow star on my dress into the patisserie and ordered two scoops of mixed ice cream for me. Of course, it was he who was being served but I believe that the people sitting inside understood what had happened.

The officer pressed the cone in my hand, paid and moved toward the exit. I followed him, the ice cream in one hand, the other that the soldier no longer held, hanging awkwardly, as if next me. I murmured my thanks as he hurried away without a backward glance. He was the one and only German soldier I had met during the war. Should I draw from this meeting a conclusion regarding the relationship between the German Nazi army and the Jews? 

The map shows the ghettos and zones set out in the deportation schedule. Places referred to in the text: Szécsény, Balassagyarmat, Szolnok, Komárom, Cinkota, Csepel, Kispest.

Daisy’s Relatives & Friends in Szolnok & Komárom:

Daisy’s father’s family lived in Szolnok, and her mother’s relatives were in Komárom, which was returned to Hungary through its Axis alliance. Of these two families, sixty-four perished in the various extermination camps, comprising men, women and children. Her father’s brother, her Uncle Bálint (above), was arrested on the German occupation of Szolnok, together with several of the wealthier Jews. They were beaten and tortured, first in the jail in the town and later in Budapest. Meanwhile, their families were deported from the town. Trains, made up of cattle cars, were already in the station when the gendarmes took Aunt Ilonka back to their home leaving Pista, aged twelve, on his own with a rucksack on his back, waiting for her in front of the wagons. She returned to the platform just as the huge doors were about to be slammed shut and locked. The gendarmes had been searching her home for hidden money and jewellery and had she not handed everything over, she would quite possibly have been beaten to death then and there. In the best case, she and Pista would have been put on the next train.

They did not know it at the time, but the first train was directed via Austria whereas the following one went directly to Auschwitz. Their catching the first meant the difference between possible survival and immediate death. They were eventually reunited with Bálint on an Austrian farm he had been deported to but found themselves separated again when taken to work at the Anker bakery in Vienna. They then survived an air raid and by the time they were transferred to Terezin concentration camp, there were no longer any trains being directed to Auschwitz. When they eventually all returned to Szolnok, they were able to begin a new life with the help of other jewels which Bálint had hidden in a different spot that he had shown only to Pista.

Bálint and Ilonka also had an elder son, who was twenty-three in 1944. He was known as ‘Sanyika’ (pictured above). Barred from university because he was Jewish, he was put to work in the extended family’s iron and metal plant, though at heart he was a poet. Drafted into the forced labour corps in the army in 1940-41, he was dispatched to the Carpathians. After his parents were deported, his poems (stored in the attic of the Szolnok house) were thrown about by neighbours who ransacked the place, searching for anything of value. Many years later, Pista met one of Sanyika’s friends in Budapest and two others in Israel. They told him that Sanyika had become desperate after he had learned of the deportations of his parents. He stopped caring about his own fate, clashed with the guards who beat him severely. When his three friends tried to escape, he refused to join them. It was a cruel twist of fate that those whom he believed to have died survived, whereas he disappeared without a trace and was thought to have perished.

Daisy’s mother’s family lived in Komárom and the neighbouring settlements. In early June 1944, Hungarian gendarmes put her grandparents into a freight train and sent them off to Auschwitz. Two letters from them have survived. The first was written to her around Christmas 1938, and the second came into her hands in 1995 when she found it among her mother’s papers. Her grandparents wrote it together, a day before they were deported from the Komáron ghetto. She realised that her mother must have carried the devastating message in her own clothing until after the liberation of Hungary and then when they escaped Hungary in 1956 and went to live in California. She reflected on how, when …

… soon after the war’s end I saw my parents – who were then in their thirties – having a good time (they even danced!), I was very angry at them for “forgetting so fast.” It took a long time of maturing until I understood that they forgot nothing: Just here and there they searched for a moment of joy in order to survive what had been barely survivable.

Her mother’s younger brother, József Blau, sent two postcards to family members in July 1944, one of which encouraged his cousin to send a postcard to deported relatives, which was limited to thirty words in German, placed in an envelope and given to the Jewish Council in Budapest from where it would be forwarded. We know now that, in order to avoid panic among the newly-arrived deportees at Auschwitz, the Nazis made them send postcards to their families from Waldsee. The cards could be picked up in the office of the Jewish Council at Budapest, Sip utca 12 on the basis of published lists. Characteristic of the Nazis’ infinite cynicism, there was no need to put stamps on the cards sent in response, because the cards were destroyed, either in the Council or at the next step, since the addressees were no longer alive. Daisy’s mother also had a cousin in Komárom, Aunt Manci, whose daughter, ‘Évike’, was of a similar age to Daisy so that they became inseparable friends (pictured below). Uncle Miki, Aunt Manci’s husband, had been called up to serve in a forced labour camp at the beginning of the war and after a short time he was declared ‘missing’. They never found out what had happened to him. Aunt Manci and Évike remained alone until, in the early summer of 1944, together with Marianna’s grandparents, Aunt Manci’s family was deported and Évike was also taken to Auschwitz. Daisy wrote that she often wondered: Who held her hand on the ramp as they stood in front of Mengele?

Another little friend in Komárom was Ági. She was also deported to Auschwitz with her mother where they were immediately gassed. Her father was in a labour camp at the time, but somehow survived and returned to Komárom in 1945. Jenő found no-one alive from his family and lived alone for months in their old house until he met Rózsi, a former acquaintance. She too had been sent to Auschwitz with her mother and her own daughter. The child clung to her grandmother which resulted in the two of them being sent immediately to the gas chamber. Rózsi, therefore, found herself in the other line of those who had survived the first selection. She was transferred from Auschwitz and worked in an ammunition factory. Broken, the lone survivor from her family, she also returned to Komárom and after a short time, she and Jenő decided to marry. However, soon after four or five young women who had spent some time recuperating after surviving the camps, also returned to Komárom. They recognised Rózsi as the “dreaded capo”, a prisoner assigned by the Nazis to supervise the rest of the prisoners in the camps. They visited Jenő and claimed that she had beaten and tortured them both in Auschwitz and later in the ammunition factory where they too had been transferred. Allegedly, he then pounced on her and almost strangled her. With a great effort, the neighbours succeeded in pulling him off Rózsi, taking her onto the grass outside to revive her. He then went into the house, left with a bag and disappeared from Komárom, reportedly for Palestine.

It was, again, a twist of fate which meant that Daisy was not sent to Auschwitz with her grandparents. When the Germans occupied Budapest in March 1944, her grandfather had demanded that her parents should send her to Komárom right away, accompanied by her friend Mariska, and they both set out for the Western Station soon after. However, when they arrived at the station, there were police and soldiers everywhere, demanding to see documents. When Mariska admitted that whereas she was a Christian, her companion was Jewish, they were barred from boarding the train. However, had she been allowed to board, she would almost certainly have been deported with her grandparents, ending her life in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. In early June, her grandparents, along with the rest of the Jewish community of Komárom, were first moved to the ghetto and then, a few days later, they were all herded into cattle cars to be deported. Gazsi, their shop assistant and factotum, helped the Bau family, although the gendarmes threatened to put him on the train too. Daisy’s dog, Foxy, who had been cared for by Gazsi for the previous few weeks, began barking at this struggle, and one of the gendarmes shot him dead. Gazsi then ran to the post office from where he mailed the Bau’s last letter, adding the last details about Foxy. The letter arrived on 13 June, Daisy’s mother’s birthday, the letter which eventually came into their granddaughter’s possession over fifty years later. Daisy recalled its immediate effects:

Neither before, nor after, have I seen anything like this. With the letter in her hand, my mother ran through the apartment in circles, screaming and tearing out her hair (literally). I was merely told that my grandparents, in the company of many relatives, were ‘taken away’; no-one knew where. … I was around fifteen when I found out that (Foxy) had been shot… Since then, I have been mourning him as another Holocaust victim from my family.

Scarred Schoolfriends from Budapest:

In the capital itself, rumours had been circulating claiming that those who converted would not be deported so that many Jewish families tried to save themselves by seeking Protestant pastors who would help them by providing certificates of baptism without studying or preparation. In one of Uncle Józsi’s postcards, sent just before he was shot dead while being deported to Austria, he mentioned that some members of their larger family were visiting a parish priest. Tom Leimdorfer’s mother had already converted to Calvinism. Daisy’s father gained the assistance of the pastor of the Fóti út Evangelical Congregation and decided that both she and her mother should convert. Her mother, however, refused, and would not let her daughter attend either. Her father, therefore, got his ex-secretary to stand in for his wife, but he could not get a Christian child to stand in for Daisy, so she remained Jewish.

A number of Daisy’s friends and classmates also survived the year 1944 as children and grew up to be wounded people. Instead of losing their relatives to illness or old age, to traffic accidents or even random bombing, their family members were victims of a well-prepared genocide. ‘Tomi’ was born in Budapest in 1931. His father owned a large factory that produced light fixtures; his mother was a concert pianist. The entirely assimilated family, living on the first floor of a Rózsadomb villa, decided to take the final step and converted to Catholicism, mainly to avoid the increasing restrictions on Jews. Nonetheless, in June 1944, they had to leave their home, as Tomi, his mother and his older sister Edit were moved to a ‘Jewish house’. By then, his father was also in a forced labour camp. In October, all three of them had to report to the brick factory of Óbuda, from where they were supposed to be deported. Tomi’s father was able to provide them with Swiss protection documents and, therefore, three days later, they were moved to the overcrowded ghetto. There, Tomi shared a room with six children but he succeeded in smuggling them all out because he had two copies of the document proving that he was a Roman Catholic. Following his plan, two boys left the ghetto (one at each exit) with the documents, met outside, one returning with both copies so that the exeat could be repeated until all seven of them were outside the walls.

Ágnes, born in Budapest in December 1933, lived with her parents in an apartment which became crowded when her mother’s sister Irén, her husband Retső and their two sons moved in with them from the small town of Cinkota, near the capital, during the spring of 1944. Her father was soon drafted into the army, but as he was forty-six years old, he narrowly avoided being sent to the Russian front. Instead, he was directed into forced labour from where he was allowed to send a postcard to his family each week so that they were not too worried about him. Teaching at Ági’s elementary school was discontinued after 30 April and she had to wear a yellow star, a humiliating sign that had to be sewn on to each and every piece of outside clothing. The family was also forced to move to a house marked with a yellow star. Ági slept with her mother on a couch in the hallway. Jews were allowed to shop only after 10 a.m. by which time everything had gone from the shelves. Ági went to the local bakery and queued for bread, so at least they had fresh bread to eat. She did not remember whether they had ration cards, which were legally valid for Christians only. She did remember her Aunt Irén poking the worms out of a piece of meat and cooked it, but Ági refused to eat it. During the warm summer, the children played out on the flat roof, or on the staircase, as they were no longer permitted to go to the park. On 3 July, Ági’s Uncle Ernő and his sixteen-year-old son Péter went out to Csepel, the industrial island in the Danube, to look for work in order to avoid deportation. They were never seen again. The family later heard that they had been rounded up in a raid and later perished in Auschwitz, the father committing suicide by running into the electrified fence.

Before the spring of 1944, Marianna’s Jewish friends in Budapest led a very active outdoor life, getting ‘Brownie’ cameras and bicycles for their birthdays. As late as the winter of 1943-44, they went skying at Normafa, a popular skiing slope in the Buda Hills. However, outdoor life soon came to an abrupt end as Jewish families no longer dared to show themselves at places of leisure, even if not yet officially banned. They feared to call attention to themselves during the frequently conducted parasite roundups aimed primarily at Jews by Hungarian fascists. Following the Nazi occupation, they suddenly found themselves excluded from most public places and during the worst times the families lost contact with each other because they were ordered to live in different ‘Protected houses’. They didn’t meet again until 1945 when Marianna learnt that her best friend in Budapest, Marika, hidden in a nunnery, remained the sole survivor of her family. Her parents and her brother Andris were taken from their ‘protected house’ by the Arrow Cross paramilitaries and were shot into the Danube. Andris, Marianna’s first boyfriend, was just thirteen.

Ágota, or ‘Ágika’, was a silent little girl who loved her father more than she loved anyone. Whenever her father was at home from his forced labour service, Ágika always sat very close to him, but during the spring of 1944, she was at home alone with her mother, Ilus. When her husband was away, Ilus found it difficult to cope with the new world that seemed ready to destroy her and her family at any moment. She continually expected to be arrested by the Gestapo, a fear not quite unreasonable since Ágika’s father owned a rubber and tire factory which was now under the control of the Hungarian state, but could have been too useful a source for the Germans to allow to remain in the hands of the state. There were still a number of similarly wealthy Jewish families living in the same building. Once a green Mercedes stopped at the park entrance of the house, and a few minutes later, when the soldiers left, they took one of the tenants along. A few days later, when Ilus saw the distinctive Mercedes again from the window of the fifth-floor apartment, she assumed the worst when three soldiers got out and started towards the gate. As she heard the elevator approaching the upper floors, she grabbed her daughter and dragged her towards the balcony door, with the aim of throwing themselves off the balcony. Ágika struggled with her mother, preventing her from opening the door by biting her wrist before screaming at her:

You are not going to kill me, you murderer, I am going to wait for my Daddy!

While they continued to fight quite bitterly, the noise from the elevator shaft stopped, and the sound of boots could be heard from the floor below. Mother and daughter sat on the floor for some minutes, gasping for air, before bursting into tears. They were later hidden by a Christian family who, though well remunerated for doing so, were  risking their lives, as the ubiquitous posters chillingly proclaimed:

Whosoever hides Jews will be hacked to pieces.

Thanks to Ágika, the three of them survived the horrors of 1944. So did Gyuri, Ágika’s cousin, who moved in with them. His mother was the elder sister of Aunt Ilus and one of the many ‘who did not return’. His parents had divorced when Gyuri was little, so he lived with his mother, brother and maternal grandmother. His father was ‘reported missing’ earlier in the war, so Gyuri became a ‘half-orphan’ at the age of ten. In 1944, they lived in wretched misery with many others in a ‘Jewish house’ waiting to be deported. He later recalled the hostility of their ‘Christian’ neighbours:

We were gathering in the courtyard when the passers-by stopped in the street, cursing us and spitting at us over the iron fence. Watched by, and at the pleasure of the bastille crowd, we were taken in a long procession along Rákóczi út to the synagogue in Dohány utca.

Apparently, a German soldier filmed the entire action by the Hungarian gendarmes which can be viewed in the permanent collection of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The plan was to move the several hundred Jews to the railway station, but the manoeuvre was suddenly halted and all were marched back to the ‘Jewish house’, after being forced to hand over their watches, jewellery and the cash they had on them. With the help of relatives, Gyuri’s family then received Swedish protective papers and, together with twenty others, they were moved into the abandoned apartment of Aunt Ilus, which had become a Swedish ‘protected house’.

Kati was also born in Budapest in 1934. Her father owned a paper factory that he managed with his father and the family lived on the Pest side of the capital, in a house where one of the apartments on the upper floor belonged to them, while her grandparents’ apartment and the shop were on the ground floor. Although Kati’s father was conscripted to forced labour even before the war, they lived comfortably, without worries… until, at age nine and a half, the world changed around them. One of Kati’s most painful memories was that she had to go to school each day with the yellow star on her dress. Because their house was declared a ‘Jewish house’, they did not have to move. Instead, dozens of people were forcibly moved in with them. Kati took care of the younger children, among whom some were under six. She took them down to the air-raid shelter and played with them to distract them during the raids. One time, bombs were dropped very close by, but only shattered the windows and damaged a few pieces of furniture.

Then one day, while on his way to join his company, Hungarian soldiers removed Kati’s father from a train at Nagyvárad and, suddenly, he went missing without a trace. Kati’s mother was able to procure copies of the ‘protection documents’ Wallenberg had been handing out, but it was too late because the Germans occupied their house and transported both sets of grandparents to the ghetto. Kati was sent to live with distant relatives and one of her father’s employees got hold of false papers for her, with a new name, Aranka Sztinnyán. Although she was with relatives, she felt terribly alone. Although I looked Aryan, I was not permitted out on the street, she recalled. A few weeks later, Kati’s mother, who had escaped from the Óbuda brick factory, came to fetch her. Together with ten other relatives, Kati and her mother hid in the coal cellar of an apartment block where, from time to time, they received food from unknown benefactors who were not permitted to see them. Kati does not remember being hungry, neither was she scared, except for the bombs. Her mother saved her from sensing the daily danger that surrounded them. When they returned to their home following the ‘liberation’, they discovered that, except for her father, everybody had survived. Eventually, he too returned from Terezin at the end of the war, having survived ten different concentration camps.

Misi ‘Gyarmat’ was born into a ‘Jewish gentry’ family in Balassagyarmat, which had been the family’s home since the eighteenth century. His maternal grandfather, Ármin, was a well-to-do, well-respected local landowner. Although Misi’s parents lived in Budapest, ‘Gyarmat’ was the paradise where he, his mother and his younger sister Jutka spent their summers, immersing themselves in the pleasures of country life which offered unlimited freedom. His father, Dr László Gy. held the rank of lieutenant, working as a physician among the mountain rangers during World War I. In Apatin in Serbia, which was awarded to Hungary in 1941, László took over the medical practice of a young Christian doctor who was drafted to serve with the Second Hungarian Army on the Russian Front. He lived there between 1942 and 1944 when he went to live with his family in the ghetto in Budapest. When Misi’s maternal grandfather died in 1943, the family council decided that since both uncles were serving in forced labour camps, Misi’s mother would take over the management of the estate, and she and the children would not return to Budapest and Misi transferred to the Balassgyarmat Jewish school. Following the German occupation, the estate was immediately confiscated, and the family’s mobility was increasingly curtailed. The local Jews were moved into a hastily assembled ghetto and all those deemed ‘temporary lodgers’ were ordered to return immediately to their permanent places of residence. For Misi and his mother, this meant a return to Budapest, so his mother pleaded to be allowed to stay in Balassagyarmat in order to take care of her recently widowed mother. Her brother, home on leave, went to see the local police chief, but the captain denied the request, saying:

I am doing this in the interest of your sister, her children and for the memory of your father.

The meaning of this sentence became clear later, making it clear that the police chief knew exactly what would happen with the deportees. As in other villages throughout rural Hungary, he did nothing to rescue any of the local Jews but instead rendered fast and effective police work to accomplish their deportation. Next day, Misi, his sister and his mother left for Budapest. Two weeks later, those of their family who remained at Gyarmat, together with the rest of the Jewish community, were all crammed into cattle cars and sent to Auschwitz. One survivor later told them that, in the wagons, they had to travel standing, all packed in like sardines. One of the gendarmes stabbed the leg of an old woman who, due to her varicose veins, could not walk fast enough. Blood was spurting from her leg as she was pushed into the car. A dying man was shoved into another wagon and his body was not removed until six hours after his death, though the train did not leave until after those hours. Misi lost his grandmother in Auschwitz and all his childhood friends from Gyarmat.

Hoping to avoid deportation later that summer, Misi and his family converted to Catholicism. Whereas none of the churches stood up openly for the persecuted, during the worst period, both children were saved by members of the Catholic orders. Misi found refuge in the Collegium Josephinum on Andrássy Boulevard. Zsuzsa Van, the Prioress of the nunnery was later awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, on the memorial honouring those Christians who risked their lives to save Jews. Misi’s sister was saved by the Carmelite nuns in Kőbánya. Their paternal grandmother remained in the family apartment in Budapest, never sewed the yellow star on her own garments, yet somehow survived, along with both their paternal uncles. Thirty-five years later, Misi returned to his once-beloved Balassgyarmat for his first visit since those awful events.

Most of the children of Budapest of 1944 were just one generation away from country life and many, like Ágnes had been born in the countryside and still had relatives there. She had been born in Endrőd, a town in eastern Hungary, but by the time she was in the first form, her family had moved to Budapest and she became another of Daisy’s classmates at the Jewish elementary school on Hollán Street. Until 1944, Ágnes’s happiest moments were spent at her grandmother’s house at Zalaegerszeg in western Hungary. Her father, György, was a journalist and newspaper editor, politically aware and active. He took his little girl seriously, talking to her about politics and other grown-up topics. His sudden disappearance, therefore, created a void that has accompanied her throughout her life. In November 1943, unable to bear their confinement any longer, he left his hiding place, a loft, said goodbye as if he were just leaving for the forced labour camp, and was never seen again. She also lost her maternal grandmother that same year, from blood poisoning, Her only son died of starvation at Kőszeg. Her paternal grandparents were deported together with their daughter, György’s sister. They were sent to a farm in Austria where Ágnes’s grandfather, a rabbi in Hungary, drove a tractor. All three of them survived, saddened and scarred by their son’s disappearance. Ágnes always remembers the gigantic capital Zs (for ‘Zsidó’, ‘Jew’ in Hungarian) in her father’s military record book. Her poem to him stands for the unfathomable sense of loss many of these children have grown up with:

...

I feel, you are off. Stepping out,

a well-dressed vagrant,

you never really leave; you are just stepping out,

looking back, laughing, at age thirty-eight,

I’ll soon be back, you nod and wave.

Your birthday would have been the following day.

The Last Days of the War in the East:

It is a remarkable testimony to the dedication of the Nazis to complete their ‘final solution’ to ‘the Jewish Problem’ that their programme of deportations continued well into July. The huge Russian summer ground offensive, timed for the moment when attention in the Reich would be most concentrated on events in Normandy, was launched on 22 June 1944, the third anniversary of Operation Barbarossa. The counter-offensive, Operation Bagration (codenamed by Stalin after the great Georgian Marshal of the 1812 campaign). The attack was supported by four hundred guns per mile along a 350-mile front connecting Smolensk, Minsk and Warsaw. Bagration was intended to destroy the German Army Group Centre, opening the way to Berlin itself. The Red Army had almost total air cover, much of the Luftwaffe having been flown off westwards to try to deal with the Normandy offensive and the Combined Bomber Offensive. Much of the Third Panzer Army was destroyed in a few days and the hole created in the wildly overstretched German line was soon no less than 250 miles wide and a hundred miles deep, allowing major cities such as Vitebsk and Minsk to be recaptured on 25 June and 3 July respectively. By the latter date, the Russians had moved forward two hundred miles from their original lines. They encircled and captured 300,000 Germans at Minsk. Army Group Centre had effectively ceased to exist, leaving a vast gap between Army Group South and Army Group North. Bagration has been described by historians as being, from a German perspective, …

… one of the most sudden and complete military disasters in history. … even in the months following the Allied invasion of Normandy, German casualties in Russia continued to average four times the number in the West.

I have written about the tactical errors made by the German High Command, including Hitler himself, in my previous article. The movement of senior personnel on both the Eastern Front and, to a lesser extent, on Western Front, resembled a merry-go-round. Having been appointed commander-in-chief west in 1942, General Rundstedt was removed from command on 6 July 1944 after trying to persuade Hitler to adopt a more mobile defence strategy rather than fighting for every town and village in France. He was reappointed to his old post on the Eastern Front in command of Army Group South. By 10 July, twenty-five of the thirty-three divisions of Army Group Centre were trapped, with only a small number of troops able to extricate themselves. In the course of the sixty-eight days of this vast Kesselschladt (cauldron battle), the Red Army regained Belorussia and opened the way to attack East Prussia and the Baltic States. The year 1944 is thus seen as an annus mirabilis in today’s Russia. For all that is made of the British-American victory in the Falaise pocket, the successful Bagration offensive was ten times the size, yet it is hardly known of in the West.

On 14 July 1944, the Russians attacked south of the Pripet Marshes, capturing Lwow on the 27th. As a result, the Germans had been forced back to their Barbarossa start lines of three years earlier. Further south, Marshal Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front prepared to march on Belgrade, aided by Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav partisans. It was extraordinary, therefore, considering that the war’s outcome was in no doubt by the end of July 1944, that the Wehrmacht continued to operate as an efficient, disciplined fighting force well into the spring of 1945. The ‘Battle of Budapest’ played a major role in this. On 20 August, Marshal Vasilevsky began his drive to clear the Germans out of the Balkans, which saw spectacular successes as the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts crossed the River Prut and attacked Army Group South in Romania. With Hitler desperate to retain control of the Romanian oilfields, without which his planes and tanks would be forced to rely on failing synthetic fuel production within the Reich, he could not withdraw the Sixth Army, twenty divisions of which were therefore trapped between the Dnieper and the Prut by 23 August. On that same day, Romania surrendered, and soon afterwards changed sides and declared war on Germany: a hundred thousand German prisoners and much matérial were taken.

At the end of August, after the success of the D-day landings in Normandy had been secured, Horthy recovered his mental strength and replaced Sztójáy with one of his loyal Generals, Géza Lakatos. By then the war aims of the Horthy régime, the restoration of Hungary to its pre-Trianon status, were in tatters. The First and Second Awards and the acquisitions by force of arms would mean nothing after the defeat which now seemed inevitable. The fate of Transylvania was still in the balance in the summer of 1944, with everything depending on who would liberate the contested territories from the Germans. When Royal Romania succeeded in pulling out, the Soviet and Romanian forces combined forces began a joint attack and the weakened Hungarian Army was unable to contain them. By 31 August, the Red Army was in Bucharest, but despite having advanced 250 miles in ten days, it then actually speeded up, crossing two hundred miles to the Yugoslav border in the following six days.

Sources:

Marianna D. Birnbaum (2016), 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes. Budapest: Corvina.

Anna Porter (2007), Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust. London: Constable.

Zsolt Zágoni (ed.)(2012), From Budapest to Bergen-Belsen: A Notebook from 1944. Published by the editor.

Szabolcs Szita (2012), The Power of Humanity: Raoul Wallenberg and his Aides in Budapest. Budapest: Corvina.

Andrew Roberts (2010), Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War. London: Penguin Books.

Gyula Kodolányi & Nóra Szekér (2013), Domokos Szent-Iványi: The Hungarian Independence Movement, 1939-1946. Budapest: Hungarian Review Books.

László Kontler (2009), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing House.

Laurence Rees (2008), World War Two: Behind Closed Doors; Stalin, the Nazis, and the West. London: BBC Books.

The Introduction of ‘The Final Solution’ to Hungary:

By 1944 it was clear that the Hungarians had backed the wrong side in the war, despite the extension of the country’s territories that its support for the Axis Powers had enabled since 1938. After their forces had been crushed on the Eastern Front fighting alongside the Germans, Regent Horthy had tried to manoeuvre a way out of the war. In March, however, when Hitler had learnt of Horthy’s plans, he forced the Regent to accept an occupation of the country and the application of the ‘Final Solution’ to Hungary’s territories through the deportation of the entire Jewish population, as enumerated in 1941, to Auschwitz.

 

Four gas chambers were fully operation by 1943 and were working at full stretch by the time 437,000 Hungarians were brought there from early May and killed, within a matter of eight weeks, by early July. At the camp, between four and eight hundred people could be packed into huts that had originally been designed for forty-two horses, in which lice and flees were endemic.

SS Obersturmbannfuhrer (Lieutenant-Colonel) Adolf Eichmann led the special force that deported the Jews from Hungary.

He later boasted to one of his cronies that he would ‘jump laughing into his grave’ for his part in the deaths of four million Jews. In a 1961 diary entry after his conviction in Israel for genocide, Eichmann wrote, chillingly:

I saw the eeriness of the death machinery, wheel turning on wheel, like the mechanisms of a watch. And I saw those who maintained the machinery, who kept it going. I saw them, as they re-wound the mechanism; and I watched the second hand, as it rushed through the seconds; rushing like lives towards death. The greatest and most monumental dance of death of all time; this I saw.

Ghettoisation, Deportation & Collaboration:

Above: The Dohány Street Synagogue, at the centre of the Jewish ghetto in 1944-45.

On the morning of 3 April, British and American aircraft bombed Budapest for the first time since the beginning of the war. In response, the Hungarian security police demanded that the Jewish Council provide five hundred apartments for Christians who had been affected by the raid. Those Jews moving out of their homes were to be concentrated in apartment buildings in an area between the National Theatre and the Dohány Street Synagogue (above). The following day, 4 April, Sztójay’s minister László Baky and Lieutenant-Colonel László Ferenczy of the gendarmerie met to firm up plans for the ghettoisation and deportation of the Jews of Hungary. All Jews, irrespective of age, sex or illness, were to be concentrated into ghettos and schedules were to be would be set for their deportation to Poland. The few people who were still employed in armaments production or in the mines were temporarily spared, but only until suitable replacements could be found for them. Each regional office would be responsible for its own actions. The “rounding up” of the Jews was to be carried out by the local police and the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie units. If necessary, the police would assist the gendarmerie in urban districts by providing armed help.  It took until 16 April for the full directive and extensive explanations to be typed in multiple copies and sent to local authorities, but the ghettoisation had already begun on 7 April. The orders were marked “secret” and bore the signature of László Baky. He declared:

The Royal Hungarian government will cleanse the country of Jews within a short time. I hereby order the cleansing to be conducted district by district. Jews are to be taken to designated collection camps regardless of gender and age.

This was the basis on which the Hungarian government agreed that the Gestapo could organise the removal of the roughly 450,000 Jews from the provinces, but not the 200,000 from Budapest. It was Adolf Eichmann’s task to organise the liquidation of Hungarian Jews. Between 7 April 1944 and 8 July 1944, we know (from the meticulous records kept by Eichmann’s SS) that 437,402 men, women and children of all ages were forced to leave their homes, first herded in to ‘collection camps’ or ghettos and then transported to Auschwitz. They were to be transported in 148 long trains of cattle wagons. At the end of April,the Jewish leaders of Hungary, together with the Hungarian leaders of the Roman Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran Churches, in addition to the Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, received a detailed report about the deportation to Auschwitz, but kept their silence, thus keeping the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews and their Christian neighbours in ignorance, and enabling the success of Eichmann’s timetable. The reality that no one in the villages knew anything about the plan in advance of it being carried out is borne out by the testimony of the Apostag villagers detailed below. Few survived, and of those who did, even fewer returned to their former homes. Once gathered in the collection camps, they were effectively doomed to annihilation, even before they boarded the trains.

Allied Inaction:

Although it was logistically possible for the Allies to have bombed Auschwitz by air from Foggia in Northern Italy from early 1944, the decision was taken not to bomb a camp that the Allies had known since 1942 was being used for the systematic extermination of Polish Jews. While it was evident that the unmarked underground gas chambers and crematoria might well have escaped, it is argued that it might have been possible to bomb the railway lines running to and from the camp, and would anyway have been worth the attempt. French railway lines, stations, depots, sidings and marshalling yards were principal targets during the pre-D-Day bombing operations, after all. The possibility of killing large numbers of inmates was a major consideration, of course, but a much more regularly used argument was that the best way to help the Jews was to defeat the Germans as quickly as possible, for which the RAF and USAAF needed to bomb military and industrial targets instead. On 26 June 1944, the US War Department replied to a request from American Jewish organisations for the bombing of the Kosice (Kassa) – Preskov railway line between Hungary and Auschwitz by saying that it considered the most effective relief to the victims … is the early defeat of the Axis. By then, the opportunity to save the remainder of the Hungarian Jews from outside Budapest had telescoped to little more than a fortnight, since the last deportations were on 9 July and photo-reconnaissance, weather analysis and operational planning would together have taken longer than fifteen days. One historian has concluded that … Even if it had been successfully bombed, Jews would simply have been transported over a different route.

In any case, with the Allied Chiefs still concentrating on the battle for Normandy (Caen only finally fell on 9 July), the bombing of Auschwitz and/ or Kosice was not likely to get much high-level consideration. Nonetheless, the camp inmates desperately wanted the camps to be bombed, even if many of them would have been killed in the process. When the nearby IG Farben factory was attacked, killing forty Jews and fifteen SS, the inmates quietly celebrated.

The first transports from Hungary to Auschwitz began in early May 1944 and continued even as Soviet troops approached. The Hungarian government was solely in charge of the Jews’ transportation up to the northern border. The Hungarian commander of the Kassa railroad station meticulously recorded the trains heading to Auschwitz with their place of departure and the number of people inside them. The first train went through Kassa on May 14th. On a typical day, there were three or four trains, with ten to fourteen thousand people on each. There were 109 trains during these 33 days through to 16 June, as many as six trains each day. Between June 25th and 29th, there were a further ten trains, then an additional eighteen trains between 5-9th July. By then, nearly 440,000 victims had been deported from the Hungarian towns and countryside, according to the official German reports. Another ten trains were sent to Auschwitz via other routes from Budapest, while seven trains containing over twenty thousand people went to Strasshof at the end of June, including two from Baja, on the lower Danube.

The Deportation of Rural Jewish Communities:

The village of Apostag is in the County of Bács-Kiskun, occupying an area of thirty-two square kilometres, and with a population of just over 2,100. It is located close to the eastern bank of the River Danube, to the south of Budapest. It is both a village and a municipality. There has been a Synagogue in Apostag since 1768, by which time the Jewish population had developed into a sizeable, settled community, worthy of its own place of worship.  The Jews had first settled in this part of Hungary at the beginning of the Turkish occupation, following the Battle of Mohács in 1526.

By the end of the Great War and the beginning of the living memory of those giving oral evidence, there were some 2,300 inhabitants of the village and 104 Jewish families. Some of them owned land and some rented it, so not all the Jewish families were rich, and some remained quite poor. There were between one and three children in the families (smaller than the average ‘Magyar’ family). Twenty-four councillors were elected for the Village Council, one for each group of ten families. These representatives needed to be fairly wealthy landowners to qualify for election and the fact that twelve of these councillors were Jewish also shows how integral a part of the leadership of the village they had become.

One of these councillors, János, had joined the army in 1940 and was a soldier until 1948. He was only given leave once during this time, and this, crucially and perhaps poignantly, happened to be in May 1944. While he was at home, the Jewish families were taken away from the village. There is no evidence that anyone in the village, including ‘regular’ soldiers like János, had any prior knowledge of the Nazi deportation plan. Even if they had heard something, there were only two cars in the village in 1944, so there was no real possibility of escaping abroad in the days and nights before it was so rapidly and ruthlessly enacted. As it happened, János was surprised by the speed with which the Hungarian Gendarmerie and ‘Military Police’ came in and took the Jewish people to Kalocsa. No one knew where they were being taken, or how long they would stay there, or what would happen to them. They were told to gather what they needed and they had to leave this village. Two little girls, aged 9 and 11, were somehow left behind, and they were able to stay on for a while, but one day the soldiers came and took them to Kalocsa as well. He was able to talk with the Hungarian soldiers who said that they weren’t very happy to take the girls away, but they had to do this. In 1991, the surviving villagers recalled:

When the Jews had to leave this village, Anna saw a little girl in someone’s lap, crying, ‘don’t let me go away, I want to stay here’, but she had to go as well. Everybody had to leave this village. When the Jews had to leave the village, they didn’t want to leave their houses and were wailing at the walls. They were kissing the walls with their lips and caressing them with their hands. The children were crying. It was really terrible. Some of the Christian families who lived close to the Jews went to the Jewish houses to say goodbye, and it was a very sad event, such a sad thing that they cannot forget it.

The Library in the Village House (former synagogue), Apostag, 1991.

All the witnesses agreed in their evidence that the village people who weren’t Jewish couldn’t do anything to save their Jewish neighbours. The villagers also told us how they had watched from the nearby woods, in secret disbelief, as the soldiers took the Jews away in May 1944. They went on carts from the village to Kalocsa, which although further south of Budapest along the Danube, was apparently used as an assembly point for the Hungarian Jews being sent to the concentration camps. The villagers all stated that they did not know this at the time. So, when the Jewish people were taken away from the village, nobody knew anything about where they would go. They went by horse and cart to Kalocsa, some with their non-Jewish servants driving, so unaware were they of the ghastly reality which awaited them. All anyone knew was that they would stay for a while in Kalocsa, but nothing else. Of the roughly six hundred Jews deported from the village, only six ever returned after the war, before emigrating.

In total, 147 trains were sent to Auschwitz, where 90% of the people were exterminated on arrival. Because the crematoria couldn’t cope with the number of corpses, special pits were dug near them, where bodies were simply burned. It has been estimated that one-third of the murdered victims at Auschwitz were Hungarian. For most of this time period, 12,000 Jews were delivered to Auschwitz in a typical day. Photographs taken at Auschwitz were found after the war showing the arrival of Jews from Hungary at the camp (see above and below).

The devotion to the cause of the ‘final solution’ of the Hungarian Gendarmerie surprised even Eichmann himself, who supervised the operation with only twenty officers and a staff of only a hundred, including drivers, cooks, etc.

Very few members of the Catholic or Protestant clergy raised their voices against sending the Jews to their death. A notable exception was Bishop Áron Márton, in his sermon in Kolozsvár (now Cluj Napoca in Romania) on 18 May. But the Catholic Primate of Hungary, Serédi, decided not to issue a pastoral letter condemning the deportation of the Jews. By contrast, later that summer, when the fate of the Hungarian Jews became known in the West, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in a letter to his Foreign Secretary dated 11 July 1944, wrote:

There is no doubt that this persecution of Jews in Hungary and their expulsion from enemy territory is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world….

Churchill in France in 1944

Above: Hungarian Jews from the Carpathian Basin continue to arrive at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.

Even so, in the summer of 1944, the Hungarian Foreign Ministry continued to defend its actions on The Jewish Question against the mounting international outcry against the genocide, led by the United States. According to the Hungarian government, the Hungarian nation was defending its own against the…

… greatest danger… a much greater danger than that presented to the white population of the USA by the negroes or the Japanese. As the Soviet army approached the frontiers of Hungary the defeatist propaganda and disruptive activity of the Jews had had to be stopped. They had therefore been segregated and set to useful work in Hungary and elsewhere. A large number of Jews had been transferred to Germany as a workforce, as had for years also been the case with Christian Hungarians.

The Rounding-up of the Roma:

Above: Rounding up the Roma & a labour detail in 1944

The ‘Christian’ Hungarians referred to may well have been members of the Roma communities. Alongside the anti-Jewish actions, the Roma were also herded into labour camps in several counties, including Szolnok and Bács-Kiskun, which were established on some of the larger farms. In June, those Roma designated as unreliable were moved to special concentration camps within Hungary. These were established near the bigger provincial towns, and the settled Roma communities in Szolnok, Csongrád, Bács-Kiskun, Pest, Heves and Nógrád counties were moved to camps in Szekszárd, Veménd, Pécsvárad, Baja and Nagykáta. A sizeable number of Roma and Sinti ‘gipsies’, in the tens of thousands, were also sent to their deaths in Auschwitz and other camps.

The Role of the Regency & the Reserve Corps in ‘saving’ the Jews of Budapest:

The idea that any member of the Hungarian government, including the Regent (pictured left), was unaware of the scale and nature of the deportations is fanciful, to say the least, as is the idea that Horthy was responsible for stopping the deportations from the countryside and/ or the capital. It is true that Horthy ordered the suspension of all deportations on July 6, but by then the Regent was virtually powerless. This is demonstrated by the fact that another 45,000 Jews were deported from the Trans-Danubian region and the outskirts of Budapest to Auschwitz after this day. Domokos Szent-Iványi (below right), an officer in the Regency and a leading member of the Hungarian Independence Movement, wrote of Horthy’s motivation:

The Regent’s idea was not to abdicate since that would end in the destruction of the lives of many thousands of people, first of all, Hungarian Jews. His old thesis was that he was still captain of the ship of State and that his duty was to remain on the bridge until the ship was saved or went down, of course with him, the Commander of the ship…

Macartney, a fellow British diplomat, recorded in his memoirs that:

Even the Jews have reason to be thankful that he decided as he did. He did not save the Jews outside Budapest (and it may well be that a more subtle politician or one less easily influenced, could have done more than Horthy did in this direction). But he saved the Jews of Budapest, and no other man could have done it…

Above: The Royal Palace on Castle Hill in Buda, which housed the Regency offices, facing the Parliament House and Government offices across the Danube in Pest; taken from Gellért Hill.

The Jews of Budapest itself, numbering about 230,000, had not yet been touched except that they had been required to move into Jewish Houses, but neither had they yet been saved. The negotiations between the Jewish leaders and the Germans were still going on. Although at one time Eichmann offered to suspend the deportations, or at least the gassings, pending the conclusion of a bargain, his price was far higher than anything which the Hungarian Jews could pay. Most of the negotiations concerned relatively small numbers – in the first place, only 750 emigrants for Palestine. Later, larger numbers were mentioned, partly in connection with a remarkable offer made by the Germans to trade the Jews for war material. The Allies rejected this, and in the end, the Kasztner-Brand negotiations brought the release of only a few thousand Jews. A few Jews bought their way out privately, and these included one group whose fate involved issues of nation-wide importance. These were the inter-linked families of the Weiss, the Kornfelds, the Chorins and the Mauthners, who between them owned not only the Weiss Manfred Works on Csepel, by far the biggest heavy industrial plant in Hungary, which alone employed over forty thousand workers, but also a very large number of other assets.

Above: Map (with Hungarian legend) showing the extent of the ‘Holocaust of European Jewry’, 1933-45, with deaths shown as a percentage of the total Jewish population, the main centres of the Jewish population in 1933 (red spots and squares) and the main concentration/ extermination camps (black spots).

In the spring and early summer of 1944, those who were interested in what was happening to Jews throughout Eastern Europe had relatively broad access to accurate information, whether from Hungarian soldiers returning from the front, or from refugees escaping from Galicia into Hungary. However, the plain fact is that these pieces of information did not interest a significant part, perhaps the majority, of both the non-Jewish and Jewish population of Budapest. Hungarian Jews looked down on other eastern European Jews and were unconcerned as to their fate. In any case, open resistance on the scale seen in Warsaw seemed futile and their faith in Hungarian society was not completely dead. Samuel Stern, the leader of the Jewish Council in Budapest, had no illusions about Eichmann’s aims, as he later stated:

I knew about what they were doing in all the occupied countries of Central Europe and I knew that their operation was a long series of murders and robberies… I knew their habits, actions, and their terrible fame.

János Horváth (born 1921, in Cece, Hungary), was an economist, becoming an MP 1945-7, who then emigrated to the US where he became founder-President of the Kossúth Foundation in New York. He returned to Hungary in 1997 and became an MP again after 1998 when he recalled how the Budapest Zionists had…

… got hold of the Auschwitz testimonies written by two Slovakian Jews, who had been able to escape from the death camp in early 1944. (They) had it translated and sent to diplomats and Jewish leaders abroad and in Hungary, as well as to Regent Horthy’s daughter-in-law, Ilona. This was the first time… as late as spring 1944, when political leaders in Europe and America read authentic personal testimony about systematic Nazi extermination going on in Auschwitz.

The saving of most of the Budapest Jews was made possible by Horthy’s reserve corps, the élite armoured battalion of Esztergom marching on Budapest on 5 July under the command of Colonel Ferenc Koszorús, dispersing and disarming pro-Nazi ‘gendarmerie’ units. This was a direct result of Horthy’s stunned reading of the testimonies…

Five years ago, on the seventieth anniversary of the German occupation of Hungary, Frank Koszorús, Jr,  the Colonel’s son and a lawyer in Washington DC, founder of the Hungarian American Coalition and President of the American Hungarian Federation of Wahington DC, wrote a clear statement of the established ‘facts’ of the Holocaust in Hungary; in the March 2014 edition of The Hungarian Review, he recorded the following view of these associations on the events of 1944:

The American Hungarian Federation, representing a cross-section of the Hungarian American community, strongly supports historical accuracy, completeness and integrity… Considering the extent of the catastrophe of the Holocaust, great care should be taken to avoid actions that serve no purpose other than to open old wounds and needlessly exacerbate controversies. Care should also be taken to objectively discuss all aspects of a period and not abuse history for political purposes.

Considering these general principles, the Federation believes:

First, that any attempt to whitewash the catastrophe of 19 March 1944 – when Hitler occupied Hungary – and the ensuing deportation and murder of 550,000 Hungarian Jews or the involvement of Hungarian authorities cannot be tolerated.

… the Federation further believes that rescue efforts by non-Jewish Hungarians who stood up against evil, such as Col. Ferenc Koszorús who intervened with his loyal troops to prevent the deportation of the Jews of Budapest in July 1944, must not be omitted, denied, forgotten or minimised. Such rescue efforts must also be acknowledged, taught and remembered for the sake of historical accuracy and to serve as examples for this and future generations of how one should behave in the face of barbarism that characterised the Nazis and their collaborators…

Map showing the ghettos, main concentration zones and deportation routes in Hungary.

The figure for the total death toll in the Holocaust quoted above takes account of the estimate that about half of the Jews of Budapest eventually became the victims of the ‘Arrow Cross’ Terror of the winter of 1944-45. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Holocaust, Congressman Tom Lantos, a survivor of the Holocaust himself who served as Chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, publicly acknowledged the role of Colonel Ferenc Koszorús:

‘Colonel Koszorús’ unparalleled action (in July 1944) was the only case in which Axis powers used military force for the purpose of preventing the deportation of the Jews. As a result of his extraordinarily brave efforts, taken at great risk in an extremely volatile situation, the eventual takeover of Budapest by the Nazis was delayed by three and a half months. This hiatus allowed thousands of Jews to seek safety in Budapest, thus sparing them from certain execution. It also permitted the famous Raoul Wallenberg, who arrived in Budapest on 9 July 1944, to coordinate his successful and effective rescue mission…’

(Hon. Tom Lantos, ‘Ferenc Koszorús: A Hero of the Hungarian Holocaust’, Congressional Record, 26 May 1994.)

Above: Himmler and his journal.

In reality, the Sztójay government continued to ignore the Regent and rescheduled the date of deportation of the Jews of Budapest to Auschwitz to August 27th. What prevented the resumption was that the Romanians switched sides on 23 August 1944, causing huge problems for the German military, and it was on Heinrich Himmler’s orders that the cancellation of further deportations from Hungary was enacted on 25 August. Horthy finally dismissed Prime Minister Sztójay and his government on 29 August. By that time, the deportations from the Hungarian and sub-Carpathian villages had been completed, however.

The Jewish Council, Samuel Stern & Kasztner’s Train:

In 2012, Zsolt Zágoni edited and published a notebook written in 1944 by Rózsi Stern, a Jewish woman who escaped from Budapest. Written in Hungarian, it was translated into English by Gábor Bánfalvi, and edited by Carolyn Bánfalvi. The notebook is of primary historical significance because it summarises, in forty-four pages of handwriting (published in facsimile), the events beginning from the German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944 until the author’s arrival at Bergen-Belsen. It describes the general scene in Hungary, the looting of her family home, and the deportation of the Jews from Budapest. Rózsi Stern was the daughter of Samuel Stern. In March 1944, he was the leader of the group which was obliged to negotiate with Adolf Eichmann, the SS man in charge of the final solution in Hungary, about the fate of the Jewish community. Given the controversy surrounding these events, and Stern’s life, it could be seen as a controversial document. However, as Zágoni himself points out in his ‘Foreword’,

… the importance of the notebook is that an everyday person – realizing the extraordinariness of the events – decides to tell her story, her fate, and the dramatic days of her family’s life and the black weeks and months of in Hungary … while she tries to understand the incomprehensible.

Rózsi’s account goes on to describe what happened to close relatives and neighbours in Budapest, as well as to the Jews in the countryside and provincial towns, where the Jews were first of all forced into ghettos and then deported or sent to forced labour camps as part of the army. Ghettos were then made in Budapest as well, and designated buildings were marked with a yellow star hanging on the front gate. In the best cases, friends and relatives were able to move in together, five or six of people to one room. Rózsi’s family had to move because their house was designated as a yellow star building, and they occupied his apartment on the first floor, though all the other Jewish people staying there were soon moved on to another apartment house. Together with their father, there were nine of them living in the apartment by June 1944. Her husband, Gyuri, decided they should leave for Palestine, but her seventy-year-old father could not be persuaded to leave his responsibilities, and Rózsi could not imagine parting with him and her mother’s grave. She would also have to leave her husband’s family, including her eighty-year-old mother-in-law. In the end, she decided to leave with her husband and daughter, accepting the place reserved for her on Kasztner’s Train. They were supposed to spend eight to ten days in a German camp outside Vienna and then travel through Germany and Spain to reach Palestine. The question was whether the Germans would keep their word and allow them to reach the Spanish border. The deportees on the Kasztner train numbered 1,684. Rózsa and Gyuri, her husband, were among the ‘privileged ones’ as she described them, those who ‘had a little hope to survive’:

One day my father told us that if we wanted to leave Budapest, there would be one more chance to make ‘aliyah’ to Palestine with the Zionists. This was the particular group I already mentioned. Gyuri, without any hesitation, decided to take the trip, even though this was also very dangerous. He couldn’t take all the stress and humiliation any more, or that so many of our good acquaintances had been taken into custody at Pestvidéki… We received news every hour: in Újpest and Kispest they are already deporting people, and on July 5th it will already be Budapest’s turn… In spite of the immunity that we were entitled through my father – and the protection of the German soldier who was ordered to live with us by the Gestapo (he was protecting us from the cruelty of the Hungarian gendarmerie) – Gyuri decided that we should take this opportunity and leave. 

Above: Samu Stern’s memoir written in 1945, before he died on 9 June 1946, with his photo on the cover.

Despite this decision, they were still hesitating on the eve of their departure, 29 June, when ‘Mr K.’, Resző Kasztner, who started this aliyah, came to see them and brought news that forced them to make a final decision. He also tried to persuade ‘Samu’ Stern to leave, because, he said, “if there are no mice, there is no need for a cat either.” He reassured them that he had a firm promise that they would reach their destination and that the best proof of this was that he and his whole family would be going with this ‘aliyah’. Unlike his family, Samu Stern decided to stay in Budapest, and somehow survived the terror of the Arrow Cross rule of the winter of 1944-45. However, when the Soviet troops arrived, he was accused of collaboration. The police started an investigation against him, but he died in 1946 before his case could go to court. His activity in 1944, manoeuvring between cooperation and collaboration, is still controversial, as is that of Kasztner and Brand, but it is not the topic under discussion here. However, when considering the question of his anti-Zionism in relation to the potential for Jewish resistance, we need also to notice the total indifference of the Hungarian authorities in Budapest towards the fate of the Jewish population.

On 30 June, her father, accompanied by the German soldier who had been billeted with them, took them by taxi to the camp with their luggage. After two hours trying to ensure their safety, he left them at the internment camp, the synagogue on Aréna Street, which was already crowded with people, mostly those saved from the brick factories in the countryside. Finally, after an anxious day standing in the pouring rain, they boarded carriages ready to depart:

After a two-hour carriage ride, we arrived at the Rákosrendező train station – on the outskirts of Budapest – totally soaking wet. It was starting to get dark by the time we occupied the wagon that was assigned to us.The suitcases were piled up against one of the walls of the wagon, and the backpacks were hanging on nails all around. In the meantime, people from other camps arrived, so by the time everyone got on there were seventy-two of us in our wagon… The wagon was only supposed to hold six horses or forty people…

We were sitting on our blankets, as tightly packed as we could be. There were twenty-six… children in our wagon, including sixteen orphans with one guardian lady… It was a miserable scene, especially seeing so many mentally worn-down people. Some people tried to stretch out, which was almost impossible, and others tried to make room for their legs while they were sitting.  Little children were crying from fear and because of the unusual environment; the bigger ones were fatigued, sleeping and leaning on one another. The adults, worn out from the stress they had gone through, were arguing or weeping in silence.

Everybody was wondering how long we would be able to take this. And we took it, and even worse… The wagon had no toilet, of course, so our human needs could only be taken care of when the train stopped for awhile and we got permission to get off, which was not too easy either as the wagon was very high, so women and children could only get off and on with help and that could take some time… People jumped off the train like animals and shamelessly took care of their needs… because there wasn’t enough time to get farther away…

On Saturday July 1st at 10 a.m., we departed (from Ferencváros Station). We all rushed to the wagon’s only small window to wave a last goodbye to Budapest and everything and everyone that meant our life until now. Tears silently dripped down our faces and our hearts were broken from the pain. Maybe this was the last time we would ever see the Danube, the bridges, and the whole beautiful city where we were born and raised. The youth began to sing the “we’re going to find a new homeland” Hebrew song. Perhaps they will find it, but the older ones cannot be replanted.

The train moved at a quick pace to the border at Mosonmagyaróvár, arriving there at 6 p.m. During the night a baby girl was born, with the help of the doctors in the carriage. They stayed there for four days, built latrines, washed fully and washed their clothes, and bought provisions from local villagers. Their German guards protected them from the cruelty of the Hungarian gendarmerie. On 6 July the train was directed to Komárom and rumours spread that they were being taken to Auschwitz. However, they arrived at the station in the Vienna suburbs in the evening of 7 July and were then moved on to Linz by the next morning, having been told that the camps around Vienna were full. Here they were disembarked and disinfected, fearing that they were to be gassed. When they departed, having been thoroughly humiliated and terrorised by the guards, they had little idea where they were going or how many more nights they would spend on the wagon:

The train sped towards Hannover. We stopped one or two times because there were airstrikes., but this didn’t even affect us anymore. We had submitted to our fate and were totally indifferent.

We arrived on the 9th, a Sunday morning, at an improvised forest station near Hannover. It was a huge prison camp. We washed ourselves in big troughs and after an hour’s break, we sped further towards our destination, Bergen-Belsen.

A whole bunch of German soldiers were waiting for the train, holding enormous bloodhounds on leashes… They yelled their orders harshly. They counted us by putting us in lines of five. This took about an hour and a half in the strong afternoon sun, and we almost collapsed from fatigue. After this, we walked nine kilometres. Sick and old people and our luggage were carried on trucks… We reached an immense camp. There were prisoners here of all types and nationalities: Russian, Polish, French, Dutch, Hungarian and Jewish. Each barrack block was separated with wire fencing. We got block 11. When we arrived, everyone was registered, and then they assigned our accommodation. Men and women were separated… 

About 160 of us were placed in one barrack, as an average. It was a dark wooden building with one small window (without lighting in the evening) and three-level wooden bunk beds above each other. Lydia and I got bottom beds so I wouldn’t have to climb ladders. Between the beds there was just enough room to turn around. It was very sad to move in here, but we were so tired that we were happy to have the possibility to finally stretch out. However, this only happened much later. Once everybody had a bed, we received an order to line up… Lining up took place in the yard, with people grouped by barracks. The first lineup took two hours in the pouring rain, with us wearing thin summer clothes without hats…

The first dinner was next. They brought soup in pots. We stood in a line individually with the mess tins we were given. Unfortunately, no matter how hungry we were, we couldn’t swallow this slop. In the backpack we still had a little bit of food left from home, but we really had to be careful with that because our prospects were not very encouraging… we had to lie down wet, without blankets. It was a divine miracle that we didn’t catch pneumonia…

It is hard to imagine sleeping in these physical and mental conditions. Sometimes a child would start crying, suppressed sobbing and deep sighs, for the old life and loved ones we left behind. You could hear other people snoring, and the different emotional and physical manifestations of 160 people. There was not a single minute of silence. Crowds of bedbugs and fleas rushed to welcome us. However, towards the morning, sleep still overcame me because I was greatly exhausted.

That is where the notebook ends. On 1 August 1944, Lídia (pictured above) sent a postcard, which still exists, from Bergen-Belsen to her fiancée,  in a labour camp in Northern Transylvania. It told him that she and her parents were ‘doing well’ and had ‘the best prospects’ of continuing on their journey. Apparently, a ‘Collective Pass’ allowing group border crossing, stamped by the Swiss Embassy in Budapest and signed by its Consul, Carl Lutz, was what eventually secured their onward journey and border crossing. After their round-about route to Bergen-Belsen and their horrific sojourn at the death camp, the refugees were then taken in two groups to Switzerland. One of these groups, comprising 318, including Rózsa Stern and her husband and relatives, arrived in Switzerland relatively quickly, while the other could only pass the German-Swiss border in December 1944. About a dozen people died on the way. Rózsi Stern (Bamberger) died in 1953, the year after her husband György.

Rezső Kasztner’s personal courage cannot be doubted since he returned from Switzerland to Nazi Germany to rescue more people before he himself emigrated to Palestine, where he was assassinated by Zionist extremists in 1957.

(to be continued…)

 

Thirty Years After the Fall: Is Socialism Dead?

Júlia Tar’s recent piece on the Hungarian government’s online media outlet, Hungary Today, points out that 2019 is the anniversary of not one, but three remarkable events of the 20th century: NATO’s 70th anniversary; Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic’s 20th anniversary since joining NATO, and the thirtieth anniversary of dismantlement of the Iron Curtain and of the Berlin Wall. According to Eugene Megyesy, the former Senior Advisor to the Prime Minister of Hungary and a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Friends of Hungary Foundation, publisher of Hungary Today, we might not have learned from these historical events. 1956 was a significant year for Hungary because of its revolt against the Soviet Union and dictatorial communism. The revolt was followed by the Prague Spring in 1968 and the Polish Solidarity movement in the early 1980s. Then,

Hungary opened the Iron Curtain toward Austria, allowing East Germans to flee the oppression of the Utopian socialist system, thereby rendering the Berlin Wall obsolete.

This was on 11 September 1989 (not June, as stated), when a courageous decision was taken at the urging of leading Socialist reformers in the government like Imre Pozsgay, and in spite of threats of invasion from Berlin. By November, the Berlin Wall had itself been destroyed. In summarising Megyesy’s ‘view’, Tar claims that…

… socialism was always built on the promises of a Utopian system, equality and the ability to solve all social problems (“heaven on earth”).

Eugene Megyesy warns that this is happening again in some countries:

Sadly, there are politicians and bureaucrats in Washington and Brussels, supported by ivory tower academics, media pundits and Hollywood luminaries, who believe socialism is viable.

Megyesy urges today’s generation to look back and think about whether socialism was ever successful. It may have been, but only for a limited period of time. He cites the unsustainability of the capitalism-backed socialistic systems in the Scandinavian countries as an example. In Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela, it is even worse and only serves to highlight the gap between the poor and the leaders living in luxury, Megyesy explains. Before socialism, Venezuela was one of the richest countries; now it’s one of the poorest. According to Megyesy, socialism means…

… control over all means of production and the redistribution of wealth by the government.

Definitions and Debates:

But not every ‘socialist’ today would agree with this definition, and especially the idea that public control means control by the central or federal government. Neither does this interpretation match those of the multifarious strands of socialism in western Europe which developed from the middle of the nineteenth century. To define socialism and understand its roots, a longer and broader view is necessary, not just one which draws conclusions based on events since the spread of Stalinism across eastern Europe, or which focuses on recent events in North Korea or Venezuela for evidence of the failings of the Utopian Socialist system. Many of the twentieth century’s ‘dystopias’ may have had their origins among the nineteenth century ‘isms’, as in previous centuries they were often the product of misguided Christian millenarianism, like ‘anti-Semitism’, but that does not mean that we should simply discard the thinking of the philosophers and political economists who developed their detailed critiques of capitalism any more than we should reject two millennia of Christian theology. After all, as Marx himself noted, philosophers only interpret the world: the point is to change it. 

In seeking to change its own world, each new generation must produce its own reinterpretation of the ideas handed down to it from past generations and come up with its own solutions to its own moral dilemmas and social problems. That is, in essence, what socialism means to me. We should neither rely on theories from posterity nor reject them out of hand as if all who came before us were thieves and robbers. We can only learn from the past by giving it a fair hearing, remembering as the novelist J P Hartley famously wrote, the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. We are solely responsible for our own ‘country’ in equity

the ‘present’, and for not learning from our own mistakes in its past. In this context, and according to the eminent ‘man of letters’ of the twentieth century, Raymond Williams (1983), ‘Socialist’ emerged as a philosophical description in the early nineteenth century. In that century and beyond, it could be used in two ways, which have had profound effects on the use of the term by radically different political tendencies. Of course, social was the merely descriptive term for a society in its now predominant sense of the system of common life; a social reformer wished to reform this system. But ‘social’ was also …

… an emphatic and distinguishing term, explicitly contrasted with ‘individual’ and ‘individualist’ theories of society.

Naturally, there has always been a great deal of interaction and overlap between these two meanings, but their varying effect can be seen in the beginning in the formation of the term. In the first sense, it was viewed as an extension of ‘liberalism’ as it referred to radical political reform of the social order, in order to develop, extend and secure the main liberal values for all members of society; political freedom, the ending of privileges and formal inequalities, social justice (conceived as ‘equity’ between different individuals and groups). In the second sense, it was seen as the ‘enemy’ of competitive, individualist forms of society, specifically industrial capitalism with its system of wage-labour. Truly social forms depended on practical co-operation and mutuality, which in turn could not be achieved while there was still private (individual) ownership of the means of production. Real freedom could not be achieved, basic equalities could not be ended, social justice (conceived as a just social order rather than simply ‘equity’ between individuals) could not be established unless a society based on private property was replaced by one based on social ownership and control.

H. G. Wells, writing his well-known book in 1922, A Short History of the World, expressed the dichotomy in the following terms:

On the one hand are the individualists, who would protect and enlarge our present freedoms with what we possess, and on the other hand the socialists, who would pool our ownerships and restrain our proprietary acts. In practice one will find every graduation between the extreme individualist, who will scarcely tolerate a tax of any sort to support a government, and the communist, who would deny any possessions at all. The ordinary socialist of today is what is called a collectivist; he would allow a considerable amount of private property, but put such affairs as education, transport, mines, land-owning, most mass production of staple articles, and the like, into the hands of a highly organised state. Nowadays there does seem to be a gradual convergence of reasonable men towards a scientifically studied and planned socialism.  

The resulting controversy among the many groups and tendencies all calling themselves ‘socialist’ has been, long, intricate and frequently bitter. Each main tendency has developed alternative, often derogatory terms for the others. But until circa 1850, the word was too new and too general to have any predominant use. The earliest known use in English is in Hazlitt’s On Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen (1826), in which he recalls a conversation from 1809 in writing those profound and redoubted socialists, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. There is also a contemporary use in the 1827 Owenite Co-operative Magazine. Its first recorded political use in French dates from 1833. However, ‘socialisme’ was first used in 1831 in the more generic meaning, and Owen’s New Moral World also contains a similar use. Given the intense political climate in both France and England in the 1820s and 30s, these references provide a sense of the period in which the word came into ‘common coinage’. It could not have been known at that time which meaning of the word would come through as dominant. It was a period of very rapid developments in political discourse, and until well into the 1840s there were a number of alternative words for ‘socialist’, some of which were in more common usage: co-operative, mutualist, associationist, societarian, phalansterian, agrarian, radical. As late as 1848 Webster’s (AmE) Dictionary defined ‘socialism’ as ‘a new term for agrarianism’. By that time in Europe, especially in France and Germany, and to a lesser extent in Britain, both ‘socialist’ and ‘socialism’ were common terms.

One alternative term, Communist, had begun to be used in France and England by the 1840s, but the sense of the word varied according to particular national contexts. In England in the 1840s, communist had strong religious associations, dating back to the Puritan sects of the seventeenth century. Thus its use was distinct from the secular word ‘socialist’ as used by Robert Owen, which was sometimes avoided for that reason. ‘Communism’ before Marx meant the primitive form practised in the early church when the followers of Jesus ‘held all things in common’. The ‘True Levellers’ or ‘Diggers’ of the English Commonwealth similarly wanted to abolish private property and social distinctions altogether. In the nineteenth century, their ideological ‘descendants’ believed this could only happen if a democratic state was to own all property. The French ‘anarchist’ philosopher Proudhon wrote that all property is theft. But the development of political ideas in France and Germany were different; so much so that Engels, in his Preface of 1888, looking back to the Communist Manifesto which he and Marx had written in 1848, observed:

We could not have called it a ‘Socialist’ manifesto. In 1847, Socialism was a middle-class movement. Socialism was, on the continent at least, respectable; Communism was the very opposite.

For a time, the stresses between employers and employees led to the worldwide dissemination of the very harsh and elementary form of communism which is associated with Karl Marx in particular. However, we need to view Marx’s political economy in its proper context as an integral shift in thinking about how to interpret the new industrial world which had grown up ‘like Topsy’ around the common man. It was only as the nineteenth century developed, according to H. G. Wells, that:

… men began to realise that property was not one simple thing but  a great complex of ownerships of different values and consequences … that there is a very great range of things, railways, machinery of various sorts, homes, cultivated gardens, pleasure-boats, for example, which need each to be considered very particularly to determine how far and under what limitations it may come under private ownership, and how far it falls into the public domain and may be administered and let out by the state in the collective interest. 

Socialism and Communism in Europe, 1871-1918:

Across the continent, the relative militancy associated with the word communist was further strengthened by the very visual effect of the Paris Commune of 1871 (depicted below), though there was a significant argument as to whether the correct term to be derived from the event was Communist or Communard. For at least a ten-year period, the word Syndicalist became at least as important across Europe as a whole. It described the development of industrial trades unionism as a revolutionary force which would overthrow the capitalist system through the use of the General Strike and revolutionary violence in general. The word appeared in French in 1904 and in English in 1907; but it went through varying combinations with anarchism (in its stress on mutuality) and socialism, especially with Guild Socialism and Cooperative movements, emphasising the important interests of the consumer in economic models for the future.

The decisive distinction between ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ came with the renaming, in 1918, of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party as the All-Russian Communist Party (the ‘majority’ or Bolsheviks). From that time on, a distinction of ‘socialist’ from ‘communist’, often with supporting terms and adjectives such as ‘social democrat’ or ‘democratic socialist’ came into common currency, although it is significant that all ‘communist’ parties, especially in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its ‘satellite’ states, continued to describe themselves as ‘socialist’ and dedicated to ‘socialism’. This is one reason why, in central-eastern Europe, socialism is still viewed by many as synonymous with communism in contrast to the use of the word throughout the rest of Europe. That does not mean, however, that the history of socialist and social democratic parties in southern, western and northern Europe can simply be tarnished with the same brush of the ‘Stalinist’ past, as Medgyesy and other politicians have attempted to do in the run-up to this year’s European Parliament elections. Even Jean-Claude Junker, President of the European Commission and a member of the conservative European People’s Party has been characterised as a ‘socialist’ in the Hungarian press and media.

The First Hungarian Republic, the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ & the Horthy Era, 1918-44:

The Proclamation of Mihály Károlyi as President of the new Republic of Hungary.

Elsewhere on this site, I have written about the roots and development of liberal democracy in Hungary, and of how both of these have been fractured by various forms of authoritarianism and dictatorship, more recently of a populist variety. Yet even in Hungary, we can trace the origins of socialist movements back to 1907, when a series of strikes and disturbances among both the urban and rural workers. But the promise of electoral reform, for which a crowd of a hundred thousand demonstrated for a second time on ‘Red Thursday’, 10th October 1907, came to nothing when Andrássy’s modest bill expanding the suffrage was rejected by the Hungarian parliament. Seven years later, the Social Democrats, as elsewhere in Europe, supported the patriotic war effort, perhaps hoping for democratic concessions in return. Following the Revolution of November 1918, with the establishment of a republic ruled by a National Council, the Károlyi government embarked on the programme of social and political reforms it had announced. These were badly needed, given the explosive atmosphere in the country. There was no political force in Hungary at the time that would have been able to answer all of the conflicting interests and expectations of these turbulent times. Although the elections to the new national assembly were conducted on the basis of a franchise including half the population, second only those in Scandinavia at that time, the effects of progressive social legislation, including the introduction of unemployment benefit and the eight-hour working day, the abolition of child labour and the extension of insurance schemes, could not yet be felt. The political scene became polarised, involving the appearance of radical movements both on the Right and the Left.

The streets, for the time being, belonged to the political Left. Appeals of moderate Social Democratic ministers to order and patience evoked the contrary effect and served to alienate the disaffected masses from them. Their new heroes were the Communists, organised as a party on 24 November 1918 and led by Béla Kun. He was a former journalist and trades unionist, who had recently returned from captivity in Russia, where he had become convinced of the superiority of the system of Soviets to parliamentary democracy.  Communist propaganda also promised an end to all exploitation through the nationalisation of property, as well as international stability through the fraternity of Soviet republics which were prophesied to arise all over Europe. Within a few weeks, this attractive utopia, underpinned by well-designed social demagogy, had earned the Communists a membership of about forty thousand. Their supporters, several times that number, mobilised among the marginalised masses and the younger members of the intelligentsia, susceptible to revolutionary romanticism. By January 1919, a wave of strikes had swept across the country, in the course of which factories, transport and communication installations were occupied; in addition, land seizures and attempts to introduce collective agriculture marked the communist initiative, which also included the demand not only to eradicate all remnants of feudalism, but also the proclamation of a Hungarian Soviet Republic, and a foreign policy seeking the friendship of Soviet Russia instead of the Entente powers.

While the radicals on both the Right and the Left openly challenged the fundamental tenets of the Károlyi government, his Independence Party evaporated around him. Unhappy with the reform projects which Károlyi embraced and seemed too radical for them, most of the Independent ministers left the government, leaving the Social Democrats as the main government party. But they were struggling helplessly to tame their own radical left, who effectively constituted an internal opposition to the government, and gravitated towards the Communists. On 21 March 1919, the Social Democrats accepted the invitation to take sole responsibility for the government, but only to accelerate and conclude negotiations with the imprisoned Communist leaders about forming a united workers’ party. A new government, the Revolutionary General Council, presided over by a Social Democrat but in effect led by Béla Kun, was formed on the same day, with the declared aim of establishing a Leninist ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

Certainly, the measures introduced by the Revolutionary government went beyond anything attempted in Soviet Russia at that time. The counterpart of these measures in the administrative and political reorganisation of the country was the replacement of old local, municipal and county bureaucracies with soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers. A ‘Committee of Public Safety’ was organised to put pressure on the civilian population where it was needed in order to maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat, its head, Tibor Szamuely travelling in his ‘death train’ to trouble spots in order to preside in summary courts, assisted by the notorious ‘Lenin Boys’, created to supplement the ‘Red Guard’, which took over the ordinary functions of the police and gendarmerie. Besides common murders of actual or alleged enemies by the ‘élite detachments, some 120 death sentences were meted out by the tribunals for political reasons.

The great momentum of the changes was partly intended to convince people that the realisation of the ‘socialist utopia’ was imminent. Social policy measures, the expected alleviation of housing shortages through public ownership of accommodation in a country flooded by refugees, the nationalisation of large firms, improved educational opportunities, the more effective supply of food and consumer goods through rationing and supervised distribution met with widespread approval, especially among the urban population. The intellectual élite, who had applauded the democratic reforms of the autumn of 1918, was initially also allured by the attractive goals of the Soviet Republic. They not only included known Marxists like György Lukács, the writer, who became People’s Commissar for Education, but also members of the Nyugati (Western) Circle, who held positions in the Directorate for Literature, and Bartók and Kodály, who became members of the one for music. Gradually, however, these figures became disaffected, as did the intelligentsia and middle classes in general and the leaders of the October 1918 democratic revolution, some of whom emigrated the following summer. By then, the historian Gyula Székfű, who was appointed professor at the University of Budapest, was already at work on his highly influential Three Generations (1920), in which he was hostile not only towards the communist revolution but also towards democracy and liberalism, which he blamed for paving the way for Kun’s régime.

The revolution and the village were unable to come to terms with each other. Despite the steady urbanisation of the previous half-century, Hungary still remained a largely agricultural country, especially after much of its towns were taken away by occupation even before the Treaty of Trianon of 1920. Besides being economically unsound the amidst the shortage of raw materials and fuel to supply machinery supposedly more efficient large-scale co-operatives than in smallholdings, the nationalisation scheme embittered not only the smallholders themselves, who actually lost land, but also the landless peasants, domestic servants and the agricultural labourers whose dreams of becoming independent farmers were thwarted by the same urban revolutionaries who had formerly encouraged land seizures. Decrees regarding the compulsory delivery of agricultural surplus and requisitioning further undermined whatever popularity the government still enjoyed in the countryside. It blamed the food shortages on the peasantry, which exacerbated the already existing rift between town and country, and served as a pretext for further central control of the economy. The anti-clerical measures taken by the government also annoyed the traditionally devout peasants, concerned about the security of ‘the family hearth’.

All of this made the communists more susceptible to counter-revolutionary propaganda, which did not fail to emphasise the foreign (that is, Jewish) character of the revolution (over half of the commissars were indeed of Jewish ethnicity). An ‘Anti-Bolshevik’ Committee was set up in Vienna in April by representatives of nearly all the old parties led by Count István Bethlen, and a counter-revolutionary government was set up at Arad on 5 May, later moving to Szeged. Paradoxically, the Soviet Republic was maintained in power for over four months, despite the increasingly dictatorial means it employed, mainly by the temporary successes it scored on the nationalities’ issue; it collapsed not in the face of internal counter-revolution but when its military position against the allies of the Entente in the region became untenable. The Entente powers, gathered at the Paris Peace Conference, sent General Smuts, the prime minister of South Africa, to Budapest, mainly to obtain reliable first-hand information about the situation there in April 1919. Smuts concluded that Hungary truly had a government of Bolshevik character, which gave weight to the French Prime Minister Clemenceau’s proposal to suppress German revanchist designs as well as the spread of Soviet communism into Western Europe by a cordon sanitaire established out of the new states of Central Europe. Harold Nicolson, the young British diplomat who accompanied Smuts on the train leaving Paris on April Fools’ Day, wrote about these concerns about the Germans turning to Bolshevism in a letter to his wife Vita (pictured below, together in Paris):

They have always got the trump card, i.e. Bolshevism – and they will go the moment they feel it is hopeless for them to get good terms. 

Small wonder, therefore, that Béla Kun’s strike for communism triggered many anxious moments for the Supreme Council. The negotiations were conducted from the wagon-lit of Smuts’ train at the Eastern Station in Budapest, so as not to imply recognition of the régime, encircled by Red Guards with ‘fixed bayonets and scarlet brassards’. They centred on whether or not the Hungarian Bolsheviks would accept the Allies’ armistice terms, which would commit them to accept considerable territorial losses. As they hesitated, Harold decided to explore Budapest, a city he had grown up in before the war. He was alarmed and saddened by what he saw:

‘The whole place is wretched – sad – unkempt.’ He took tea at the Hungaria, Budapest’s leading hotel. Although it had been ‘communised’, it flew ‘a huge Union Jack and Tricoleur’, a gesture of good intent. Red Guards with bayonets patrolled the hall, but in the foyer what remained of Budapest society ‘huddled sadly together with anxious eyes and a complete, ghastly silence’, sipping their lemonade ‘while the band played’. ‘I shudder and feel cold,’ Harold remarked. ‘We leave as soon as possible. Silent eyes search out at us as we go.’

Kun desperately needed allied recognition of his government, but he inserted a clause into Smuts’ draft agreement that the Romanian forces should withdraw to a line east of the neutral zone established by the 1918 Armistice, in effect to evacuate Transylvania. Smuts would not countenance this, however, and the Bolsheviks were ‘silent and sullen’. Nicolson wrote that they looked like convicts standing before the Director of the Prison. Smuts concluded that ‘Béla Kun is just an incident and not worth taking seriously’. This proved to be only too true, as on 10 April, only a day after Harold’s account to Vita, a provisional government was set up in Budapest seeking to reinstate the old ruling Hungarian cliques. On 1 August, Kun fled the capital in the face of invading Romanian armies. He ended his days in Russia, dying in 1936, ironically as the victim of one of Stalin’s innumerable purges. The world revolution that was expected to sweep away the corrupt bourgeois politicians of the peace conference and their allies spluttered to a halt. The Bavarian Soviet Republic, proclaimed on 7 April, hardly survived into May and the communist putsch planned by Kun’s agents in Vienna on 15 June also failed. Meanwhile, General Deniken’s counter-revolutionary offensive in Russia thwarted hopes of help from across the Carpathians.

Facing an ever more turbulent domestic situation marked by widespread peasant unrest and an uprising of the students of the military academy in Budapest, the Revolutionary government, after heated debates, decided to give in to the demands of the Peace Conference, withdrawing Hungarian forces from Slovakia behind the demarcation line at the end of June. Aurél Stromfeld, who as Chief of the General Staff led the Red Army into Slovakia which led to the short-lived Soviet Republic proclaimed there on 16 June, resigned in protest against the ‘capitulation’. Some of his generals now started to join the National Army, organised by the counter-revolutionary government in Szeged, under the command of Admiral Miklós Horthy, the last commander-in-chief of the Austro-Hungarian navy. When the Romanians refused to retreat behind the neutral zone as envisaged, the Red Army launched a surprise offensive along the River Tisza. The initial advance was aborted, however, and ended in a disorderly flight of the Red Army. On 1 August, with the Romanian forces threatening to occupy the Hungarian capital, the commissars handed back power to the Social Democrats on the advice of trade union leaders that the creation of a government acceptable to the Entente powers was the only way to avoid complete foreign occupation. The next day, a government led by the trade unionist leader Gyula Peidl, who had refused to accept the creation of a united workers’ party, took office.

Although it promised to end the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ while at the same time defying a conservative restoration, the new government was still regarded as crypto-Bolshevik not only by conservatives but also by Liberals, peasant democrats and Christian Socialists. It also failed to gain support from the Entente. Assisted by the Romanian army, occupying Budapest, a coup forced the government to resign on 6 August. The government headed by István Friedrich, immediately set about annulling all the measures associated with the Soviet Republic, especially the nationalisation process. It also dismantled all the major social reforms of the democratic revolution, including those associated with individual civil liberties. Revolutionary tribunals were replaced by counter-revolutionary ones, packing prisons with workers, poor peasants and intellectuals, and by the beginning of 1920 it had passed roughly as many death sentences as had the lackeys of the ‘red terror’, the ‘Lenin Boys’. The intellectual élite of the country suffered a serious blow. Bartók and Kodály were prosecuted, Móricz was imprisoned and several dozen left the country, including Lukács, Mannheim and Korda. Horthy’s ‘National Army’, now transferred to Transdanubia, controlled and gave orders to local authorities and its most notorious detachments were instruments of naked terror. In three months, they may have killed as many as two thousand suspected former Soviet members, Red Army soldiers, and ordinary Jews who were in no way associated with the proletarian dictatorship. Besides executions and lynchings, about seventy thousand people were imprisoned or sent to internment camps during these few months.

Despite the protests of the Social Democrats and other left-wing forces, the occupying Romanian forces were replaced by Horthy’s National Army in Budapest. His speech before the notables of the capital stigmatised it as ‘the sinful city’ that had rejected its glorious past, Holy Crown and national colours for the sake of red rags. This suited an atmosphere in which most of the remaining adherents of the democratic revolution as well as the communist one were neutralised in one way or another. The returning conservatives promised to heal the country’s war-wounds by returning it to order, authority and the mythical ‘Christian-national system of values’. Sir George Clerk, the leader of the Peace Conference’s mission to Budapest in October 1919, abandoned his initial insistence that the Social Democrats and the Liberals should have an important role in a coalition government. As Horthy commanded the only troops capable of maintaining order and was ready to subordinate them to government control, it had to be acceptable to Horthy personally and the military in general. As a result, the cabinet formed by Károly Huszár on 24 November 1919 was one in which the Christian National Unity Party and other conservative-agrarian groups prevailed over those of the Independent Smallholder Party, the Social Democrats and the Liberals. Even though the great powers insisted that voting should take place by universal and secret ballot, the circumstances were unfavourable to fulfilling any illusion of a democratic outcome. Terrorist actions by detachments of the National Army and the recovering extreme right-wing organisations, designed to intimidate the candidates and voters for the Social Democrats, Smallholders and Liberals, led to the former boycotting the elections of January 1920 and withdrawing from the political arena until mid-1922.

On 1 March 1920, the army occupied the square in front of the Parliament building, and, accompanied by his officers, Horthy entered and, according to medieval precedent, was ‘elected’ Regent, with strong Presidential powers. This signalled the end of Hungary’s own short experiment with democratic socialism, following its even briefer experience of home-grown communism. Count Pál Teleki and Count István Bethlen, the dominant political figures of inter-war Hungary, both from Transylvanian aristocratic families, argued that the immediate post-war events had shown that the country was not yet ready to graft full democracy onto the parliamentary system. They advocated a limited ‘conservative democracy’, guided by the landed gentry and the aristocracy, as the proper response of the region to the challenges of the democratic age. They opposed all endeavours aimed at the radical extension of the liberal rights enshrined in the parliamentarism of the dualist. Liberal democracy seemed to them a mechanical application of the majority principle, undermining political responsibility and stability. They despised communism and were suspicious of social democracy because of its antipathy to private property. But they also opposed the right-wing radical and fascist trends epitomised by Gyula Gömbös and other ‘protectors of the race’ who thought that the parliamentary system had outlived its usefulness and ought to be replaced by an authoritarian rule which would facilitate a redistribution of economic functions in favour of the Hungarian Christian middle classes and away from the ‘foreign’ bourgeoisie (in other words, the Jews).

The fundamental character which the political system of the country retained until the German occupation of 1944 had emerged by 1922 as a result of Bethlenite consolidation. Hungary became a parliamentary state with strong elements of authoritarianism and a hegemonistic party structure, in which the institutions inherited from the liberal era were operated in an anti-democratic fashion. The government acknowledged a lawful political opposition, consisting on the left of Social Democrats, bourgeois liberals and, after 1930 a rejuvenated Independent Smallholder Party; and on the right of different groups of Christian Socialists as well as right radicals. One of the most important developments in the intellectual life of the Horthy era was the development of ‘populist’ writers, predominantly young and of peasant origin, who wrote ethnographically-based pieces revealing the economic and intellectual poverty of life in rural Hungary and drawing the attention of the ruling classes to the need for change. In ideological terms, some of them, most notably László Németh, advocated a ‘third way’ for Hungary between East and West, or between Soviet collectivism and capitalist individualism. Some, including Gyula Illyés and Ferenc Erdei, sympathised with socialism. Their top priority was the improvement in the lot of the poor peasantry through a genuine redistribution of land among them. But their willingness to engage with both the extreme Left and the extreme Right, as well as their emphasis on the ‘village’ as the root of ‘Hungarianness’, with its anti-Semitic overtones, led it into conflict with more cosmopolitan democrats and ‘urbanist’ intellectuals. This was symptomatic of a broader and longer-term division among Hungarian progressives which survived the attempts of even the Soviet communists to homogenise Hungarian society as well as the post-1989 transition to democracy and is resurgent in the propaganda of the current right-wing populist era.

The Second Hungarian Republic & The Eras of Rákosi & Kádár, 1945-1989:

The second Republic of 1945 was equally as brittle as that which followed the First World War, ending in a Soviet-style government which lasted more than forty years. By the time of the elections of November 1945, the communist vanguard, which had numbered only three thousand a year before, had managed to create a mass party of half a million members as a result of an unscrupulous recruiting campaign. Unlike the Social Democrats, they did not mention socialism as being even their strategic goal, and their rhetoric concentrated mainly on the pressing tasks of reconstruction combined with reform. Their avowed programme was essentially the same as the Independence Front; however, they did not refrain from occasionally playing nationalist tunes. Workers and smallholding peasants out of conviction, intellectuals out of idealism, civil servants out of fear and opportunism, all augmented the party ranks; the surviving Jews of Budapest joined out of gratitude to their liberators and their search for a new experience of community. Besides boasting an ever-growing influence on its own, the Communist Party was also able to manipulate the other parties of the Left. The Social Democratic Party, whose 350,000 strong membership possessed a powerful working-class consciousness, found it increasingly difficult to resist the call of the Communists for working-class unity. Together with the National Peasant Party, the Social Democrats chose to join the Communists in the Left-Wing Bloc on 5 March 1946, following the elections of the previous November which was won by the Smallholder Party, who collected fifty-seven per cent of the votes, with both the Social Democrats and the Communists polling seventeen per cent each, and the National Peasant Party a mere seven percent.

‘Forward to Peace & Socialism!’ The Young Pioneers’ Congress.

The elections themselves, by secret ballot and without a census, were the freest ever to be held in Hungary until 1990. Cardinal Mindszenty, the head of the Hungarian Catholic hierarchy, had condemned the ‘Marxist evil’ in a pastoral letter and called upon the faithful to support the Smallholders. Whatever the voters made of this intervention, the verdict of 4.8 million of them, over ninety per cent of the enfranchised, clearly showed their preference for the return of parliamentary democracy based on support for private property and the market economy over socialism with state management and central economic planning. But then the Smallholders gave in to Soviet pressure for the formation of a ‘grand coalition’ in which the communists were able to preserve the gains they had already secured and to secure a firm base from which they were gradually able to bully their way to power by 1949. After the tribulations of the Rákosi dictatorship, it was not surprising that, in 1956, what was initially a struggle between ‘reform’ communists and orthodox within the party, set off by and adjusting to changes in Moscow, and in the meantime itself triggering off a growing ferment among the intelligentsia, became a national anti-Soviet uprising. The events which began, from 20 October onwards, with meetings and demonstrations at the universities in Budapest and the provinces, culminating with a peaceful demonstration in support of Gomulka’s reforms in Poland on 23rd, became a ‘revolution’ when the crowd successfully laid siege to the radio station and fighting began the next day between Soviet tanks and young working-class ‘guerillas’ whom even the restored Prime Minister referred to as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ at this stage.

All the insurgents agreed about was their desire to return national sovereignty and to put an end to arbitrary rule. They did not call for a reversal of nationalisation or a return to the pre-1945 order.  As fighting continued, by 28 October, Nagy had dropped the label ‘counter-revolution’ and started to talk about a ‘national democratic movement’, acknowledging the revolutionary bodies created during the previous days. The Hungarian Workers’ (Communist) Party was reformed as the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP) and the old coalition parties became active again, including the Social Democrats. After his initial uncertainty, the PM kept pace with developments on the streets, closing the gap between himself and the insurgents step by step. His changes culminated in the formation of a new multi-party cabinet on 2 November, including reform Communist, Social Democrat (Anna Kéthély, below), Smallholder and Peasant Party members.

However, this consolidation of power by a now avowedly ‘Revolutionary Government’ involved the collapse of the whole system of institutions of the party-state on which the cohesion of the Soviet bloc rested, and this was unacceptable for the Moscow leadership, Khrushchev included. It could not afford to lose a country of Hungary’s strategic location and mineral wealth from among its satellite states. But it was the radicalisation of the revolution in Budapest which made it impossible for a compromise deal to be struck. After announcing the formation of the MSZMP, also declaring himself to be in favour of neutrality and willing to fight in the streets, János Kádár left Parliament on 1 November for the Soviet Embassy. He quickly found himself in Moscow where he became the latest figure selected by the politburo to steer Hungary on a course acceptable to them. Having accepted this assignment, he entered Budapest with his cabinet in Soviet tanks on 7 November.

Although the pockets of armed resistance had been mopped up by 11 November, the most peculiar forms of the revolution, the workers’ councils, started to exert their true impact after 4 November, with an attempt to organise a nationwide network. Initially set up as strike committees, their basic idea was self-management in the factory, owned principally by the workers. On the initiative of the workers’ councils, a massive wave of strikes lasted into January 1957. The intellectuals, rallying mainly in the Writers’ Association, the students’ committees and the Journalists’ Association, founded the Revolutionary Council of the Hungarian Intelligentsia, chaired by composer Zoltán Kodály, which demanded the restoration of the country’s sovereignty and representative government. These movements marked out the Revolution as more than simply a defeated National Uprising. They were clearly socialist in their aims and membership. Kádár, on the other hand, did not have a clear policy to cope with this situation. The government programme which he drafted while still in Moscow, included promises of welfare measures, workers’ self-management and policies to aid the peasantry and small-scale enterprises. But these were clearly not the reasons for his ‘appointment’ by his Moscow patrons. To begin with, he was too busy organising special police forces for the purposes of retaliation and repression to spend time setting out policies. Although he negotiated with the leaders of the Budapest Workers’ Council on 22 November, on the previous day the special police squads prevented the creation of a National Workers’ Council and in early December, two hundred members of the movement were arrested on the same day that saw the abduction of Nagy and his associates.

The revolutionary committees which had been set up were dissolved, and the police shot dead nearly a hundred demonstrators in Sálgotorján, Miskolc and Eger. The ideological justification for these actions and the continuing repression and the impending campaign of retaliation was created at a party conference which identified the causes of the October Uprising as the mistakes of the Rákosi-Gerő faction on the one hand and, on the other, the undermining of the party by ‘Nagy circle’ leading to a capitalist-feudal counter-revolution of Horthyite fascism… supported by international imperialism. Given the trauma created by the revolution, its repression and the retaliation which followed in 1956-58, it is not surprising that Hungarian society was in the mood for Kádár’s Realsozialismus, based on his personalised creed that the ‘little man’ was interested simply in a decent living, instead of the great political issues of the day. He used the scope created by the ruins of the revolt on which he built his power to buy the complicity of Hungarians by unorthodox methods. In November 1962, Kádár somewhat pompously announced that the foundations of socialism in Hungary had been laid and that the construction of socialism was an all-national task, dependent on co-operation between Communists and non-party members, irrespective of personal convictions. There was to be no ‘class war’; this was what became known as the ‘Kádár doctrine’. These were the foundations of the ‘Hungarian model’, often referred to as ‘Gulyás communism’ in the 1970s, which was a far cry from utopian models. With characteristic persistence, Kádár managed to earn legitimacy, retaining it until it became apparent in the 1980s that Realsozialismus was not a functioning system, but merely ‘the longest path from capitalism to capitalism’.

Conclusion: The End of ‘Class-War’ Socialism?

Marx House (Memorial Library) in London.

Marx (before ‘Marxism’) based his theories on a belief that men’s minds are limited by their economic circumstances and that there is a necessary conflict of interests in our present civilization between the prosperous and employing classes of people and the employed masses. With the advance in education necessitated by the mechanical revolution, this great employed majority would become more and more class-conscious and more and more solid in antagonism to the ruling minority. In some way the class-conscious workers would seize power, he prophesied, and inaugurate a new social state. The antagonism, the insurrection, the possible revolution are understandable enough, but it did not follow that a new social state or anything but a socially destructive process would ensue. Marx sought to replace national antagonism by class antagonisms, but it is interesting to see how the two lines of thought, so diverse in spirit, so different in substance as this class-war socialism of the Marxists and the individualistic theory and socialist theory have continued to be part of a common search for more spacious social and political ideas and interpretations. In the long history of socialism in western Europe, as contrasted with the seventy years of Soviet-style Communism, the logic of reality has usually triumphed over the logic of theory.

Sources:

László Kontler (2001), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing.

H. G. Wells (1922, 1946), A Short History of the World. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.