by Susan Faludi
In many ways, the seeds for this catastrophe had been sown two decades earlier, with the end of the First World War and the signing of the Treaty of Trianon, when the success of assimilated Jews ran up against a ferocious resurgence of anti-Semitism. József Kiss, the poet who had so effusively heralded his coreligionists’ emancipation in 1868 (“Finally, O Jew, your day is dawning …”), would revise his conclusions. Before his death in 1921, he penned a self-eulogy:
He was free prey in his homeland
Disowned, destitute, and homeless
Maybe the grave will bring him peace
But maybe even that will reject him.
With Trianon, Hungary shed not only landmass but ethnic diversity. A vast portion of the country’s minorities—those restive Romanians, Slovaks, Croatians, Ruthenians, Slovenians—now belonged to other nations carved from its borders. (The persecuted Roma, whose numbers the treaty also shrank, remained politically and economically invisible.) With the exception of ethnic Germans, strongly assimilated yet in their own way outliers, the populace had gone from a roiling rainbow quilt to black and white: Magyar and Jew. One way to read the collapse of the Golden Age—it’s what happens when a fluid system becomes binary. Magyars now represented 90 percent of the population. They were no longer the only slightly-less-than-half demographic who needed the Jews to be Magyars in order to construct their majority. The Jews of Hungary now served another purpose, as scapegoats for the “amputation” of the nation, the “mutilated motherland.”
Trianon and the subsequent Hungarian humiliation were blamed on the country’s Jews—based on the tortured reasoning that, in 1919, many of the leaders of a short-lived Communist regime were Jewish. Even before then, though, after Hungary’s defeat in World War I, Hungarian rioters robbed and beat more than six thousand Jews. The violence continued. “The international Jewish mob strives for the complete destruction of dismembered Hungary,” the Union of Awakening Hungarians declared in the fall of 1919. “Remove those persistent leeches from your fainting body!” In the weeks after Trianon was signed, the Awakening Hungarians and their compatriots retaliated by murdering Jews in Budapest. By the early ’20s, the right-wing union (populated by ex-army officers and university students) boasted one hundred thousand recruits and nearly a third of the members of parliament.
With the collapse of the Communist regime, and in response to its “Red Terror,” in which several hundred “counter-revolutionaries” were executed, militia gangs who’d amassed around Horthy’s National Army unleashed a “White Terror” that killed roughly one thousand people and targeted Jews in particular. Hundreds of Jews were tortured, lynched, and murdered in anti-Semitic pogroms. Thousands of locals—decommissioned soldiers, peasants, women, and children—joined in the violence. An American military dispatch in the fall of 1919 reported many instances of savagery, including this one:
Here, the criminals moved on to Diszel, armed with hand-grenades and machine guns. They killed all the Jews there; 4-year-old girls were raped and thrown into the well. Two young girls jumped into the well of their own accord, in order to save their virtue. The soldiers threw hand-grenades after them.
In Budapest, Jewish organizations were attacked and bombed. And so many Jewish students were beaten or hurled down flights of stairs (in one week, 174 had to be hospitalized) that university classes in the capital were temporarily suspended. Nine months after Horthy rode a white horse into Budapest at the head of his National Army—and was then elevated to Regent by the National Assembly (with powers like those of a king)—a fact-finding report to the British Foreign Office observed, “Some of these barbarities as reported by credible witnesses reach a degree of bestiality and horror for which it would be difficult to find a parallel.” A year later, the new Regent Horthy gave blanket amnesty to the White Terror perpetrators who, “because of their national enthusiasm, in the interest of the nation, committed certain acts.”
In interwar Hungary, the shtetl Jews with their exotic-seeming habits and dress were no longer the prime objects of anti-Semitic suspicion. Now it was the secular Jews, the least exotic, the most accommodating, the “so easily assimilated”—and with that was opened a new conversation on the finer nuances of identity. “We were satisfied with the externalities of clothing and speech,” Gyula Szekfű wrote in 1920 in Three Generations, his influential anti-Semitic assault on Western liberalism, “and thus we fell prey to the gravest mistake: … we mistook language for nationality, Hungarian chatter for Hungarianness, the transient, deceptive exterior for the immortal soul.” The deceiver was the Magyarized Jew, applauded for decades for “correcting” his alien nature, but now, in the popular parlance of the time, “the hidden Jew,” whose disguise fooled no one. “Why must the Jews hide their race?” interwar populist writer and politician Péter Veres asked. “Have they truly shameful racial characteristics? … Assimilation is a hundred times more difficult for the Jews than for any other race. The more they desire it, the more difficult it becomes, for their nervous false conformity is one of their main characteristics.”
In ’20s Hungary, there were to be two species—one pseudo, one true—and the pseudo-Hungarians needed to be expelled for the true Hungarians to thrive. “Hungarians and Jews,” the popular writer László Németh wrote in 1927, the year of my father’s birth, “are like two laboratory animals that history has sewn together in a skin graft to see which one will poison the other.”
The assimilated Jews of Hungary responded to the mounting animus by trying all the harder to assimilate. The authors of the 1929 Hungarian Jewish Lexicon attempted to appeal to detractors by itemizing all the Jewish good works in support of the Hungarian state and the Horthy regime, all the acts of devotion to Magyar culture, all the ways that Jews had absorbed and been remade by “European-Christian civilization” (assimilated Jews, the lexicon asserted, even showed a measurable increase in skull size). “For decades prior to the horrible tragedy of their physical annihilation,” historian Raphael Patai wrote in The Jews of Hungary, “the Hungarian Jews lived the psychological tragedy of unrequited love, of being rejected, at times politely, at others brutally, by the people of whom they so desperately wanted to be part.” The more their affections went unreciprocated, the more the Jews of Hungary tried to prove their fealty as loyal Magyars, with tormented results.
That torment had been building for decades in so many of the new nation states of Central and Eastern Europe. “With the deepening crisis of assimilation in the late nineteenth century,” Hungarian historian Viktor Karády wrote, “all forms of modern Jewish identity became saddled with some kind of psychic disturbance.” Karády enumerated the symptoms of that disturbance: “an aversion” to the past (what my father called “ancient history”); exhibitions of extreme self-hatred “invariably directed against ‘archaic’ Jews who rejected ‘progress’ ” (what my father called those “Orthodox Jews in their awful getup”); and “grotesque forms” of compensatory behavior, including “maximal conformism in dress and public self-presentation,” “imitating Christian traits that turned out to be utterly improbable, pointless or misplaced,” and “proclamations of chauvinist bombast” (or what my father would call being “100 percent Hungarian”). The impossible contradictions of self-denial and self-presentation led to a terrible irony. “The need to pay constant heed to fitting in,” Karády wrote, “paradoxically drove those engaged in such strategies of concealment to an obsessional preoccupation with identity.”
As the ’20s and ’30s unfolded and Hungarian Jews were terrorized by anti-Semitic militias and subjected to punishing anti-Semitic laws that stripped them of their basic rights, the Jewish leadership repeatedly rebuffed offers of aid from international human-rights and Jewish organizations as “foreign intervention”—and entreated these groups to help reverse the terms of the Treaty of Trianon instead. In 1934, the Israelite Congregation of Pest passed a resolution rejecting any alliance with outside Jewish groups and proclaimed, “We cling indomitably to our Magyardom, and
we cannot allow this to be interfered with by foreign, international currents, even praiseworthy ones.” Hungarian Jewish leaders would continue to refuse outside help until 1939, when it was far too late.
In the end, Magyardom would avail them nothing, even to the most decorated. In the winter of 1942, Attila Petschauer, the Olympian fencing star of 1928 and 1932, Hungary’s “new D’Artagnan,” was deported to a forced labor battalion in the Ukraine. On the Eastern Front, his champion status would spell his undoing. Sports chronicler Peter Horvitz gave one account of Petschauer’s last hours:
One day, from among the Hungarian officers guarding his unit, Attila recognized a lieutenant colonel as an old friend from the Amsterdam Olympics, Kalman Cseh, who had participated as an equestrian. Attila called out to Cseh, who recognized him. The Hungarian officer turned to one of his ordinates and said, “Make things hot for the Jew!” The great Olympian who had brought honor to Hungary was ordered to undress in the frigid weather and climb a tree. Then he was ordered to sing like a rooster. He was then sprayed with water, which froze to his naked flesh. He died shortly thereafter on January 20, 1943. These tragic events were witnessed by Károly Karpati, a Jewish wrestler from Hungary who in 1936, before Hitler’s own eyes, defeated the German National Champion to capture the gold medal of the Berlin Olympics.
At the end of a cascade of identity creations and identity breakdowns was the Jew. Under Habsburg rule, the Magyars, in order to maintain their political authority as Magyars, needed the Jews to be Magyars. After Trianon, the Magyars, in order to know who the Magyars were, needed the Jews to be Jews. And the Jews, having assimilated into Hungarianism (a concept they had done so much to create), had no identity to fall back on.
“Who is a Hungarian?” There seemed to be only one answer. The Hungarian was not a Jew.
On the morning that my father showed me the photo of my great-grandparents’ “Golden Jubilee,” I’d asked her to identify the well-dressed people in the picture. They were my relatives, but I’d never met any of them. My father slowly ran a finger across the faces as she named them, though not by their names. “Shot in a house. Killed in a brick factory. Died in a cattle car. Gassed in Auschwitz. Gassed in Auschwitz. Gassed. Gassed. Gassed …”
Only three of the fifteen pictured survived the war.
My paternal grandfather’s hometown of Kassa, home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the country, was among the first to ghettoize and deport its population. More than twelve thousand Jews from the northeastern city and its neighboring rural hamlets were herded into brickyards and loaded onto trains. (When a seventeen-year-old girl tried to flee, she was killed and her naked body displayed as a lesson to others.) Kassa was also the railway hub for the transports to Auschwitz and other Polish concentration camps, the transfer point where cattle cars from all over Hungary were turned over to the Germans. That transfer was memorialized by Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda in a so-called documentary intended to demonstrate the Germans’ “humanitarian” approach—by contrasting it with the brutality of the Hungarians. After shots of Magyar gendarmes—whipping children, beating women, and ripping off their victims’ wedding bands—the film showed German Red Cross nurses rushing into the freight cars to administer to the victims. The Florence Nightingale performance was staged. The cruelty of the Hungarian gendarmes was all too real.
Fifty-six members of the Friedman-Schwarcz family of Kassa, my grandfather Jenő’s side of our family, were killed during the deportations. My great-grandfather Sámuel—the paterfamilias celebrating his wedding anniversary only months earlier—died in the brickyards. One of his grandsons was my father’s cousin Viktor Schwarcz, a retired chemist who lives in Prague and was nearing ninety when we met. Viktor showed me Sámuel’s “dying paper.” He kept it swathed in layers of protective plastic. The official notice, dated May 25, 1944, lists Sámuel’s cause of death as “heart attack.” A “lie,” Viktor told me, of a sort; if there was a heart attack, it was induced by the seventy-seven-year-old’s savage beating by Hungarian gendarmes. “They wanted to know where the rich Jew was hiding his gold.” By the time the Jews of Kassa were deported, teenaged Viktor Schwarcz was already in forced labor on the Eastern Front. He eventually escaped and joined the Red Army. At the end of the war, he returned to Kassa to find the house rifled of its worldly goods. There was no gold to recover, except for a gold-plated garland he found in the cellar: the commemorative wreath of Sámuel and Frida Friedman’s Golden Jubilee. At the end of our visit together, Viktor said he’d decided to give it to me: “In remembrance of our family.” He apologized for its tarnished state. “You can see where the gold is going away,” he said, rubbing a finger along the discolored metal leaves. That wasn’t what bothered me. The names on the leaves were faded, almost unreadable. The Friedman family, I thought, was going away.
It was the same with the other side of the family. Two years before Sámuel Friedman’s death, the deportations of the region’s Jews had reached my grandmother’s birthplace, the Grünbergers’ ancestral town of Spišské Podhradie, “The Place under the Beautiful Castle.” The once Hungarian hamlet was now ruled by Slovakia, where deportations began earlier. Gendarmes and paramilitary guards rounded up the hundreds of Jews living in the town and the surrounding area and sent them to concentration camps in Poland, where most were immediately put to death. The abbot at the Spišské Podhradie monastery shielded a few Jews, as did one Greek Orthodox priest in a nearby village. Others did nothing.
The last surviving sibling of my grandmother Rozi, Alexander Gordon (who changed his name from Grünberger after the war), gave me a series of photographs that recorded the day of the deportation, May 28, 1942. They had been taken by his Christian schoolmate. Several of the pictures were shot from ground level, others from the vantage of an upper-floor window, providing a vista on the town square. They show a long row of horse-drawn hay wagons, laden with older men, women, and children, who are swathed, despite the warmth of the day, in layers of coats, hats, and sweaters. They were only allowed to bring what they could wear. The perimeter is lined with spectators, Christian villagers, children playing at their feet. As the wagons pass the monastery, a townswoman waves to her Jewish friend who she may or may not know is being taken to her death. The woman in the wagon waves back. In the last shot, guards congregate in front of a house in their dark uniforms and high boots, rifles strapped to their shoulders, some of them laughing and chatting. Standing stiffly in their midst, somber and isolated, is an older man in a jacket and tie, a fedora on his head, a walking stick in his hand. I’d seen his face in family portraits of special occasions. Leopold Grünberger, my great-grandfather.
I wondered why he wasn’t in the wagons. Alexander Gordon explained: “My father was granted an ‘exception,’ ” along with his wife, Sidonia. “Only a few Jews had exceptions. Like if you were producing something that was important to the Germans.” In Leopold’s case, he was making the lumber in the town’s biggest industry. On this day, he was being made to preside over the destruction of his own community.
The “exception” would be rendered meaningless when the Germans occupied Slovakia in the fall of 1944. Leopold and Sidonia fled into the countryside, where their son Alexander encountered them one last time. He’d been in a forced labor camp during the deportations and had fled to join the Slovak National Uprising. After the revolt failed and he was lying low with false documents in a small village, Alexander heard rumors that his parents were hiding in the forest and, after days of searching, found them huddled with twenty others in a woodsman’s shack. “The Germans are coming,” Alexander told them. He begged his parents to keep themselves hidden. His mother asked for his shirt. “She wanted to wash it,” Alexander said. Sidonia scrubbed the garment as best she could and hung it near the fire. When it was dry enough to wear, she told him, “Go! Go! Save yourself.” Alexander fled. The following day, an SS unit descended on the hut and sent all of its inhabitants to concentration camps in Germany: Leopold to Sachsen
hausen, Sidonia to Ravensbrück.
Alexander presented me with a document, several pages long. It was a list of names, composed on a manual typewriter by a functionary: a roster of the lost Jews of Spišské Podhradie. The fastidious bureaucratic record listed the dead alphabetically, followed by date of birth, concentration camp, date of death. There were 416 names on the list, all but 20 of the Jews who had been residents of Spišské Podhradie. Nos. 135 and 136 were Leopold and Sidonia Grünberger.
When Adolf Eichmann came to Budapest on March 19, 1944, the first day of the German occupation, to oversee the “Jewish Question” in Hungary, he arrived with ten to twelve officers and an administrative staff (including secretaries, cooks, and chauffeurs) of a mere two hundred—and with no clear authority to direct the Hungarian government. “What was unique about the German regime in Hungary,” Hungarian historian György Ránki observed, “was that a relatively large degree of national sovereignty was left in the hands of the [Hungarian] government, even more than had been done anywhere else in Europe, including Denmark.” Denmark had famously used its sovereignty to resist the anti-Jewish dictates of its occupiers. With only a handful of SS officers in the entire country, the Hungarian officialdom would seem to have been in an even stronger position to counter German edicts, but right from the start it chose otherwise. When the SS and the Gestapo arrested hundreds of prominent and professional Jews in Budapest in the first two weeks of the occupation—and interned them in the rabbinical seminary building where my father had attended elementary school—neither the parliament nor Regent Horthy protested. Every branch of Hungarian lawmaking and law enforcement would fall into line. Eichmann was startled, if pleased, by the occupied state’s willingness, even enthusiasm. “Hungary was the only European country to encourage us relentlessly,” he said later. “They were never satisfied with the rate of the deportations; no matter how much we speeded it up, they always found us too slow.” He had no objections, of course: “Everything went like a dream.”
