|
|
Three anti-Semitic laws completed the exclusion of the Hungarian
Jews between 1938 and 1941. The first two laws made their economic
situation more and more difficult; the Third
Jewish Law, which was passed in 1941, however, was a real,
Nuremberg-type, racial law introducing "race-protective"
orders.
In July and August of 1941 nearly
16,000 Jews regarded as aliens or whose citizenship was stated to be
unresolved, were deported to territories under German rule in Galicia
where the Germans massacred them in the vicinity of Kamenec-Podolskij.
This was the first "five-digit massacre" during the process
of the Holocaust of the European Jewry. We do not have photos
documenting this massacre. However, we have pictures about the second
massacre which involved Hungarian Jews. In January 1942 in the
Southern region (Délvidék, which was reclaimed from
Yugoslavia) during an action taken against Serb partisans Hungarian
gendarmeries murdered nearly 3,500 people. There were about 800 Jews
among them. The gendarmeries shot their victims and threw their bodies
into holes blown in the ice of the frozen-over Danube. Evidently, in order to frighten the
civilians, they also hanged people in the public squares as we can see
in the pictures.
Eichmann and his
Sonderkommando of 200 men deported the Jews of the provinces to
Auschwitz with the active help of the Hungarian clerks, policemen,
solders and gendarmeries in the spring and early summer of 1944. The
Jewry of the provinces, 437,000 people, made up more than fifty
percent of the entire Hungarian Jewry. We have extremely few photos
documenting this horrible "record achievement," since
Eichmann and his "experts" were not "able" to
deport so many Jews in such a short period from any other European
country (between May 15 and June 6 of 1944).
According to archival documents,
sporadic newspaper sources, and testimonies of survivors, the majority
of the gentiles did not even try to help the persecuted people. There
were only a few people who participated
actively in the persecution besides the officials and functionaries.
Their estimated number is greater, however, than the number of those
people who tried to help actively. The photos documenting the
deportation show that it takes only a few gendarmeries to march the
obedient Jews to the railway station, to the cattle cars. We know from
archival documents that after the deportation, the citizens began the
looting of the deserted ghettos. In some places they acted defying the
martial law; and in other places they had official permission.
Obviously, the looters of Kôszeg belonged to the second
category, since they happily allowed the taking of pictures. Both the
looters and the loot indicate, that in this case, poor people were
taking the belongings of other poor people.
Miklós Horthy put an end to
the deportation of the Jews on the 6th of July, 1944. The reasons are
still not entirely clear. It is possible that his decision was
motivated by the landing of the allied forces on the shores of
Normandy, or the offensive of the Red Army, or he was afraid that the
capital would have been destroyed by a carpet bombing if the Jews of
Pest had had been deported. Eichmann had a fit, but without Hungarian
help he was not able to continue shipping "raw material" to
the death factory of Auschwitz.
Ferenc Szálasi, the leader
of the Arrow-Cross Party and the Hungarist Movement came to power with
the help of the Germans, after
Miklós Horthy, the governor of Hungary, announced that he
appealed for cease-fire. The members of his government, when their
picture was taken, broke a tradition: they did not wear their
Hungarian gala-dress. They put on simple civilian clothes. Maybe they
had a premonition concerning their fate: the majority of them would be
sentenced to death by the court of the Hungarian People within a
period of less than one and a
half years.
Nearly 200,000 Jews were terrified
in Budapest by the coming into power of Szálasis
Arrow-Cross men. The troops of
the Red Army were not able to liberate the ghetto of Pest until the
18th of January, 1945. Up to then, hundreds of defenseless Jews were
murdered by Arrow-Cross men every day as the photos show. Many Jews
were tortured horribly before their death, others were simply shot and
thrown into the Danube which was filled with drift-ice. They handed
over nearly 70,000 Jews to the Germans for forced labor. They worked
on the fortification system in the Sub-Alps in order to
"protect" Vienna.
In the spring of 1945 Budapest was
reduced to ruins as we can see in the photographs. Because of the
meaningless war fought, on the Nazis' side nearly one million lives were lost. From
825,000 Hungarian Jews 550,000 died, and some of the returning
survivors emigrated within the next few years. Thus, in the place
where one of the most flourishing Jewish communities of Middle-Eastern
Europe once existed, now only approximately 5,000-70,000 Jews
exist.
|