Hungary’s Vote on History

A Zsidokerdes Magyarorszagon (The Jewish Question in Hungary)
By Janos Gyurgyak
Budapest: Osis Kiado, 2001 (in Hungarian)

In the run-up to Hungary’s elections in April 2002, the Justice and Life Party (MIEP), a highly organized far-right movement, campaigned simultaneously for seats in parliament and for the retrial of a man long dead. Laszlo Bardossy, Hungarian prime minister between 1941 and 1942, was tried and executed in 1946 for his role in handing over 600,000 provincial Jews to the Germans.

MIEP lost its parliamentary platform when Hungarians elected a center-left administration and kicked every racist deputy out of the legislature. Yet the MIEP quest to retry Bardossy reopened the wounds of Hungarian responsibility in the Holocaust and caused uneasiness in the European Union, which is considering Hungary’s bid for membership. Now the party is free to focus its energies on rewriting the past. MIEP’s newspapers describe some of the executed fascist leaders as Hungarian martyrs, leading many to suspect that the Bardossy retrial is intended as only the first of several to rehabilitate heinous war criminals.

Luckily, much more is on offer in the new free market for historical interpretation, created when the Communist administration imploded. A welcome crop of books by young Hungarian scholars displays ruthless, independent analysis — a virtue that some of their own professors might have regarded as an expensive luxury just a decade earlier.

An outstanding example is The Jewish Question in Hungary, historian Janos Gyurgyak’s analysis of the role Jews played in the development of the country over the past two centuries. Gyurgyak was born in 1956, the year of the abortive Hungarian revolt against Soviet rule. Like other works springing up throughout Eastern Europe, Gyurgyak’s book represents the region’s first history intended to inform and clarify rather than to score political points. These books are themselves a historical phenomenon.

Gyurgyak’s book is an overdue attempt to stimulate meaningful dialogue between persecutors and victims and to enable Jews and non-Jews "to meet in a common endeavor to overcome or at least moderate a set of stubborn ethnic, religious, and cultural conflicts between them that naturally occur in all societies," Gyurgyak writes. He argues that Hungary will not find peace until the cultural heirs of the fascist past and its survivors learn to talk through their dreadful joint inheritance.

The culmination of four years of research, this study digests an enormous volume of evidence as well as polemics. The book airs all sides of the arguments, reviews the statistics behind the insults, and maps the path to the gas chambers.

The Jewish Question in Hungary, which has won widespread acclaim in both the academic and general press, fills an enormous need in the current debate over Bardossy, as Hungarian society tries to overcome half a century of enforced silence on a painful issue. Had the Holocaust been followed by a calm period conducive to reflection and dialogue, Gyurgyak says, reconciliation would have been difficult enough. What followed instead was one of the most tempestuous eras in Hungarian history.

Gyurgyak, who is not himself Jewish, holds all segments of war-time Hungary morally and in many cases criminally responsible for the destruction of the Jewish population. But he says that, after the war, the Communist-controlled press "deliberately fed to the public a distorted image of the war…" The press "depicted the occupying Germans and certain of their prominent Hungarian allies, including Bardossy, as the perpetrators of all horrors. That approach falsified the whole truth and, what is even more important, sought to relieve society of its moral burden without any attempt at confronting the past." The reality, Gyurgyak continues, was that the Germans carrying out the deportation did not rely on a few Hungarian officials; they "passed on the dirty work to Hungary, placing their trust in the anti-Semitism and criminal greed of a significant minority of the population, the cowardice of the majority, and the racism of their servile government."

Bardossy appears in Gyurgyak’s book as a singularly hapless politician, at the helm of government for just one year, who managed in that little time to declare war on the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union and to involve Hungarian forces in two notorious acts of ethnic cleansing — in Kamenets-Podolski (Ukraine, 1941) and in Novi Sad (former Yugoslavia, 1942) — that cost thousands of lives.

During the brief, heady days of parliamentary democracy that followed the collapse of fascism, 26,000 Hungarians were sentenced for war crimes, and 189, like Bardossy, were summarily executed. Bardossy’s trial documents bear witness to a profusion of legal blunders, under a judge who lacked proper qualifications. These facts were also shrouded in embarrassed silence by Hungary’s official historians under Soviet rule.

Gyurgyak lists the retributions meted out to a tenth of Hungary’s male population by the tribunals, including imprisonment, forced labor, and the deprivation of due process. Under the pretext of liquidating fascism, the Communists frequently attacked leaders of rival democratic political parties. "As a result, the distinction blurred in the public perception between war criminals and the victims of Communist autocracy," Gyurgyak writes. "And given the high proportion of Jews participating at the time in public administration, many people perceived the emergence of Jewish revenge for the Holocaust."

Another outstanding historian of Gyurgyak’s generation, Christian Ungvary, comments that Hungarian democrats have nothing to fear from a retrial of Bardossy. "Let our independent courts reconsider the trials of all our war criminals," he argues in the newspaper Nepszabadsag. "The fact is that the postwar tribunals were dominated by the Communists who played their own political games and often hanged mass murderers for the wrong reasons. That is the anomaly exploited today by people who would deny Hungary’s responsibility for the Holocaust."

The Jewish Question in Hungary also looks at contemporary Budapest, a city that has remained a major European Jewish center despite its murderous past. Its doggedly loyal Jewish population continues to play a prominent role — too prominent, the neofascists argued in the bruising election campaign — in all spheres of public endeavor.

Gyurgyak welcomes a renaissance of Jewish culture in the capital, with a thriving press, political organizations, and numerous associations promoting the arts, commerce, education, sports, travel, entertainment, and social welfare. The freedom of political expression achieved at the collapse of communism has also opened a flood of racist polemics — increasingly extreme, Gyurgyak observes, as the far right becomes politically marginalized. Nevertheless, fewer than 100 Hungarian Jews a year have settled in Israel since 1989.

National heroes and bogeymen have often switched places in the official postwar history books of Eastern Europe as bygone rulers of the region sought to justify conflicting policies. The shiftiness of official history has promoted widespread cynicism and ignorance, rendering these nascent democracies vulnerable to neofascists. Into the breach come Gyurgyak and his colleagues, exposing the wounds of the past through honest historical research that makes national healing possible.