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How It Happened: Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry PDF

391 Pages·2018·12.01 MB·English
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HOW IT HAPPENED Fig. 1 Portrait of Ernő Munkácsi, 1943 ERNŐ MUNKÁCSI HOW IT HAPPENED Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry Translated from the Hungarian by Péter Balikó Lengyel Edited by Nina Munk Annotated by László Csősz and Ferenc Laczó McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago © Nina Munk 2018 ISBN 978-0-7735-5512-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-5581-5 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-5582-2 (ePUB) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2018 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Munkácsi, Ernő [Hogyan történt? English]           How it happened : documenting the tragedy of Hungarian Jewry / Ernő Munkácsi ; translated from Hungarian by Péter Balikó Lengyel ; edited by Nina Munk ; annotated by László Csősz and Ferenc Laczó. Translation of: Hogyan történt? Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-5512-9 (cloth).–ISBN 978-0-7735-5581-5 (ePDF). –ISBN 978-0-7735-5582-2 (ePUB)           1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945) – Hungary – Personal narratives. I. Munk, Nina, editor  II. Title: Hogyan történt?  English DS135.H9M8613 2018              943.9’004924                   C2018-903578-1                                                                                              C2018-903579-X This book was designed and typeset by Peggy & Co. Design Inc. in 10.5/14 Sabon. Contents Illustrations vii Editor’s Preface Nina Munk ix Acknowledgments xv Maps xvi The Excruciating Dilemmas of Ernő Munkácsi Ferenc Laczó xxiii The Life and Times of Ernő Munkácsi Susan M. Papp lvii u w U How It HaPPeNeD: DocUmeNtINg tHe trageDy oF HUNgarIaN Jewry 1 Preface 5 1 Introduction 7 2 The Entrapment of Hungarian Jewry 9 3 From Yellow Star to Ghetto 29 4 The Auschwitz Protocols and Their Fallout 104 5 Deportations from the Provinces/Star-Marked Buildings in Budapest 133 6 The Role of the Christian Churches 158 7 The Struggle to Save the Jews of Budapest 183 8 Between Two Deportation Dates 213 9 In the Shadow of Destiny under the Lakatos Cabinet 259 u w U Glossary Ferenc Laczó and László Csősz 287 Contributors 295 Index 297 List of Illustrations Fig. 1 Ernő Munkácsi, 1943 © Estate of Magdalena and Alfred Gergely, courtesy of Andrew E. Hegedus ii Fig. 2 Ernő Munkácsi at Peter Munk’s bar mitzvah, Budapest, 1940 Photo by Gyula Schäffer © Estate of Peter Munk xi Fig. 3 The girls’ gymnastics team at Budapest’s Jewish high school, 1941 Photo by Pál Kis © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives xxv Fig. 4 An Orthodox Jewish mother with her children, Makó, 1922 Photo by Nándor Homonnai © József Attila Museum of Makó xxvii Fig. 5 Opening ceremony for the Hungarian Jewish Museum, Budapest, 1932 © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives xxix Fig. 6 Jenő Vida’s villa, Budapest, c. 1930 © Estate of Jenő Vida, courtesy of his grandchildren xxxii Fig. 7 The Jewish ghetto in Munkács, 1944 © Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum xxxvi Fig. 8 Sándor and Berta Guttman with their children, Budapest, 1944 © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Irving and Emma Eisner xxxvii Fig. 9 Jews in Dunaszerdahely herded onto a freight train to Auschwitz, 1944 © Yad Vashem Photo Archive xl Fig. 10 Residents of Hajdúnánás plunder the town’s ghetto, 1944 © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives xlii Fig. 11 Hungarian Jews arrive at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944 © Yad Vashem Photo Archive, courtesy of the Hungarian National Museum xlvii viii Illustrations Fig. 12 Sarah Stein and Adolf Munk, Nagyvárad, c. 1880 © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives lviii Fig. 13 Bernát Munkácsi with his Votyak instructors in Russia, 1885 © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives lx Fig. 14 The Munkácsi family on holiday in Abazzia, 1915 © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives lxii Fig. 15 The synagogue of Gyöngyös, 1930 Photo by Lipót Baumhorn © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives lxiii Fig. 16 Hungarian Jewish Museum general assembly, Budapest, 1930s © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives lxvi Fig. 17 Éva Kahán’s wedding party, Budapest, 1935 Photo by Gyula Schäffler © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives lxix Fig. 18 Paula Éva and Maya Munkácsi, Budapest, 1933 Photo by Pál Kis © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives lxxi Fig. 19 Pest Israelite Congregation general assembly, Budapest, 1930s Photo by Sándor Diskay © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives 10 Fig. 20 Jewish inmates at Kistarcsa internment camp, 1944 Hungarian Film Office © Hungarian National Museum 30 Fig. 21 Women and children on arriving in Auschwitz, 1944 © Yad Vashem Photo Archive 105 Fig. 22 Gendarmes lead Jews in Kőszeg to the train station, 1944 Photo by János Babai © Hungarian National Museum 134 Fig. 23 A man with two boys in the Ungvár ghetto, 1944 © Hungarian National Museum 159 Fig. 24 A yellow-star house at 8 Vay Ádám Street, Budapest, 1944 © Memorial Museum of Hungarian Speaking Jewry 184 Fig. 25 The Glass House on Vadász Street, Budapest, 1944 Photo by Carl Lutz © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Agnes Lutz Hirschi 214 Fig. 26 German soldiers round up Jews in Budapest, 1944 Photo by Walther Faupel © Bundesarchiv 260 Editor’s Preface A few years ago, while rummaging through his desk drawers, my father, Peter Munk, found a tattered copy of a Hungarian book written in 1947 by his cousin Ernő Munkácsi. My father sat down, read the book in one sitting, and called me. “This book,” he began urgently. “It has to be published in English.” Leading scholars of the Holocaust in Hungary have long been influenced by Ernő Munkácsi’s remarkable book of 1947. Notably, How It Happened served as a vital source for Randolph L. Braham’s encyclopaedic The Politics of Genocide. But, as my father understood immediately, How It Happened is not only an important historical record of the Holocaust in Hungary; it is an extraordinary first-hand account of the atrocity, written by a “priv- ileged” eyewitness and victim. Memoirs of war are almost always affected by hindsight bias. How It Happened was written right after the Second World War, when the wounds were still raw. That immediacy magnifies the horrors Munkácsi describes: the barrage of increasingly preposterous demands made by Adolf Eichmann’s special operations unit in Budapest (Sondereinsatzkommando Eichmann); the complicity of the Hungarian authorities; the disagreements that unfolded behind closed doors among frantic members of the Hungarian Judenrat; the mind-numbing swiftness and barbarity with which hundreds of thousands of Hungary’s Jews were rounded up, robbed of their property and civil rights, herded into ghettos, and murdered in Nazi concentration camps. My father and Ernő Munkácsi were first cousins once removed (my father’s grandfather was Munkácsi’s uncle). The Munk family was big and tightly knit and comfortably bourgeois. In Budapest in the years leading up to the war, family members gathered frequently at their local coffee house (Országház kávéház), at their synagogue on what was then Csáky Street, and for Shabbat dinners at my great-grandfather Gábor Munk’s well-appointed apartment in Lipótváros. Ernő, born in 1896, was thirty-one years older than my father. My father, born in 1927, remembered his older cousin as serious, dutiful, and “rather dull.” By all accounts, Ernő was all that and more. He

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A gripping first-hand account of the devastating "last chapter" of the Holocaust, written by a privileged eyewitness, the secretary of the Hungarian Judenrat, and a member of Budapest's Jewish elite, How It Happened is a unique testament to the senseless brutality that, in a matter of months, decima
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