How It Happened: Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry

391 Pages·2018·12.01 MB·English

by  Erno Munkácsi

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