The exhibition, entitled My Story:  Early Memory of the Holocaust in the Works of Eyewitness Artists, closes 21 July 2024. 

About the Hungarian Holocaust

By Agnes Kaposi

Budapest is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. Its main feature is the blue Danube which divides it into two distinct halves, knitted into a whole by an array of gracefully arched bridges. Its spectacular art nouveau buildings, hot spas, famous cuisine, vibrant cultural life, elegant cafés and restaurants offer a veritable paradise to tourists who flock to this metropolis from all corners of the world. Visitors ride up the funicular to Castle Hill. Some may even wander into the National Gallery in the Castle, but few attend the current exhibition of works by eyewitness artists of the Holocaust. In mid-May this year, when a distinguished historian offered a guided tour of the exhibition, I was one of just a handful of participants. No fault of the tourists; the event is barely publicised because Hungarian leaders are reluctant to acknowledge Hungary’s responsibility for the Holocaust. The exhibition is beautifully arranged, the art is evocative and painfully moving, but a young usher tells me, in a whisper, that the explanatory notes on the walls have been heavily censored. 

How did the Hungarian Holocaust happen? Why is it particularly shocking even compared to the rest of the history of the Holocaust? 

The period before World War I was a golden age for the Jews of Hungary. They were free to practise their religion, pursue their trade and gain an education. The community flourished, and Jews came to occupy prominent positions in Hungary’s cultural, professional and business life. With the end of the war, the good times came to a sudden end. Hungary, a parliamentary democracy, was the first European country to introduce the Numerus Clausus in 1920, a law curbing education of Jewish citizens. This was followed by political oppression and a sequence of racial laws in the Nuremberg pattern, together with regulations first restricting the employment of Jewish professionals and later excluding Jews from schooling, employment and most of social life. 

How did this affect me? I was born in 1932, the only child of young socialists, the only child of the extended family, and the only Jewish child on the block. Other children were not allowed to play with me, but it was not a lonely childhood: my playmates were my unemployed and devoted uncles: new graduates of law, medicine, engineering and the like. We were desperately poor but intellectually ambitious. My uncles taught me to love learning, and explained to me the professions they were not allowed to practise. It was an unusual childhood.  

In 1940, Hungary joined the Axis as the fourth power, alongside Germany, Italy and Japan. At that time, the country had 725,000 people of Jewish faith and a further 70,000 Christians counted as Jews under the racial laws. 

Then in 1941, tiny Hungary, enthusiastic ally of Hitler’s Germany, declared war on the mighty Soviet Union. When my uncles showed this to me on the map, I thought they were joking. The country mobilised for war. Jewish men aged between 16 and 60 went to war unarmed and without uniforms, as ’forced labour’ units of the Hungarian army. Some 50,000 Jews perished through starvation, disease and ill-treatment by their fellow countrymen. This must be counted as the first phase of the Hungarian Holocaust. Only one of my beloved uncles survived.

After the departure to war of young Jewish men, those left behind – women, children and older Jews – had to endure hardship, oppression and degradation, but they were alive, while most of the Jews of Europe were systematically murdered, most in the death camps of Poland. At this point of history, Hungary’s Jews were lucky. 

Capitulation of the German army at Stalingrad in 1943 was a decisive turn in the war. By then, most of the Jews of the continent of Europe were dead, but the large majority of Hungary’s Jews were still alive. Then on 19 March 1944 the German army occupied Hungary. 

Now came a whirlwind of events. A government wholly subservient to Germans was immediately established. Early April 1944 brought the yellow star law. In late April came the law of ghettoisation. Between 15 May and 7 July, in 56 days, mass deportation took away all 437,000 Jews of the provinces. Who carried out the deportation? Hungarians try to pretend that it was all done by the Germans, that they themselves were victims of the Nazis and not perpetrators of the Holocaust. In fact, the deportation was directed by Eichmann and his staff of 150 but was carried out by an armed force of 22,000 Hungarian police and gendarmes. Almost all Hungarian Jews were taken to Auschwitz and murdered on arrival, making over two thirds of the 1.1 million victims of Auschwitz. This was the second phase of the Hungarian Holocaust. The luck of Hungary’s Jews ran out. 

My own family was deported from my native city of Debrecen, Hungary, on 27 June in one of 143 trains heading for Auschwitz. We were nearing our destination when our train was reversed and diverted to Vienna where I spent the rest of the war working as a child slave labourer. History books assert that there was only one such reversed train, and offer several possible explanations for our extraordinary journey. The reason remains obscure, and scholars just shrug their shoulders, saying that we owe our survival to ‘a quirk of history’. 

In mid-July 1944, Eichmann proudly reported to Hitler that Hungary’s provinces were ‘Judenrein’ (clean of Jews). Now he could turn his attention to administering the final solution to the 200,000 Jews of Budapest. Because of the military situation and due to international protest, deportations to Auschwitz were halted, but killing of Jews continued. Half of Budapest’s Jews, among them my lovely Aunt Rose, were shot into the Danube, or were killed in death marches, or were deported to other camps and killed there. The murder of some 100,000 Budapest Jews is the third and final phase of the Hungarian Holocaust. In all, the Hungarian Holocaust cost 600,000 Jewish lives, 10% of the 6 million victims of the Holocaust. 

In conclusion, let me return to that exhibition in their National Gallery. I asked for a catalogue. They said there was none. Perhaps next week, they said. Not being much of a photographer, I tried to take a few snapshots. Here are three drawings in the room devoted to women victims. I thought I might share them with you.