A ‘privileged’ witness to atrocity
In this excerpt from the preface of How It Happened: Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry, editor Nina Munk discusses her cousin Erno Munkacsi’s testament to brutality and first-hand account of the Jews’ moral dilemmas in wartime Hungary — with a focus on the Jewish Council (a.ka. Judenrat). The book has been published in English for the first time.
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 Erno Munkacsi.
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 Erno Munkacsi’s remarkable book of 1947. Notably, How It Happened served as a vital source for Randolph L. Braham’s encyclopedic 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 “privileged” 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 Munkacsi 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 and murdered in Nazi concentration camps.
My father and Erno Munkacsi were first cousins once removed. 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, at their synagogue on what was then Csaky St., and for Shabbat dinners at my greatgrandfather Gabor Munk’s well-appointed apartment in Lipotvaros.
Erno, born in 1896, was 31 years older than my father. My father, born in 1927, remembered his older cousin as serious, dutiful and “rather dull.” By all accounts, Erno was all that and more. He was a member of Budapest’s Jewish intelligentsia, a highly respected jurist, committed to doing right by his community.
As Susan Papp argues in her biographical essay (included in this volume), by acting as secretary for the Judenrat or Jewish Council, Erno Munkacsi surely believed he could act as a bulwark against the Nazis.
The reality was something very different, as revealed by a disquieting joke that Erno recounts in How It Happened:
A Jew is woken up in the middle of the night by a banging on his door. “Who’s there?” he calls out. “The Gestapo,” comes the answer. “Thank God,” says the Jew, with obvious relief. “I thought it was the Jewish Council!”
To read How It Happened is to understand that the Budapest-based Judenrat, an administrative body established by the SS immediately after the invasion of Hungary in March 1944, inadvertently facilitated the Nazis’ “wholesale extermination of Hungarian Jews” (Erno’s words). Even today, this is a deeply unsettling, controversial topic.
The tragic role played by the Jewish councils in Hungary, Poland and other Nazi-occupied nations is often defined in terms of “impossible choices” or, to quote the Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer, “choiceless choices.” In The Politics of Genocide, Braham describes the Hungarian Judenrat as naive, ineffective and “almost completely oblivious of the inferno around it.”
Rudolf Vrba, an escapee whose detailed report of April1944 first documented the extent of the horrors at Auschwitz, went further in his critique of the Jewish elite who composed the Judenrat, charging them with complicity in the Nazis’ crimes: “It is my contention that a small group of informed people, by their silence, deprived others of the possibility or privilege of making their own decisions in the face of mortal dangers.” Erno Munkacsi wrote How It Happened well before Braham or Vrba questioned the role of Jewish leaders in Hungary; yet already in the immediate aftermath of the war he and other members of the Judenrat were confronted by intense hostility and outrage from fellow survivors, many of whom had lost their whole family and community to the gas chambers.
Why didn’t the Judenrat do more to save their people?
How did the Judenrat and their families manage to emerge largely unscathed from the war even while more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered?
In his perceptive introduction to this volume, Ferenc Laczo suggests that in writing How It Happened, Erno had a personal stake in denying how much he knew about the Holocaust by mid-1944; he needed to defend himself against accusations of having done too little too late.
Fulop (Pinchas) Freudiger was another member of my family who served on the Hungarian Judenrat in 1944. Years later, as a witness at the Eichmann Trial, Freudiger was asked what he did to prevent the mass deportations in Hungary. “What could we have done?” he asked.
Erno Munkacsi and Fulop Freudiger weren’t the only members of my family who wrestled with their wartime records. In June 1944, as the cattle cars rolled from Hungary to the AuschwitzBirkenau death camp at peak capacity, 14 members of my immediate family — including my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather — fled Budapest on what we now know as the Kasztner Train, the result of secret negotiations with the Nazis that permitted 1,687 select Jews to flee to safety in Switzerland.
To be blunt: My family used its connections and money to escape the inferno, while others with less money and fewer connections were murdered.
That unspoken, unsavoury fact has caused lingering rifts, even within my own family, because less-wealthy or less-lucky branches of the family were trapped in Hungary and slaughtered by the Nazis or the Arrow Cross (fascists who took over the government in October 1944).
What was the right thing to do during the Holocaust? In How It Happened, Munkacsi offers readers a new understanding of the lamentable, impossible balancing act that he and his fellow members of the Judenrat performed.
They were not heroes. They were dutiful, “rather dull” members of the establishment who trusted in the established order that had permitted them to thrive in Hungary.
Even as anti-Jewish measures robbed them of their property, their jobs and their civil rights, the Jewish elite in Budapest rationalized that if they kept their heads down, they would emerge from the war relatively unscathed.
Even after the Nazis arrived in 1944 and Hungary’s Jews began to be herded into ghettos and deported, they stayed the course, perhaps because they “entertained the illusion that Hungary would be the exception, a tiny foothold of an island in the sea of Jewish devastation,” as Munkacsi argues, or perhaps because they felt they had no option.
To quote Ferenc Laczo: “With greater temporal distance, it might … be easier to acknowledge that members of the Council made politically and morally problematic choices because there was no alternative; it was impossible for them to make good decisions.”
My father could never forgive himself for leaving his mother behind when he escaped in 1944. I should have done something to save her, he would say. But what could he have done?
Just after the Germans occupied Hungary, my grandmother was arrested. The charge: She was a threat to the Reich.
My father, aged 16, accompanied her to the Gestapo detention centre on Rokk Szilard St., carrying her brown leather valise. Assured by elder statesmen of the community that she would soon be released, my father would only later learn that she had been sent to Auschwitz and then forced into labour for the Nazis.
She survived the ordeal, only to later commit suicide. Not surprisingly, my father empathized with his cousin Erno’s impossible dilemma.