The war, the Holocaust and after in Poland and Hungary

The topic was the subject of a conference organized by the Institute for Polish Jewish Studies at the Polish Embassy in London.

By MONTE JACOBSON
The Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews and Monument to the Ghetto Heroes (photo credit: COURTESY POLISH EMBASSY LONDON)
The Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews and Monument to the Ghetto Heroes
(photo credit: COURTESY POLISH EMBASSY LONDON)
Between autumn 1939 and spring 1945, some six million of Europe’s men, women and children were murdered because they were Jews. Most came from two of the largest communities, Poland and Hungary. This is the second part of an article comparing experiences in those countries before, during and after the Second World War, the subject of a conference organized by the Institute for Polish Jewish Studies at the Polish Embassy in London on January 29 this year.
The first part, published in The Jerusalem Report of April 8, outlined the history of the communities up to 1939. Although the war and the Holocaust have been exhaustively documented, new research, new interpretations and even new testimonies continue to appear. The conference, together with the Institute’s Polin yearbook that it launched, offered the fruits of much original academic work. Prof. Tim Cole of Bristol University brought a social historian’s perspective to the history of the ghettos, while Dr. Anna Manchin described how new museums are explaining and commemorating the history of the Jewish communities and the Holocaust.
The war and its aftermath
Germany invaded Poland on September  1, 1939, followed sixteen days later by the Soviet Union. The country’s forces, including some 100,000 Jewish officers and soldiers, put up strong resistance but were soon overwhelmed. As so often in its history, Poland was divided and occupied by more powerful neighbors, now with appalling loss of life. For Jews this was to end in the greatest catastrophe in their history, the Shoah.
After the notorious Munich Conference of 1938, Germany had annexed the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia and returned former Hungarian territories. However, despite allying with Germany, Hungary declined to join the invasion of Poland. But after trying to maintain its independence and neutrality, in March 1941 Hungary succumbed to pressure and further territorial promises, entered the Axis and annexed part of Yugoslavia. In June it joined the invasion of the USSR and in December declared war on Britain and the United States.
After the war Poland and Hungary, both fell under the domination of Soviet Communism. In that ideology, in theory, Jews were regarded as no different than other citizens. The Holocaust was not recognized as a uniquely Jewish tragedy. Millions of Poles, Russians and others had been victims of the Nazi aggression and atrocities. At the same time, for those resisting or suffering under the new regimes, Jews were commonly perceived as being disproportionately represented among them, as well as being the arch-proponents of Bolshevism. This fed all too easily into the antisemitism still widely prevalent throughout the region.
In 1945, the Jewish population of Poland, which in 1939 had been 3,350,000, was fewer than 300,000. Facing hostility from both the Communists and some sections of society, most of these left the country, mainly for the Americas or Israel. Then, starting in March 1968, the remnant was reduced to five figures, when some 13,000 were expelled or forced to leave in a cynical antisemitic, anti-Zionist campaign by the Communist government – an act for which Poland’s President Andrzej Duda apologized officially in March 2018.
The Hungarian census of 1941 recorded about 850,000 Jews, as defined by the recent racial laws, approaching five percent of the population. In 1945 the number who had survived the murders in Hungary itself and transportation to the death camps was about 165,000.
The Polish experience
Although the full horrors of the Holocaust did not come to light until the liberation of the camps towards the end of the war, reports of the barbarous treatment of Jews in Germany and the countries it overran reached the rest of the world from the earliest days. In Poland, people were being herded into special lorries and killed by the exhaust fumes. In some villages, all the Jewish men were forced to dig their own graves and were then machine-gunned in the public square. Children were often slaughtered with rifle butts or thrown alive into mass graves. On June 29, 1942, a Polish underground group reported that over 700,000 Jews had been murdered. As they captured the larger towns, the Germans set up ghettos, crowding in all the Jews from the surrounding areas.
The largest and most infamous ghetto was that of Warsaw, where nearly a third of the pre-war population was Jewish. Planning started soon after the city was occupied late in 1939. The Germans brushed aside Polish objections that the Jews constituted an integral part of the city’s economic life. The ghetto was to be set up in the city center, where most Jews lived, rather than the suburbs. Although this would mean more disruption to the economy, industry and transportation, it was quicker. It was just a matter of building a wall, which the Jews would pay for. The actual line of the wall involved negotiation between Jews and the Christians who had long been their neighbors, concerned to preserve their own freedom of movement. Over 100,000 Jews had to move into the ghetto area and a similar number of non-Jews to move out.
When the ghetto was sealed in November 1940, 400,000 Jews were confined within 3.4 square kilometers, living up to 29 to a room, dying from starvation and disease, with medical supplies denied to children under five and adults over fifty. Historians even today debate whether the intention was to let these conditions cause the eventual death of all the Jews in the ghetto or whether it was always intended that they should be transported to the death camps. But in the summer of 1942 more than 250,000 were murdered in Treblinka. When the order came to annihilate the ghetto, Jewish fighters rose up. Heavily outnumbered, their only weapons smuggled in at great risk, the ghetto held out for nearly a month and deportations were temporarily halted. Almost all the survivors were massacred, only a few managing to escape or hide, often in the sewers.
When Soviet forces liberated Warsaw on January 17, 1945, about 174,000 people, under six percent of its pre-war population, were left in the city. Perhaps 11,500 were Jews.
The Nazis built hundreds of concentration camps in Poland, including six extermination camps. Jews were rounded up in every occupied country and transported like cattle to the camps. Although there were many brave and honorable exceptions, the police, railways and other public authorities assisted willingly. Special accommodation was built for workers and their families from the Ukraine and elsewhere to man the camps alongside Germans.
On arrival the victims were robbed of any possessions they had managed to keep, such as wedding rings and even glasses. Women’s hair was collected. The Germans selected those judged fit enough to be worked to death in slave factories attached to the camps. The rest went immediately to their inhuman deaths. In Auschwitz alone, as many as 1,100,000 people died, ninety percent of them Jews. Most were killed in gas chambers using Zyklon B, a product that enriched several German companies, as did the work of building and supplying the camps. Thousands of others died of exhaustion, disease, starvation, brutal treatment, and as the subjects of medical experiments. Before they were burned in ovens, their corpses were robbed of any gold fillings.
Often Jews were forced to assist with the disposal of the bodies. In some camps these were among the Jews who managed to raise revolts. Unarmed, weak from their slave labor and undernourished to the point of starvation, they rarely escaped the machine-guns of the camp guards and the electrified fences. But some did succeed and sought out local resistance groups. Perhaps 20,000 Jews joined partisan forces, though they were not always welcomed, and thousands more formed their own groups, hiding in forests and marshes.
The IPJS Conference at the Polish Embassy, London: In the front row, Sir Ben Helfgott (center) talks to Ambassador Arkady Rzegocki, with Dr. Agnes Kaposi, (second from right)
Hungary
Although at first the antisemitic Miklós Horthy resisted collaborating in the transportation of Jews to the extermination camps, he did nothing to prevent their deaths at the hands of Hungarians. Following the deportation, in summer 1941, of perhaps 20,000 refugees back to certain death in Poland, in January 1942, the Hungarian army massacred some 1,000 more Jews within the country itself. Jews had to serve in unarmed “labor service” units, with duties including barehanded clearing of minefields, and some 42,000 died at the Russian front.
Frustrated by Horthy’s recalcitrance, on March 18, 1944, Germany sent tanks into Budapest. On March 23, a puppet government was installed under Döme Sztójay, which legalized the Arrow Cross Party. Anyone identified as a Jew now had to wear a yellow star. On April 9, the government agreed to placing 300,000 Jewish laborers at the Nazis’ disposal, but then Adolf Eichmann arrived and, supported by several notoriously antisemitic Hungarian politicians, ordered the deportation of all Jews to the death camps.
The decision was made to first transport the Jews from outside Budapest. In mid-April they were forced into ghettos with the enthusiastic assistance of the Arrow Cross and the Hungarian gendarmerie. Transportations began on May 14 and by early July over 430,000 Jews had been sent in cattle-wagons, typically 12,000 a day, mainly to Auschwitz, where most were gassed on arrival. Perhaps a third of Auschwitz victims were Hungarian. The transportation was policed by Hungarian gendarmes – Eichmann had a total staff of a hundred Germans, with just twenty officers. Among the few who were saved at this time were about 4,000 Jews smuggled into Romania by members of Zionist youth movements.
The fate of Budapest’s Jews was different. The world now knew. On June 15, the BBC had broadcast details of a report on the deportations. There were pleas from the Pope, the King of Sweden and President Roosevelt. And the Allies were now bombing the city. The government feared that if the Jews were all placed in one area, this would be spared, concentrating the attacks on the rest of the population. The mayor designated 2,000 separate buildings for 200,000 Jews. A complete exchange of occupants was not possible, though many profited from the expulsion of Jews, moving into furnished homes taking their own furniture and fuel with them. Many Jews stayed living alongside gentile families in “mixed houses,” identified by a yellow star on their doors. Non-Jews had to display an official notice: “No Jews live here.” There were curfews for Jews, which allowed some movement. And there was also the possibility of assistance from neighbors and caretakers, though this inevitably depended on the nature of pre-war relationships.
On July 7, Horthy ordered deportations halted. Then, following a coup in Romania, which went over to the Allies, and the collapse of the southern front, the need for troop trains made it impossible to restart. Eichmann left Budapest and on August 25 further deportations were canceled. On August 29, Horthy dismissed Sztójay.
Following unsuccessful attempts to withdraw from the Axis and seek a separate peace with the Allies, on October 15, Ferenc Szálasi led a coup d’état by the Arrow Cross. Thousands of Budapest Jews, men and women, were sent to build defenses on the Austrian border, effectively on death marches. In mid-November, a small ghetto was established for Jews under international protection. Diplomats from Switzerland, Sweden, the Vatican, Portugal and Spain, including Raoul Wallenberg, issued over 15,000 passports. Then a large ghetto was set up with three-meter walls. By mid-December some 60,000 Jews were crowded into its one-third of a square kilometer, constantly raided by Arrow Cross thugs. By Christmas, the Red Army was surrounding Budapest. Soviet soldiers liberated the large ghetto on January 18, 1945 and drove German and Hungarian troops out of Pest, but the Arrow Cross continued to murder Jews until Buda was taken on February 13.
In two months between November and January, they had also murdered up to 15,000 on the banks of the Danube and thrown their bodies into the river. However, of Budapest’s 200,000 Jews, some 130,000 survived to see the liberation of Hungary.
Two survivors
The chairman of the IPJS is Sir Ben Helfgott, knighted in 2018 for Holocaust remembrance and education services. Born in Łódź, he was ten when Poland was invaded. He and one sister were the only members of his family to survive. After at first passing as an ethnic Pole, with the help of a Christian friend, he was deported to Buchenwald. He spent his teenage years as a slave laborer. Eventually liberated from Theresienstadt he was sent to England with 700 other youngsters. Determined to make a contribution to his new country, Helfgott set up a Jewish youth club and himself took up weightlifting.
In 1956, he represented Britain at the Olympic Games, as team captain, a role he reprised for the 1960 Games. Today he continues his mission, a familiar sturdy presence at Holocaust memorial and educational events throughout the country.
In a moving contribution to the conference, Dr. Agnes Kaposi, who was 11 when her family was forced into the Debrecen ghetto, emphasized this was the work of Hungarians. She never saw a German soldier in the ghetto or while being transported. Through an administrative error the cattle wagons, destined for Auschwitz, were diverted to Strasshof, near Vienna. After four days and five nights in the heat of summer, without water, food or sanitation, the 86 Jews in her wagon were actually relieved to see the guards at the camp were Germans and Ukrainians, not Hungarians. Lying that she was 14, she survived by working as an ‘adult’ slave laborer, able to contribute to providing food for her family. Kaposi was one of the “lucky” 15,000 deported Hungarian Jews who, unlike 437,000 others, did not meet their fate in the death camps. When the 1956 revolution offered the opportunity to escape from Communist Hungary she moved to Britain, where she built a distinguished career as an electrical engineer, becoming a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Remembering the Holocaust
Short sections of the old ghetto walls are kept as memorials in both Warsaw and Budapest, but the stories they can tell are different. For the post-war Communist regime in Poland, the wall was a testament to the brutality the whole country had suffered at the hands of the Nazi occupiers. For their comrades in Hungary it paid tribute to the liberating Red Army. A fascist Hungary had fought as part of the Axis. Nazi troops had entered Hungary not as invaders but as allies. In both countries, antisemitism had a long history, but while individual Poles may have collaborated or turned a blind eye, in Hungary it was the government itself, with willing officials and citizens, who sent their Jewish neighbours to the death camps.
Since the post-war Communist regimes fell in 1989, the new democratic governments have struggled to come to terms with that past. Polish nationalists are loath to accept any interpretation that detracts from the image of heroic victimhood. Their Hungarian counterparts attempt to claim that their country, too, was the victim rather than the perpetrator of fascist barbarities. In playing down any suggestion of guilt, the more unscrupulous leaders may not shrink from using the old religious prejudice or the exaggerated identification of Jews with Communism, while in many places there remains a fear of their return to reclaim stolen property.
Poland has impressive memorials to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and other instances of Jewish suffering and heroism. Hungary’s war memorials continue to portray it as a saintly victim of Nazi aggression, with no responsibility for its army’s massacres in the USSR or for the Holocaust. New museums in Warsaw and Budapest reflect the degree of conflict that remains in confronting historical facts. The Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, opened in 2013, presents Jews as an integral and positive element in centuries of Polish history, giving meaningful context to pre-war troubles as well as the Holocaust. Equivalent institutions in Budapest tend to universalize the Holocaust rather than accepting it as a specifically Jewish experience, still less as one in which Hungary was deeply complicit. Many voices seek to confront the country with the reality of its 20th-century history, but they do not yet prevail.
Today, perhaps 30,000 Jews live in Poland, 3,000 of them belonging to Jewish organizations. In Hungary, estimates range from 54,000 to 130,000, living mainly in Budapest.


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