Hosszú út az első magyarországi deportáláshoz. (Magyar Történelmi Emlékek. Értekezések)

The mass murder committed on 27–28 (possibly 26–28 or 28–31) August 1941 in Kamianets-Podilskyï claimed about 23,600 Jewish victims, most of whom (about 13–16,000) were so-called “stateless” Jews deported from Hungary. After the dawn of 22 June 1941, when Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa to invade the Soviet Union, it was the first instance in which the number of people murdered in the occupied territories reached five figures. There had been pogroms and killings before that (e.g. Šiauliai, Lithuania, 26–29 June; Lviv, Ukraine, 30 June – 2 July and 25–29 July), but not on this scale. A month later (28–29 September), the massacre in Babyn Yar near Kyiv far surpassed it – and obscured its memory.

Tamás Stark, a well-known and respected researcher at the Institute of History of the HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities in Budapest, who has long been studying “the history of the first deportation in Hungary” which culminated in the mass murder of Kamianets-Podilskyï, summarises the results of his research in his book. In the foreword, the author points out that this deportation “is usually presented only as an episode in comprehensive works on the fate of Hungarian Jewry” which is why “the literature on the subject is relatively scarce.” (9) Tamás Stark not only reviews and processes this limited literature but also expands his sources to include archival material and, by exploring the “long” road to mass murder, actually changes its “episodic” character and places it in a broader European historical context. In his work, the author examines “how the ‘Jewish question’ became a central issue of public life in East-Central Europe, and especially in Poland, Romania and Hungary, after the First World War. To what extent was this process due to the strengthening of the nation-state ideal, which saw foreign residents, and Jews in particular, as potential enemies (…) How were the provisions governing the granting of citizenship used to declare as many undesirable Jews as possible stateless.” (13).

The First World War and the revolutions that followed – most notably the Bolshevik-style Soviet Republic – brought radical changes in the history and perception of Hungarian Jewry. After the Trianon Peace Treaty, which took away about two-thirds of the country’s territory, a truncated Hungary no longer needed the Jews to create a “Hungarian” national majority, so it started to blame the Jews for the lost world war and the Soviet Republic, and to marginalise them within the Hungarian nation. Tamás Stark rightly points out in his introduction that similar “anti-Jewish” processes took place in the territories of the disintegrating Russian Empire (accompanied by pogroms), as well as in Poland and Romania. After all, the newly established nation states were also religiously and ethnically diverse, similar to the empires, but over a much smaller area and driven by more radical national political ideologies. Jews were the least able to fit into this diversity. It is no coincidence that Tamás Stark, in the first chapter of his work, examines the Jewish question as a question of destiny. He points out that a significant number of Jews fled from the pogroms in Russia – mainly from Galicia – to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, mostly to Hungary. In the post-war transformation, the loss of territory and population in Hungary meant that the old political elite lost its authority, new actors emerged in public life, and anti-Jewish sentiment became a dominant feature of public and political life.

The new regime, established by Miklós Horthy as regent, called itself as “Christian” and national. Political antisemitism was an organic part of the new regime.

In the new Hungarian state, the Jews, who had been considered part of the Hungarian nation during the Monarchy, were defined as a foreign body: a race, so to speak. At the same time, the need to “solve the Jewish question” came to the fore. As Tamás Stark points out, this was not specific to Hungary but was equally “central” in Poland and Romania. “Equality before the law [was] never achieved anywhere.” (61).

The second chapter of the book deals with the question of “good” and “bad” Jews, which is closely linked to assimilation to, and identification with a particular national ideal. For the most part, Jews were considered inadequate for these and distrusted. Consequently, they were regarded as an “alien element” and their deportation was urged. Individually, this attitude was particularly dangerous for Jews who had no citizenship (“stateless persons”) or whose citizenship was uncertain and difficult to prove. In case of raids, they faced internment and deportation. Indeed, after the world war, as chapter three explains in part, citizenship became not only more valued, but also “a fundamental issue in the [Central European] region, because its recognition would allow for personal and group protection.”

Citizenship was therefore synonymous with life; its absence foreshadowed death. This was the “legal” basis for the deportation of Jews from Hungary to Galicia in the summer of 1941, and it was the root of the tragedy of those murdered in Kamianets-Podilskyï, as is clear from the third chapter on “statelessness”. In fact, many Jews, especially in the territories returned to Hungary (in Transcarpathia and Northern Transylvania), were unable to prove their citizenship or to obtain the necessary documents. Not to mention the fact that Romania had previously deprived many Jews of their citizenship, so they had already been returned to Hungary as “stateless” persons.

As the title of the fourth chapter indicates, Operation Barbarossa, launched by Nazi Germany – and Hungary’s entry into the war against the Soviet Union within a few days – created the possibility of an imminent removal of “foreigners,” i.e. Jews, from the territory of the country. But Hungary was not alone in this situation. In Romania, the Jewish Law, promulgated on 8 August 1941, also categorised Jews and distinguished between those living inside and outside the territory of pre-1918 Romania! This meant deportation and death for Jews living in Bessarabia and Bukovina. Earlier, in July 1941, Hungary had already begun deporting the so-called “stateless” Jews, although not on the same scale and not as systematically as Romania. In reality, however, many Jews with Hungarian citizenship were also deported. The victims were mostly picked up at night by the police or the gendarmerie. “Under these circumstances, it was only possible to pack only the most essential belongings.” (178) According to one lucky survivor, “everything that was once considered unthinkable happened to us there.” (185).

The Hungarian government was forced to stop the deportations on 9 August 1941 in the face of increasingly strong protests from the German High Command, which considered Hungarian deportees a security risk in the occupied territories. An exact figure is almost impossible to establish. In his speech to the House of Representatives on 26 November, Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer, Minister of the Interior, put the number of Jews deported from Hungary at around 20,000. In reality, the figure was closer to 22,000.

On 25 August, at a meeting in Vinnytsia, the leaders of the German military administration decided to liquidate the Hungarian Jews in the Kamianets-Podilskyï region.

Tamás Stark reconstructs the history of this mass murder in great detail on the basis of recollections and testimonies of the German perpetrators.

According to him, the deported Jews, who were in other cities, could have avoided later massacres if they had been allowed back into Hungary. (237) However, the Hungarian authorities consistently and systematically tried to prevent this. “The overwhelming majority of the Jews who avoided deportation to Kamianets-Podilskyï,” the author writes, “were the victims of the subsequent mass murders in Nadvirna, Kolomyia, Stanislav (now Ivano-Frankivsk), Chortkiv, Horodenka and other settlements.” (272).

The strengths of Tamás Stark’s book, which is illustrated with pictures and contains original scientific results, lie in its extensive and critical processing of the literature – which makes his work indispensable for those wishing to research the subject in the future, its reliance on sources (in addition to the Hungarian archives, he has also researched in the United States and Yad Vashem) and its placing the events in the “longue durée” process on the one hand, and in the broader comparative historical perspective on the other. Anyone interested in the history of Central European antisemitism and the Holocaust between the two world wars will find this a very useful read!