How It Happened: Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry

551 Pages·2018·6.53 MB·English

by  Ernő 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
Editor’s Preface
Nina Munk
Acknowledgments
Maps
The Excruciating Dilemmas of Ernő Munkácsi
Ferenc Laczó
The Life and Times of Ernő Munkácsi
Susan M. Papp
HOW IT HAPPENED: DOCUMENTING THE TRAGEDY OF HUNGARIAN JEWRY
Preface
1 Introduction
2 The Entrapment of Hungarian Jewry
3 From Yellow Star to Ghetto
4 The Auschwitz Protocols and Their Fallout
5 Deportations from the Provinces/Star-Marked Buildings in Budapest
6 The Role of the Christian Churches
7 The Struggle to Save the Jews of Budapest
8 Between Two Deportation Dates
9 In the Shadow of Destiny under the Lakatos Cabinet
Glossary
Ferenc Laczó and László Csősz
Contributors
Index
List of Illustrations
Fig.1 Ernő Munkácsi, 1943
© Estate of Magdalena and Alfred Gergely, courtesy of Andrew E.
Hegedus
Fig.2 Ernő Munkácsi at Peter Munk’s bar mitzvah, Budapest, 1940
Photo by Gyula Schäffer © Estate of Peter Munk
Fig.3 The girls’ gymnastics team at Budapest’s Jewish high school, 1941
Photo by Pál Kis © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives
Fig.4 An Orthodox Jewish mother with her children, Makó, 1922
Photo by Nándor Homonnai © József Attila Museum of Makó
Fig.5 Opening ceremony for the Hungarian Jewish Museum, Budapest, 1932
© Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives
Fig.6 Jenő Vida’s villa, Budapest, c. 1930
© Estate of Jenő Vida, courtesy of his grandchildren
Fig.7 The Jewish ghetto in Munkács, 1944
© Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum
Fig.8 Sándor and Berta Guttman with their children, Budapest, 1944
© United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Irving and
Emma Eisner
Fig.9 Jews in Dunaszerdahely herded onto a freight train to Auschwitz, 1944
© Yad Vashem Photo Archive
Fig.10 Residents of Hajdúnánás plunder the town’s ghetto, 1944
© Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives
Fig.11 Hungarian Jews arrive at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944
© Yad Vashem Photo Archive, courtesy of the Hungarian National
Museum
Fig.12 Sarah Stein and Adolf Munk, Nagyvárad, c. 1880
© Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives
Fig.13 Bernát Munkácsi with his Votyak instructors in Russia, 1885
© Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives
Fig.14 The Munkácsi family on holiday in Abazzia, 1915
© Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives
Fig.15 The synagogue of Gyöngyös, 1930
Photo by Lipót Baumhorn © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives
Fig.16 Hungarian Jewish Museum general assembly, Budapest, 1930s
© Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives
Fig.17 Éva Kahán’s wedding party, Budapest, 1935
Photo by Gyula Schäffler © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives
Fig.18 Paula Éva and Maya Munkácsi, Budapest, 1933
Photo by Pál Kis © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives
Fig.19 Pest Israelite Congregation general assembly, Budapest, 1930s
Photo by Sándor Diskay © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives
Fig.20 Jewish inmates at Kistarcsa internment camp, 1944
Hungarian Film Office © Hungarian National Museum
Fig.21 Women and children on arriving in Auschwitz, 1944
© Yad Vashem Photo Archive
Fig.22 Gendarmes lead Jews in Kőszeg to the train station, 1944
Photo by János Babai © Hungarian National Museum
Fig.23 A man with two boys in the Ungvár ghetto, 1944
© Hungarian National Museum
Fig.24 A yellow-star house at 8 Vay Ádám Street, Budapest, 1944
© Memorial Museum of Hungarian Speaking Jewry
Fig.25 The Glass House on Vadász Street, Budapest, 1944
Photo by Carl Lutz © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
courtesy of Agnes Lutz Hirschi
Fig.26 German soldiers round up Jews in Budapest, 1944
Photo by Walther Faupel © Bundesarchiv
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 “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 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 was a member of
Budapest’s Jewish intelligentsia, a highly respected jurist, cultured, and
committed to doing right by his community. As Susan Papp argues in her
biographical essay (page lvii), by acting as secretary for the Judenrat or Jewish