A talk I gave at the Holocaust Centre of NZ on May 21, 2017

The Holocaust in Hungary and Romania

Holocaust between East and West

Holocaust in Romania and Hungary

After the peace treaties at the end of the First World War there were winners and losers. Hungary was one of the losers, It lost two-third of its territory and a third of its Hungarian speaking people. Romania was one of the winners, gaining large areas at the expense of Hungary and Russia.

The aim of the Hungarian government in the 1930s was to reclaim these lost territories, while the aim of Romanian government was to retain them. It was these aspirations that prompted their alliance with Nazi Germany.

Winners and losers

Peace treaties at the end of W W 1 changed borders and created new states.

Hungary lost 2/3 of its land and 1/3 of its people

Romania was greatly enlarged.

Hungarian foreign policy was driven by its aim to regain lost land, while Romania's aimed to retain territories.

Alliance with Germany was seen as the best way of achieving these aims

Murder of stateless Jews from Hungary

Until 1944 Hungary protected its Hungarian Jewish citizens, but in 1941, Jews who were not Hungarian citizens were exiled to Kamenets Podolsk across the Ukrainian border. 17,000 were murdered there in one of the first massacres

The Germans occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. By then it was clear to all but the most single minded Nazi that Germany was losing the war. The Soviet army was moving through Belarus towards Germany, British and American troops were working their way north in Italy. The Germans could no longer count on the loyalty of Hungary. One of the signs of its disloyalty was that Hungary refused to address the 'Jewish question'. Not only did Hungary refused to hand over Hungarian Jews to Germany to be murdered, it provided shelter to Jews fleeing from Slovakia, Poland, and other parts of Nazi occupied Europe.

On March 19, 1944 Germany occupied Hungary, and immediately introduced measures for the isolation and deportation of Jews.

By March 1944 the Hungarian Jewish community of about 650,000 was the only large Jewish community left alive in Europe. To address this issue, Adolf Eichmann arrived with the first occupying troops with his specialist experts on transporting and liquidating Jews, and the persecution, isolation and ghettoisation started immediately.

When Hungary was occupied by the Germans (March 19, 1944), a large number of Jews were arrested and sent to the SS-run Kistarcsa camp administered by the Hungarian police. From there they were deported to Auschwitz

Working from East to West, town by town, Hungarian gendarmes under Germans supervision cleared the Hungarian countryside of Jews. Clare Galambos, living in Szombathely, one of the most western cities, close to the Austrian border was on one of the last trains. 437,000 were deported on 145 trains Four trains a day with about 3000 on each, 12000 people arrived in Auschwitz every day. Of the 437,000 about 320,000, children, old people, the lame and the sick, were killed immediately on arrival. The rest, like Clare Galambos, were selected for slave labour.

Budapest however, with 200,000 Jews, 20% of the city's population, presented a special logistic challenge. The Jews of Budapest were to be deported in the middle of July 1944, but on July 7, Horthy, the Regent, the head of the Hungarian government ordered a halt to the deportations.

Between July and October the Hungarian government sought to follow the Romanian example and pull out of its alliance with Germany and change sides. The Germans arrested Horthy, the head of the government, and his son, and installed the extreme nationalist antisemitic government of Szalasi and his Arrow Cross party. This lead to uncontrolled mayhem and the random murder of thousands of Jews.

With the overthrow of the Hungarian government in October by the Arrow Cross antisemitic regime, deportations resumed.

Deportation were resumed on foot. Trains were no longer available. The death camps in Poland had already been destroyed or captured by Soviet troops, so the the Hungarian Jews were deported mainly to Austria. These included my father who ended up in the notorious Mauthausen camp and its sub-camp Günzkirchen, and my mother who was in Lichtenwörth, a women's camp close to the Austrian Hungarian border, a sub-camp of Mauthausen. In November the Jews remaining in Budapest were confined in the newly established ghetto. My brother and I survived there in the care of our grandparents

During the Szalasi's Arrow Cross regime, gangs perpetrated a reign of arbitrary terror against the Jews of Budapest. Hundreds of Jews, both men and women, were violently murdered.

Memorial on the Danube river bank commemorating those who were shot into the river by Arrow Cross murder squads

Jews of Romania

Your chance of survival depended on where you lived. Large proportion of the Jews of Bessarabia and Moldova were killed, but the Jews of the Banat and the Regat [Old Kingdom] had a better chance of survival.

Whereas Jews in Hungary had been aligned with the liberal Hungarian nationalist movement since at least the Revolution of 1848 and were granted full Hungarian citizenship rights in 1868, Jews of Romania were not granted citizenship until after the First World War, and then only reluctantly, mandated as part of the Peace Treaty settlements. Antisemitism was deeply ingrained in Romanian politics, closely linked, as in other parts of Europe, to anti-liberal forces, and acceptance of Jews was a significant divisive issue. The incorporation after the First World War in Romania of territories with large Jewish communities that were formerly part of Russia, added to the perception that Jews were an alien element in Romanian society.

There was widespread opposition to the granting of equal rights to Jews. There were a number of pogroms in the 1920s, demand for the exclusion of Jews from universities and the professions. After the Nazis assumed power in Germany, violent antisemitism became an integral part of the political movements of both the right wing regime of Ion Antonescu and the extreme fascist organisation of the Iron Guard. Starting in October 1941 as part of their conflict with the government of King Carol II, the Iron Guard began a massive antisemitic campaign torturing and beating Jews and looting their shops. Coinciding with the failed coup in which the Iron Guard tried to overthrow the government the attack on Jews culminated in the pogrom in Bucharest in which 125 Jew were killed in the most brutal manner, their corpses hung from meat hooks in the slaughterhouse.

In the northern provinces that were annexed from Russia by Romania, Jews were largely unassimilated Eastern Europeans. In some towns and cities, Dorohoi, Botosani, Jasi and some smaller towns, Jews formed a majority. Many were poor, though there was also an elite, essential for the economy of the province.

Deportation to Transnistria

After Romania occupied the Soviet territories of Bessarabia and Bukovina between 45,000 and 60,00 Jews were killed by their Romanian neighbours and 150,000 were deported to Transnistria, a district east of the Dniester river that came under Romanian occupation. Many were shot, others died of exposure, disease and starvation. Killings took place before the arrival of occupying armies. Members of the German Einsatsgruppen D were shocked by the primitive brutality of the Romanian slaughter.

Deportation of the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina was completed by the middle of 1942. However in Transylvania, the Banat and the Regat, the Old Kingdom of Rpmania, most Jews remained in place despite German pressure to deport the remaining Jews to Polish camps. Ion Antonescu, the head of the Romanian government, began to have doubts about the final German victory. Why should he give up his Jews when the Hungarian government refused to do so. Deportations ceased, the Jews of the Regat and the Banat survived, and some who had been deported to Transnistria were able to return. Antonescu stopped the murder of Jews when he understood that this was contrary to national interest.

In the end, 50% of the Jews of Romania, 300,000 of the 600,00 survived, compared with 30 % of the Jews of Hungary, 200,000 of the 650,000 who lived there before the Holocaust.

Romanian soldiers rounding up the Bessarabian Jews, summer 1941