Radnóti endured much in his brief life. But his harrowing journey, and the death that ended it, was shared by hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews. Anti-Semitism has a long history in Hungary, and by the Second World War, it was woven deep into the fabric of Hungarian society.
In the 1200s, under the rule of King Ladislaus, Jews were temporarily forced to wear red cloths to indicate their religion, and during the time of the bubonic plague in the mid 1300s, they were expelled from Hungary, later to be recalled. In the late 1400s and early 1500s, there was once again widespread persecution, and Jews were sometimes burned at the stake for what are now recognized to be blood libels—false accusations that Jews ritually murdered Christian infants and used their blood in Passover rituals. From 1526 to 1686, Hungary lost a desperate and drawn-out war against the Ottomans; as a result, various regions of the kingdom were occupied by Turkish forces for almost 150 years. Jews generally fared better in Turkish-occupied regions than in those controlled by Christians. In 1686, Habsburg Christian forces captured the city of Buda from the Turks, and most Jewish residents of the city (as well as Muslims) were massacred. During the reign of Empress Maria Theresa in the 1700s, Jews living in Hungary were taxed more heavily than Christians and were prevented from living in certain areas of the kingdom. It was Maria Theresa’s son, Emperor Joseph II, who toward the end of the 1700s eliminated the laws and edicts that had oppressed Jews for centuries, providing a temporary respite from persecutions. In 1839 there was a movement to provide Jews with equal rights if they adopted the Magyar language, and in the famous uprising against the Habsburg monarchy in 1848, Jews demonstrated their patriotism by fighting alongside their countrymen and providing money for the war effort. In 1849, they were rewarded with full citizenship; but two weeks later, when Russian and Austrian forces defeated the Hungarian rebels, the Jews were severely punished by the Habsburgs for having supported the revolution. There were executions and heavy financial levies. In 1867, during the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph, a bill of emancipation was finally approved, and by 1910 some 900,000 Jews lived in the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, representing nearly 5 percent of the population. In the Hungarian capital, Budapest, almost one-quarter of the population was Jewish. By the time of the First World War, and for several years after, Jews found greater acceptance in Hungarian society, and over 10,000 died fighting for their country. With the defeat of the Habsburg’s in 1918 and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, however, there came a period of chaos. Through the Treaty of Trianon, the victorious Allies forced Hungary to relinquish two-thirds of its territory and its population to neighboring countries, and one-third of ethnic Magyars found themselves living in territories outside of Hungary. This caused great humiliation and led to long-standing resentments that later fueled the rise in Hungary of right-wing, reactionary, fascist organizations that several decades later allied themselves with Hitler and Nazi Germany. These same groups would lash out violently at the Jewish population that they held as scapegoats for all of Hungary’s problems.1
Soon after the end of World War I, a liberal democratic government was briefly set up under Mihály Károlyi but was overthrown by a communist revolution in March 1919. Three of the four leaders of the newly formed Hungarian Soviet Republic were of Jewish origin, including Béla Kun, and they were brutal and deadly in their suppression of dissent. This gave credence to the fabricated idea of a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy, and when the communists were themselves overthrown after just four months in power, many held the Jews responsible for the months of terror and resurrected the long-simmering anti–Semitism that had characterized Hungarian society for centuries:
The resurgence of old-fashioned, theologically informed, and unenforced Judeophobia and the growth of a newer kind of secular, cynically manipulated anti–Semitism were both closely linked to this drive by the internally torn but ultimately consonant right to restore, maintain, or purify the established order.…The fascist right, usually with the tacit connivance of traditional conservatives and reactionaries vilified Jews as the chief carriers of social and cultural subversion and the masterminds of political revolution.2
The armies that crushed the communists were led by Admiral Miklós Horthy, an avowed anti–Semite, and his supporters exacted their vengeance through a string of pogroms and lynchings of Jews, as well as the imprisonment, torture, and killing of real and imagined communists and socialists, as well as peasants who in seeking rights had allied themselves with activists. The reprisals perpetrated by Horthy’s government were at least as bloody and indiscriminate as those of the short-lived Soviet Republic. Jews were the most visible minority and quickly became scapegoats for all of Hungary’s economic and social ailments. In 1920, Horthy’s government passed a numerus clausus law that capped the enrollment of Jews at the country’s universities to 6 percent of the student body, a figure that approximated the percentage of Jews in the general population. (At the time the law was passed, Jews accounted for approximately 15 percent of university students.)3
For a group that constituted so small a portion of the population, Jews had managed by this time to achieve great commercial and social success. For example, in 1920 nearly half of all Hungarian physicians were Jewish, as were approximately 50 percent of attorneys, 40 percent of veterinarians, 40 percent of engineers and chemists, 20 percent of pharmacists, 35 percent of journalists, and 30 percent of musicians.4 It is to be noted, however, that a large percentage of Jews were merchants and shopkeepers with more limited educations, and especially in small villages, many still lived in poverty. In the early 1930s, the Depression caused even greater social chaos, and amidst these upheavals fascist extremist groups began to flourish, including the Nazi Arrow Cross Party, formed in 1935. There were also virulently anti–Semitic national socialist parties that arose in the twenties and thirties, and these all played an active and enthusiastic role in the genocide to come. On May 29, 1938, Hungary passed its first anti–Jewish law, which restricted the number of Jews in commerce, journalism, medicine, law, and engineering to 20 percent. A year later, on May 5, 1939, the second anti–Jewish law defined Jews racially for the first time. Employment in government was forbidden, and Jews could no longer serve as editors of newspapers. In addition, their numbers among physicians, lawyers, and engineers was further reduced to 6 percent. As a result of the laws, half of the country’s Jews lost their income. In addition, their right to vote was rescinded. The third anti–Jewish law passed on August 8, 1941, and prohibited intermarriage and sexual relations with non–Jews. All of these laws were modeled after those passed by Hitler in Nazi Germany. In 1941, three years before their mass deportation to the death camp in Auschwitz, Hungary’s Jews numbered 700,000–750,000, accounting for approximately 5 percent of the country’s population.5
The preliminary killings of Jews began in August 1941 when Hungary handed thousands of refugees from German-occupied countries back to the Nazis. Approximately 10,000 were murdered,6 and soon afterwards, Hungarian soldiers and police killed 1,500–3,000 Jews and Serbs.7 While Jews could neither bear arms nor serve in the regular army, they were enlisted for forced labor service. They were essentially slave laborers who cleared minefields, built railroads and airfields, and worked in munitions factories and other locations in support of the German Nazi and Hungarian fascist war effort. Radnóti was called up for labor service (munkaszolgálat) three times, the final call-up proving fatal. Tens of thousands of Jews in labor service died while serving on the Soviet front, and approximately 4,000 died in the copper mines at Bor in Serbia where Radnóti also labored.8 Numerous others died on death marches, killed by the German SS or by their Hungarian countrymen.
On March 19, 1944, German troops invaded after Hitler became suspicious that Hungary planned a separate peace with the Allies. Until then the majority of Hungary’s Jews had been spared the fate of most of Europe’s Jewish population, which had been decimated in Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Hitler quickly neutralized Horthy’s influence and installed a puppet government, giving power to leaders of the Nazi Arrow Cross Party and its sympathizers. He sent Adolf Eichmann to Hungary to supervise the deportation of Jews to the death camps, and in less than eight weeks, from mid–May through mid–July, 435,000 of the last large population of Jews remaining in Europe had been placed in cattle cars headed toward Auschwitz.9 Hitler and his SS found enthusiastic partners among members of the Hungarian government, army, general populace, and the virulently anti–Semitic gendarmes and police (csendőrség).10 Hundreds of villages were rapidly emptied of their Jews with the assistance of their neighbors. Eichmann informed Horthy’s aides, as well as the leaders of the Roman Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran churches, of his timetable and his intentions, leaving the organization of the deportations and of the train transports entirely in Hungarian hands. Even Eichmann is reported to have been surprised by the enthusiastic participation of the Hungarian citizenry and the Hungarian gendarmes. He had not been fully aware of the depths of hatred that had developed over centuries.
In July the largest concentration of Jews in the country, the community in Budapest, was targeted. By July 9, more than 400,000 had been deported to Germany on 147 trains, and 90 percent were killed in the gas chambers soon after their arrival.11 It was not until the joint American-British landing in Normandy, and the invasion of Italy, when the defeat of Hitler became inevitable, that Horthy and his fellow Hungarians halted the deportation of the Jews.12 The death marches of forced laborers, however, continued even as Soviet forces advanced from the east, and Hungarian troops massacred hundreds of Jews in Romania as they retreated. Ghettos were established in Budapest, where there were mass executions by the Arrow Cross and the gendarmerie.13 Between November 1944 and February 1945, as many as 15,000 Jews were murdered and thrown into the Danube even though Soviet forces were already in Budapest, and the Arrow Cross continued to kill Jews even as they were encircled by Russian soldiers. Between May and December 1945, those Jews who had survived the death camps in Germany returned to their homeland to search for their families. Most searched and waited in vain, finding their homes occupied by their neighbors and their properties confiscated. Approximately 25 percent, or 180,000–200,000, of Hungary’s Jews survived the genocide and were living in Hungary in 1945.14 There were those who survived the death camps only to be killed by their countrymen when they returned to their villages to wait for the return of their families and friends. Punishment of the perpetrators of one of the greatest acts of genocide, however, was not forthcoming. Only 122 individuals were executed in 1946 for their crimes under the Soviet puppet government, and all but a few were tried not for their role in killing Hungary’s Jews but for their political affiliations.15 The tens of thousands of direct perpetrators melted into the general population and resumed their lives, held unaccountable, and often welcomed and accepted, by their fellow citizens.
—Gabor Barabas