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Friends Let's Go is Assistant Professor of History at Monstrich University in the Netherlands. He's the author of three books, has edited three additional volumes, and has published a number of articles and essays. Today we're going to talk about his most recent book, Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide in Intellectual History in 1990-1948. The book is a careful, concise, and powerful analysis of how Hungarian Jews responded to the traumas of the 1930s and 40s.
It shows the complexity of the challenges facing them, that simply saying the 1930s and 40s may mislead more than it clarifies. I'm confident parents can help us unpack the world's subjects we're facing in white matters. I'm really looking forward to talking to them. And, parents, welcome to the show.
Thanks for joining us on New Books and Genocide Studies. Good morning, and thank you for having me on the show. I always ask people at the beginning to say a little bit about how they became, how they decided to become a professional, studying whether it's history or sociology or anthropology. So, friends, how did you decide to be exploring?
I should probably start by saying that I was born in the early 1980s, and both of my parents were researchers at the time. I went to a really good high school in the 1990s, where I'm from, and that was a really exciting time, also for historical discussions. There was a general opening of the country, and there was a lot of debate about the recent past, and Jewish history and the historical council were very central to that, next to the history of communism, which just ended. So, that was the time I was growing up, and that triggered my interest.
I mean, it's to be at the quite early age. At the same time, I should also say that I didn't really plan to be a historian, a administrator or so. I was at least equally interested in literature and in philosophy, and I did a BA degree, which was an interdisciplinary one. I studied in the humanities, rather than just history.
So, I really became a historian quite gradually over time, and I also found the topic I wanted to write my dissertation about, which is a Hungarian Jewish intellectual history, as you just mentioned, really rather gradually. I started wanting to write something about Interwar, Hungary, and with a strong component, on Jewish perspectives. And really, as I was getting into the material, I realized that there was really plenty of unexplored sources. So, I basically stick to this topic, and I explored it for a number of years, and that's how this monograph going to be discussed emerged.
So, that's the story in brief, I suppose. So, you got your degree at Central European University, and some of the members of the History Department are actually editors of the series, in which this book is published. This is called, What's your experience like there? The Central European University is really quite a special place.
There isn't anything quite comparable to it, I would say. It's the only English language speaking university in Central and Eastern Europe that you really have students from all the major countries of the region, and some of the best ones, I hope. And it's really an environment where there's an open dialogue about the recent past of this region, which is mainly extremely complicated, and also is very controversial in great number of ways. And the CU, I think, has really managed, not only in history, but I think in history, perhaps in particular, to position itself as a place where Western type of scholarship is being produced locally by people who know the Western academic tradition, that's enough, but that's also so to say close enough to the sources, and really know the countries that are studying very well.
I think that's really the combination that's find specific to the CU. So I was very glad to be there, and I should also say I made a lot of friends, I think there's really been a great atmosphere when I was studying there. And again, I was also, as you may know, I was also a researcher in Germany, so I was somewhat familiar with the German tradition of studying the region, and I would say the CU is in some ways a place to study this country, precisely because it's sort of from within, and that's also very important to what I am doing as a historian. Yeah, it's interesting.
My students, I've just had to recently add a course to the course catalog here on the Cold War, because my students don't realize it existed. It's now long enough ago that 1989 is something that their parents, or possibly even their grandparents, experience, and that's here in the United States. And perhaps we'll come back to this at the end of the interview, but I think the description you just offer would challenge my students because they don't understand that the kind of their sense of the complexity of European history is the first half of European history, not the second half, because that's what gets talked about in the United States. So why this book?
Congerian Jews in the age of genocide, 1929 to 1948. So you bracket the Second World War. Why did you decide to write this book in this way? Right, so my dissertation really ended in early 44, such as before the major chapter of the Holocaust in Hungary, and I really focused on 29 to 43, and then I decided to expand the focus to study the early post-story years, which was a very important decision.
There's really a lot going on in scholarship around the Holocaust, and especially around the Jewish responses to the Holocaust today, which focused on the early post-story years. There's a new wave of studies showing that there really wasn't any silence when it comes to the Jewish communities survivors, and I found Hungary to offer one of the richest source bases in disrespect. This is what the second half of my book was on. I found a huge collection of witnesses that were published memoirs in the immediate post-war month and years, and also there was an incipient historiography developing what was happening in the early 40s.
I wanted to focus on those of us. I decided to expand my focus, but originally this was really a project on the 40 years or the interwar years and years of the Second World War in Hungary. And my basic idea was, and this is something quite well known internationally, I believe, that the Hungarian Jewish community was the last major Jewish community in the Nazi Sea of Influence. As I mentioned, the major of the deportations took place in the very late stages of the war.
The Holocaust in Hungary has been labeled the last chapter of the Holocaust by the Israeli and the Christian Gela. In the book, which was published in German under that title. And so my interest was really in what is happening in the Hungarian Jewish intellectual media in those years, when they are already being persecuted, they have a very responsive persecution, but the large majority of the community in Hungary is still alive. Until early 40s, and they are heavily discriminated against by the Horde regime, but still they have a whole array of surviving the almost continent-wide genocide.
And they also had a chance to publish a number of journals and yearbooks, even during the years of the Second World War, all the way up until 1944. And this is really what triggered my interest. Nobody has really quite explored these publications previously. And I thought that you could really study the evolution of Hungarian Jewish perspectives in a really new way by looking at them more closely.
So let's impact on what you said, because some of our listeners may not be completely familiar with the history of the Hofs were monarchier at the end. So you mentioned the name Horti. Who is that? So Mikos Horti is the Reagan of Hungary who comes to power in 1919, right after the First World War.
Hungary has a Republican regime for a short period of time. Then there's a Bolshevik takeover for a hundred and thirty-three days. And Horti is the leader of the counter-revolutionary Sudan, established a kind of national conservative regime. It's an authoritarian form of government, with a very moderate, sorry, very mild form of liberal tenets being incorporated into it, at least in the 1920s.
And then this regime radicalizes ever, ever further to the right. And it starts to discriminate the Jewish population ever more severely against starting in 1938 in the first anti-Jewish law. And it starts to adopt a non-sustained legislation, you may say, by the early 1940s, 1941, there's a infamous racial law. And even though the large majority of the community is alive until 1944, there are several instances of mass violence committed against the hungry and Jews before that.
This is something I really want to emphasize, and to balance what I said just before. Again, the Hungarian army is involved also in the general-cycle campaign against Jews on the Eastern Front. There's also the first round of deportations from Hungary in 1941, very early on, just after the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union. And there's also mass violence in the way of the northern Serbian reports that Hungary, CIV, and ex-Zoree, occupied in 1941.
So that's why I call these years the age of persecution. The use of persecution, I take the expression from South Finland, as many of the listeners will know. And I try to say that there's something similar going on Hungary between 1938 and 1944 to Nazi Germany just a few years earlier. So in the years of freedom, there is talking about the years of 33 to 39.
When it's using the term the use of persecution, I say that basically five years later, a very similar process is taking place in Hungary. It starts five years later, it lasts five years longer. And then you have the years of extermination, which for freedom there is basically everything that belongs to the years of the Second World War, right? All those six years.
And in the case of Hungary, that's basically 40, four, four, five, so the last year of the war from March, 40, 40, at your deliberation. You have the Holocaust, its main chapter. So that's how I conceptualized the study. And so you're not getting any of the concerns of the whole thing in this way.
So how many does the Jewish community in Hungary during this period? So this is again a very interesting question because by the late 1930s, the five largest Jewish communities of Europe all live in what we now call Eastern Europe. The Polish one, the Soviet one, the Czechoslovak one, the Hungarian and Romanian one. So these are the five largest Jewish communities in Europe.
And this is something that I think hasn't really been quite reflected in the academic literature. I speak about that also in my conclusion that if you look at Holocaust studies, there's a very notable shift to the East. There's Evernus, not on occupied Poland, which has always been there to some extent, but also increasingly the Soviet Union comes into view. But the fact that the Jewish history was very heavily concentrated in Central Eastern Europe, and this doesn't only mean Poland, because the second Poland is setting quite exceptional because the transition has always been clearly there, and that's something that's recognized and acknowledged also for the rest.
But the other communities in the Czechoslovak, the Hungarian and the Romanian, I think haven't been researched nearly as well as for instance the German or the Polish. So that's why this is what tries to make a contribution. And the Hungarian Jewish community, again, Hungary changes as you may know, Hungary expands. Hungary changes between 1938 and 1941.
Four times Hungary basically becomes nearly twice as large as it was after the First World War. And that means that the Hungarian Jewish community becomes one of the largest ones in Europe. It's really just right behind Romania at that time. And by 1943, and this is again also quite interesting, is the largest one, the best of the Soviet Union, right?
So it's really the largest community still left alive in the Soviet sea of influence. Now again, you can take different indicators to discuss how many people there were, whether you take a religious definition or whether you want to look at the Nazi's racial definition to see how many people they want to persecute. You obviously end up with very different numbers, but it's in the range of 700 to 800,000 people, just within the borders of Hungary by by 43. Again, something close to 10% of them pass away in violent ways before, in 1944.
It's a very large number. It's around 60,000 people, maybe slightly more than the numbers are not very exact here. Again, there's a lot of problems of calculation also, the writing from border changes, right? So people who may not have been hungry in sickness before the second world war nor afterwards may be victims of the whole of the whole of the House in Hungary.
So that is really a complicated factor. There, we don't need to point to that too much here, I believe. So it's really a major community. Another thing I wanted to add is a last point.
But also after the war, and this is again something crucial to understand why I talk about 29 to 2.48 in my book. I say that also after the war next to the French and the British community, so the two major Jewish communities in Western Europe is the Romanian and the Hungarian, which are the largest. You have also quite a substantial community of survivors. Again, the large majority of Hungarian Jews are murdered in 44 to 45.
But nonetheless, you also have quite a large number of survivors in particular. In Budapest, the Jews of Budapest mostly are not deported to Nazi camps. And also you have camp survivors. You know, Hungarian Jews being deported in the very late stages of the war, but also the Nazi camp system is being reorganized.
They have more survivors than they would otherwise have had. Probably right? I mean, the year of extermination is last one year. And those who get transported from Auschwitz have no chance, but no chance.
And so survivors also have quite a number of returnees from the camps who actually then end up in some cases coming back to Hungary in other cases going after 45. So as the Jewish writers who you study are thinking about the experience of persecution and the experience of living under the Hordi regime, at least one of the themes you discussed in your book is this attempt to understand whether the experience they're living through in the 30s is somehow a break, a pause in the kind of, I don't know, but I think that the progress that Jews have made or whether it's a permanent regression. So maybe we talk about what do Jewish intellectuals kind of respond to this persecution in the 30s? And what kinds of things are they talking about?
How are they viewing their past? What kind of policies are they debating? Right. So again, this was really a major agenda in the first half of my book to try to understand how the perspectives get transformed into what are the major themes that they are discussing.
And you know, how and why this evolution of respect is until 40, 40, 40, so that's a very central question. And here is I think one aspect that I've been talking about Hungary a lot and in a way in the national frame, until now, which is more or less what the book does, but it also does something slightly different or something more. We just try to embed this history in the transnational world. Right.
This is really crucial for to understand my main argument because what I try to say is that after 38, when Hungary starts to discriminate its Jewish population, and again, it adopts ever more severe anti-jurism. So it's a legal form of discrimination. And there's of course a very severe process of socio-economic exclusion leading to the large scale ruin of the community by the early 40s. You know, Hungary and just typically start to look for some kind of embedding of this crisis, of this sort of situation, Jewish history.
They emphasize that Jewishness more than before. And of course, also, there are external constraints, external reasons. But also people who simply are eager to find meaning in their Jewishness and now their persecution, meaning via Jewish references. So this is what's happening until the early 40s, 41 would be the key.
Here, here, and then as I'm sure all your listeners will know that the Nazis launched the genocide against European Jews, and that again changes their perspective's point. Because this is something that's happening practically all over Hungary, to some extent also within it. If you look at the boy, but in a case as I mentioned before, but essentially something that's happening all over it. You see, you have to remember that Hungary is directly neighboring Slovakia, right?
The first country to deport, in its Jews, North first to Auschwitz. Hungary is of course also directly bordering the Nazis in the West, even after the Anschuss of 38. Romania is of course heavily involved in the Holocaust early on, and so is Croatia. And of course, Hungary is also part of the war on the Eastern Front.
So again, it's surrounded by countries somehow, part of the Axis who are contributing to the Nazi war effort. And Hungary is as well. Now this of course means that the situation of Jews is extremely difficult. They barely have alternatives.
But one thing that they come up with is to try to emphasize, you know, they're Hungarian-Hungarian-Efiations. So there is a revival of Hungarian-Efulations in 4243. And my argument is that it's not in spite of the genocide, but rather because of it. You see, they know that the genocide is taking place all over the country, sorry, all over Europe, and just outside the borders of the country.
You see it happening pretty much more or less all over the place. And that is why the fear that the war to regime is not their last hope of survival. So you have again the revival of Hungarian-National, Afri-Nish National, the discourses of loyalism. And I would say that this goes a long way in explaining why the Hungarian-Jewish elite is so loyal also in 44.
This is a question that historians have been asking for many, many years. This unfathomable loyalty of the Jewish elite to the Hungarian state, the lack of rebellion, the lack of even an attempt to resist early on. And this is something that I think if you look at the logic, the dynamics of this story, you may come to understand it better. Because by 40-40 everything Hungary is their only chance to survive.
And of course Hungary, the Hungarian state, we trace them in the most terrible way, and this of course very much involved in perpetrating the Holocaust in 44. But that is again what I'm trying to do. So one of the things I found interesting was this debate about why all of this was happening. And as I read it, and correct me if I'm wrong, there's something of a debate between perhaps religious scholars who say that one of the reasons is the drift away from faith and religious life, is that those who have a more sociological or political explanation, isn't it?
How vibrant is that debate? Right, so again I try to define who are Hungarian-Jewish altars, and this is a very difficult thing to do. There's a lot of debates of who qualify as a Hungarian Jew, and again you have a lot of contemporary scholars who debate that question. And my point was really to look at the internal sources.
So one thing, and this is again a part of my introduction, I tried to say that these sources have been marginalized in Hungarian scholarship for those who know that Hungary have heard of it, at least. A young Jew Jack is an author who wrote a massive monograph on what he called the Jewish question. In Hungary all the debates related to Jews in modern Hungarian history, and he basically said that the internal sources that Jewish altars wrote with Jewish audiences in mind do not really belong to this story. Now this is something that I think is great, and something that I of course very much disagree with, and if you wish the book is a product of trying to explain why and how I disagree with him on this issue.
So I try to say that if you want to study Hungarian-Jewish intellectual history, you have to basically look at all the Hungarian-Jewish altars who first of all employ the Hungarian language in a prominent way to discuss Jewish needs, but also that they express a level of Jewish self-consciousness in the form of these Jewish intellectual projects, or at least they conceptualize parts of their own experiences as important to respect specifically Jewish ones. So these are the criteria I use, and when I did this of course I wanted to arrive at a representative sample of intellectual phenomena, but also I didn't want to impose two strict group boundaries. I didn't want to say that these people still qualify as Jewish and others, not as something like that. That was the last thing I would have wanted to do, but that meant that I ended up looking a lot at religious people in the strict sense of the word.
So rabbis also people affiliated with the main center of Jewish scholarship, the rabbinical seminary, but I also looked at intellectual journals which were much more secular. I would consider something like an attempt to create modern Jewish culture in a secular key. In Hungary, again I looked at people who were working very much Jewish, such as the Jewish children find a lot of people from all walks of life. I find people who often were brought together under the Jewish label for the first time in the years of persecution in Hungary.
And it also has the last point, let me mention that this was a gender component. Again, if you look at the chapters on the religious segment, you will not find women there since this was the gender device, or the typical for the conservative form of Judaism in the interval and second word, Hungary. So finally the chapter on intellectual period, because from the time of the most secular agenda, you also find a number of female voters, and not too many. So it's against quite a low percent, but that is that gender difference between these two groups.
The other thing that struck me about the first half of this book is, as you say, the degree to which your subjects are really thinking transnational, the understanding and the degree of attention they paid to politics, particularly in Germany, but also other places was impressive. They actually knew quite a bit about what was happening in Germany. Absolutely. I think I'm right.
There's actually an author and I've forgotten his name, who pens quite a insightful report in, I think, 42 about laying out the claim that although I don't think he used the word genocide, that what was going on was in fact something different than had ever happened before. Exactly. Well, let's turn. So you've talked about 1944 a lot.
Maybe I could ask you briefly to just kind of give us the chronology in 1944, because this is going to bear on some of the things you talked about in the second half of the book. So what happens in 1944? Right. There is, as you can, I think, as all the listeners can probably value my truth by now, there isn't any question which is more controversial than that.
In Hungary, that's also, again, the big debate today. You know, what are the causes of the Holocaust in Hungary? Right? Why do the large majority of Hungary and Jews get deported in such a short period of time, so close to the end of the war?
That's, again, something that is very heavily discussed partly because for a very long time, the idea was that this is due to the German occupation of the country. Right? Germany, which is, again, an ally, Nazi-German is an ally of Hungary and the Hungarian-Zaí, in many ways, profiting from the alliance relatively early on. Right?
I mentioned the territorial expansion in the late 30s, early 40s. Germany decides to invade or to enter Hungary in early 44 on March 19th. It doesn't really encounter a significant amount of resistance. It's really an occupation by an ally if that is not a much-related curse.
They are really working together. And then the Holocaust in Hungary follows very, very soon, right? The deportations are going to start within two months. And they also are at an unprecedented speed, that's something that's very often emphasized by scholars of the Holocaust in Hungary, that within two months, then a very large majority of 100-inchuse gets imported.
Over 400,000 people arrive in Auschwitz-Birkenau in between May and July of 44. And then the question really is, what is the connection? So how did this German entry into the country influence the decision-making process or was it really cheaply responsible for what happened? And I think many scholars in recent years and by now, in decades, I would say, have very much insisted that this so-called German occupation doesn't quite explain what happens.
It's not the primary reason. There's something really different. It's really the change of behavior on the Hungarian side. That's what they explain.
What happens is, the people who want to commit this genocide see a great opportunity in this entry of the Nazi army and the Nazi forces of opposition. Some of the Germans, of course, Eichmann, as you know famously, also, becomes a Budapest. And they have a certain plan, but it's really the Hungarian side which pushes for more maximalist implementation of the plan. There's a lot of new literature also on the interaction of the two sides, some of which shows, I think quite clearly, that some of the Hungarian perpetrators, such as Elaso andra, was actually even more radical.
And the Nazis had a greater urge to deport Hungarian Jews and he actually negotiated for more people to be deported at a faster pace since the end of the war was nearing. And he thought that this was the way to still implement the genocide of hands. So again, that is the story in a nutshell. And there's another element which I think is quite important to clarify, which is about the fall of 1944.
And the Nazis, or the Hungarian Nazis, you may call them again, the labels are contested, come to power, but this is the air across the movement led by France, asology. But this is again after the major chapter, right? The major phase of deportation still takes place under the Soviet government, and when 40 is still in power in many ways. I mean, he's still in that sense directly responsible for these events as the regans of the country.
And then you have a turn to the air across the movement, again put in power by the Nazis through a pooch in the middle of October. And they continue persecuting and murdering Hungary and Jews until early 45. But again, the major chapter is before the fascist takeover. This is something that I wanted to mention because I think it's often mistaken in international scholarship.
You know, there's often an assumption that the first mass happened under the fascists and that these fascists were somehow puppets of Nazi Germany. And of course, this is an argument that also in Hungary has often been used, right? That the Holocaust was essentially a result of the fascists' actions, who were then very much helped by the Nazis. And so the actual Hungarian responsibility would be somehow somewhat of a lesser kind.
But in fact, if you look at the story a bit more closely, you realize that it's immediately into a world establishment, and that comets the crimes. And it's not just another right in the fringe, which would be involved. So you mentioned before the kind of traditional historiography, which has argued that there was this period of silence about the Holocaust, and that period of silence ended in the 60s and 70s, and various explanations as to why that might be so. And then you mentioned this, and so I guess I'd like to now just briefly ask you to expand on what you mentioned earlier about the emerging I don't know if you can call it consensus, but the emerging sense that that interpretation isn't really correct, that there wasn't this moment of silence that Jews were talking about their experiences immediately after the war.
How did we decide that that actually happened? Right, I think that's a very interesting question, because what I think happens is that people who establish a Holocaust scholarship later on don't really talk about the predecessors. So you have a sense that you went around here, for instance, published in the underground breaking monograph. It's not really emphasizing too much that there are people who have been writing about this topic, or who may have published about the topic already right after the war.
So they certainly, certainly, have made responses, which then gets largely organized, and gets to be largely marginalized. And I think it's only in more recent years that scholars have started to focus on this. Now I can love AYoko Shih, who's a German scholar currently working in Israel, has written, I think, a terrific book called Collect and Record. And she has really studied some of the major cases.
Again, it's some kind of European panorama that she provides about all the documentation centers and history of the commission. She's a very technical commission. She's studying the Holocaust right after the war. Her major focuses are Poland and France, but she also studies Austria, Germany, and Italy.
But she doesn't really talk much about Hungary, which is, again, understandable to some extent. But my point is that Hungary also had such a big impact on one of the largest waves anywhere in Europe, for some of the reasons that I mentioned early on. So I think next to France and Poland is really in Hungarian that you have the largest corpus of sources to really prove this disease, right? That there was never really silence.
And here, again, I wanted to maybe drone, it says around his day, it says around his day. The point, you know, who tragically passed away just last year, who mentions that even if it discards, you know, this is what he calls the myth of silence, we still have to take into account that there was a deafness of the surrounding world. So many people don't really listen to the survivors, and there are very, very few non-Jewish people who would be interested in these stories. So it really, you know, remains a Jewish intellectual history, like I study in my book.
And it's also only a generation or two later that you have finally something like a connecting community, right? There are so many people who labels it in a recent research that there are suddenly people all around the world who want to find out more about these stories of survivors and who are really interested in them in a very empathic way. And this isn't the case early on. So again, while I emphasize that there is a major wave of responses in Hungary, this very much is an affair of the community of survivors, tragically enough once again.
So one of the sources you find is that there's a whole collection of interviews, which sound fascinating. Who's collecting these interviews and why? Right, that's a very interesting question. Again, Hungary has, it's an special situation, partly because, as I mentioned, there are two groups of survivors.
People who survived the Holocaust in Hungary and people were deported to the Nazi camps, but managed to survive and managed to then also return to their country of origin. And these two groups of people meet around 1945. So those people who are receiving people back, they are starting to inquire with them about what they had experienced. And this starts out in a very simple way.
They want them to also list just very simple list people they know would be still alive, but somewhere abroad as they see, right, somewhere outside Hungary. And also to these people they know to have been murdered. So they want to basically compile list of the victims and the list of people they should still be looking. This is how it starts.
And as time passes, and again, you have thousands and thousands of survivors returning asking for help. And while they are asking for help to reintegrate somehow or to re-establish themselves in Hungary in the early post-war a month, they start interviewing them. And again, this is, I would say, a semi-professional project because they also develop an extremely long questionnaire of some 14 ages, or they cannot quite apply, this is a massive question, which means that you would have to talk to everybody for hours and hours. So instead of doing that, they just end up basically adjusting the interview.
So the people who make the interviews and they're all together 29 of them, and most of them are women. This is an important quality of the interviews. I would suggest they make them in quite unique ways. Every interview makes a different kind of interview.
But they talk to more than more than 5,000 people. Again, there's 3,000, over 3,600 interviews that I had to chance to get. There are some of them where there's more than one person speaking. A large majority of these are in Hungarian.
Some of them, and I think up to 20% or so, are in German. So there's also, in that way, access for those who may not know the rhetoric, idiosyncratic Hungarian language. But the point is that here you have, again, a attempted documentation, right? Many of the things that we assume you would want to know when you talk to a survivor or you would want to talk about, they don't yet really have.
The interest is in many ways in historical documentation. I would say, and that's also what I tried to study. If they wanted to document the Holocaust, what have they actually documented? What were the linguistic codes?
What were the key terms that they then used to denote what was so unprecedented about the Nazi genocide against European Jews? And that's basically what we call part of this chapter on these interviews. So I basically look at perhaps above all distinctions between different camps. You know how different nomenclature is being used and how these differences are then explained during these interviews.
So that's something I was very interested in. How could survivors explain in a way about the Holocaust as a whole? And my conclusion is that this might be very surprising in our age when we look at, I think, memories more for the subject, even the value that actually these interviews have a lot of historical value as well. So again, as a historian, this is really an impressive project of documentation that takes place via the survivors in 45, 46.
Yeah, what I think is the most interesting about your discussion is the sense, at least as I saw it, a sense in which some of these tropes and some of the kinds of language we now use were already widely established and used, but in other ways they're scrambling to come up with a language that can describe what they felt and experienced. You also use memoirs. Seven, I think, if I've got that right. Some by Jews, some by not.
Some not by Jews. They display some interesting differences. Can you talk about maybe the place to start is just to say they seem to date the start of the catastrophe differently? That's right.
Yes. So this again relates to something we have been sort of discussing earlier on, because I studied the memoirs and I picked seven of them, and this is the only part of the book where I draw on some non-Jewish sources, right? Because I wanted to compare and contrast them. Basically what I do, I look at memoirs, obviously, 45, 46.
So at the same time that these interviews were made that we have just been discussing, and I wanted to see how they look at 44, 45. So what I call the year of extermination in Hungary, history, 44, 45, how about these experiences, these events interpreted in the immediate aftermath? This was my question. And then I knew somehow that they would be interpreted very, very differently by different people.
This probably isn't too surprising. But what I wanted to look at specifically is how do different groups of persecuted people who really have just been persecuted, how do they venerate these events and how do they end out with some kind of meaning, political, historical or otherwise. And what I have found that this is again, I think, an interesting point also when you look at the discussion in Hungary today, is that it's the anti-fascist who introduced the idea of March 19, 1944, in a very, very significant way. So what we know today, as you know, the right-wing attempt to do in a way shift the responsibility on to the German side, right, to emphasize the German occupation, this is really very heavily emphasizing their anti-fascist narrative.
Right for them, you know, the term to fascism and then to the beginning of the persecution is March 19, and the second coin sides very closely to their own life experience. Because many of them, you know, captured by the guest couple immediately upon the entry of Nazi Germany into Hungary, and they were the first to be then persecuted. And because of that, they have also missed out on, in many ways they have missed out on the persecution of Hungary and Jews. Right, so then they survive and when they then return to Hungary and become politically quite influential, at least many of the people I study, then here have had a certain political role in the post-war era.
They also develop something like ethnicism, anti-fascism. I call it that way, and I say that this is really a consistent of two major components, right? The one is to overemphasize the German occupation as a breakpoint, as a kind of rupture in Hungarian history, and the second is to then not really emphasize the Hungarian perpetrator at the law too much. So in that sense, they can be anti-fascists by seeing the Germans as the perpetrators and the Hungarian and the Americans as victims.
So this is what I'm trying to show. And in that way, they also have a much more directed political interpretation of 44-45. The Jewish memoir is right about their experiences in very diverse ways, and very often they don't find any clear political meaning. It's more the accident or survival of them that they are somehow inquiring about.
So you also, I guess the last group of sources you talk about are attempts to create some kind of historical narrative about the experiences there. People who are writing what we would call histories. I was surprised, maybe that was not strong enough, by the degree to which there were people who were doing primary resource publishing source documents, doing what we would think of as traditional academic writing. So maybe you could say something about what kind of interpretive frames they come with for the Holocaust.
Yes, so again, my last chapter is on four people who have written histories, published in 47-48, and the interpretive events in quite a different way. So I also tried to compare the perspectives. It's absolutely true, but you have just said that there's a lot of research going on, and some of this research again throws on the knowledge that was there before 44. So again, this continuity that I emphasize in the historical terms is also important because some of the people who write these early histories of the Holocaust were people who were studying Nazism, studying in the persecution of Jews before the major chapter of the Holocaust in Hungary.
So again, that is precondition for writing these projects so early and you'll complete them already before the standardization of Hungary. And together, there are four of them that I study. Their names are Shumwen, Lüvinger, Munga Chih, Yanil Levi, and Andr Schusz, and they all have a slightly different take, or you might say very different take. Shumwen Lüvinger is the scholar of religion.
He's the director of the rabbinical seminary in the 1940s, and he basically looks at the history of religion and how there's a German tradition of trying to deny the influence of Jews on Christianity to create a kind of new, purified German form of Christianity, and that this leads to what is the genocide of the agenda against Jews or this is sort of the intellectual, historical origins of the persecution. You may say, I don't mean to stretch the analogy too far, but Alan Confino in his new book, Verteau Jews, does something comparable, again, on a probably higher and more sophisticated level, but living as a gender is, I think, in many ways, in line with Confino's recent book. Now, Munga Chih is very interesting case, and we're just going to publish his book in English in a year, so I'm very glad to say that, because again, much of the material I discuss in this book is not available in English or in any other language than Hungarian, so that's fortunately something that's going to at least slightly change in the near future. Munga Chih was the chief secretary of the Jewish council in 44, so he was also accused of having collaborated with the Nazis, there's a lot of criticism of the leadership, and he writes a rather apologetic book, which is again there to explain how they made their choices and why they acted the way they did, and in that way he wrote a history of the Holocaust from the perspective of the persecution, or the leadership of the persecution more precisely, which draws very heavily on Jewish documentation on Jewish resources, and again, interestingly enough, of course, these are sources that he himself had co-produced, right, as the chief secretary, he was very much there to produce some of these sources, again, that's a very, very interesting case, and again, I wrote a long introductory essay for the translation of the book, which will be published in the next year.
Now, Levi is the major researcher, the third person I wanted to say a few words about, he's the one to publish altogether 12 books by 1943, he's really incredibly productive in these early most old years, he's a journalist by profession, and of course he's used to writing a lot of art because of that, but he's the one to really, in a way, grapple with the question of responsibility the most. You know, he's different books from these few years, he shifts the emphasis quite a lot, and he comes to articulate the Hungarian responsibility, I think, ever more clearly, as the years progress, early on he has a very clearly anti-German, almost ethnicist way of blaming the Germans for everything, and by the late 40s, in his major since he's called Jewish late in Hungary, he comes to, I think, very balanced, and quite precise assessments, also of Hungarian responsibility. And as Shoshan, he's the fourth author, he's really a communist, by this time he gets converted to the communist ideology, partly through the experience of the Holocaust, and he writes an all European panorama. So again, if Munga and Levi, the other two authors are really focusing on Hungary, Shosh is the first one in Hungarian to talk about the genocide against Jews in an all European frame, and he already uses the word genocide, he's discussing it how to translate, that term into Hungarian, that is a yet established translation for it, so he's suggesting a number of alternatives, and he's again, as a communist, he has a very strongly, so to say, ideological Marxist reading of the economic causes of the Nazi violence.
So again, the four of them, all of them, are very different, the perspectives, I would say, one religious, the other from the community elite, the third one, a kind of left leaning critical researcher, and the fourth one, a very ideologically biased communist, right? So you have basically a whole spectrum of interpretations, and I argue, and this is again my melancholy conclusion, that there has never been more a debate about the Holocaust in Hungary, and if you look at this moment in 14, there isn't anything quite comparable to that today in terms of the variety, and also the richness of research and the monographic outcomes, but that's actually where I wanted to go next. So what happens to these debates after 1948? Right, right, well, there is again, an infestinating question, there is really an abrupt break because of communism, right, the debate gets suppressed, the transnational perspective shows us that the decline of interest also within the Jewish communities happens more or less parallely, also in Western Europe, and if you look at France, the city should see, and this is again something that the open side shows very nicely, the interest in the topic declines around the same time in the late 30s, early 50s, there's clearly less interest in continuing this very, very intense, very, very, you know, very, you know, very painful discussion about what has just happened, and in Hungary it's really after 56 that the Holocaust as a topic returns, and again here I want to emphasize one thing which may not be known, that well, it's really, in the case of Hungary, that the large majority of the victims of the Second World War, or the Second World War, and the Holocaust in June, right, in most European countries, if you look at the overall numbers, in percentage, the Jews were murdered in much larger numbers than non-Jews in most countries, but it's only in Hungary, and in very few other cases, in the United Kingdom, the most extreme case, but really the absolute majority of the victims are victims of the Holocaust, right, who were during the war, so again it's a very central story in the country's history, or at least should be that, so when the discussion is relaunched, there's again quite a great interest, and this is what you see already in the late 50s, but especially then later on in the 70s, again Hungary is quite in line with the new interests in the Holocaust at that time, this often takes literary form though, so again, historiography is likely to be a very interesting way of being in the world, so again it's very central story, so again it's very central story, so again it's very central story, so again it's very central story, so again it's very central story, history or at least should be that, so when the discussion is happening behind, and historiography I would say is lagging behind all the way until 89, and maybe even beyond, because until 89 the most important works, and here Randolph Graham's name comes immediately to it, the most important works are written abroad, right, so I'll read in immigration by people in the US, or in some cases in Israel, and then he's done really research on the Holocaust in Hungary, which would then have international relevance, there is a number of documentation projects and so on, but it does seem very meager in comparison to what we had just after the war, right, so again it's, in that sense I think it's 89, that is the big breaking point, right, there's suddenly a huge wave of history, so again it's very central story, so again it's very central story, so again it's very central story, so again it's very central story, so again it's very central story, so again it's very central story, so again it's very central story, so again it's very important, so again it's very interesting if you look at my introductory chapter, and what kind of literature I refer to there, you will probably quickly notice that a lot of it is from the 1990s, you know we started into, by me saying that I went to high school at that time and that's where my interest was triggered in these discussions, and that's when the discussion is again reaching some kind of a peak, exactly already in 89, 90, there are a number of publications, but later on ever, ever more, and this is that then leads to what I would call a massive politicization of this history, so if I wanted to be very brief about in a way the current situation, I don't know whether you wanted to ask about that, but I don't know if you want to ask about that, I don't know if you want to ask about that, I don't know if you want to ask about that, I don't know if you want to ask about that, but I don't know if you want to ask about that, I don't know if you want to ask about that, so again if I wanted to highlight just one thing about that, I would say that this is the problem of a national narrative, developing after the fall of communism, which is a national narrative focused on victimhood, focused on also the victimhood of the Hungarian international community, and how this new mainstream narrative which is again being institutionalized in a great number of ways, height can then cope with a very different type of story, which is the persecution and extermination of Hungarian Jewry, which again a very significant and very crucial involvement of Hungarian perpetrators, so you have that situation, and this makes the history of the world, and this makes the history of the Holocaust a very polarizing topic in Hungarian politics and culture until today, you have no clear sense of its status, and I think we still are in a way grappling with how to incorporate it and how to really talk about it in a larger framework, which is again very nationalistic, and therefore is in many ways unready to accept the Hungarian responsibility for such a major crime.
So it's a fascinating discussion, it's a wonderful book, and I'd love to talk about it with you more, but I know you have thanks to you, I appreciate the time. I always conclude interviews with the same couple questions, and so the first one is, you've clearly done a lot of reading and research on this, maybe you can suggest a book or two or a movie or something that my listeners or me maybe, might read this weekend, what was meaningful for you as you work on this project? You see, I think we uncovered a lot of materials which are looking into, and very little of this is available internationally, so I'll probably suggest something that has been translated into a number of languages, including English, and that is a billion of Joel's nine suitcases, it's one of the early memoirs which I actually don't discuss in the book, so it goes beyond the scope of this modest study of memoirs which I offer in chapter five. It's a fascinating book written by a leading journalist, politician of, let's say, left leading liberal, liberal persuasion, who survived, the Holocaust was also in one of the most gruesome ghettos in Oradar, not Marad, and was also as a labor service man on the Eastern Front, and he describes his experiences, I think, with a lot of black humor, it's a very grim book as well, it's a very honest book, very brutal, but I think what he does there, and again this is something written immediately at the end of the war, reflects, I think, very well what these early responses more generally feel like.
You see, when I also study the witness accounts, I think there's a lot more direct evidence in them than in some of the later ones, that people become more cautious, people become more sensitive about things, more eager to maybe avoid some of the horrors, and this is not so much there early on, and I think Bay of Joel's book nine suitcases reflects that very well, and he's also a very, very interesting writer, a very conflicted personality, so I think the book is very exciting to read, also today, and also if you want to get a sense of the kind of materials I was dealing with in this book. Well, we're taping this just before, or just as I'm starting my holiday break, I'm at a Catholic school, and so we get a lengthy Christmas break, and it does seem appropriate to the subject we study that I'm now going on Amazon and ordering nine suitcases, so I can spend my holiday break reading about the Holocaust. And then the last question is always what are you working on now, and I know one of the things you're working on is being a new parent, but I also know you're an academic. So what kind of research are you exploring in the future?
Well, as I started with saying that I'm a historian of Jewish history, but I'm also a historian of modern and contemporary European history, my job profile is in modern and contemporary European history, and I do want to write the next book which is more contemporary, and also more a regional history of Central and Eastern Europe. I'm trying to write the history of the transition period, and I'm particularly interested in something that I think has debated a lot at these days, which is why the liberal consensus that these countries had after the fall of communism is appeared by now. And if you look at Poland or if you look at Hungary and maybe even more conspicuously Russia, it's clear that there is a turn to a more authoritarian, more nationalistic politics, and I'm trying to understand the roots of both. How could these countries develop in a much more liberal direction around 89 than before, and what are the reasons why now you seem to see this backlash against that.
So this is my current interest. I hope to have a monograph about that in a number of years again, as you correctly mentioned, I'm young parents, so I might fix life longer this time, but I think I have a few years to work on this. So this is again something that I'm really struggling today also because of the very recent events in the Western world. I must say that in some ways it makes my research more relevant for Western audiences perhaps, but it also means that I should probably expand in my focus, because the crisis of liberalism is really a topic that is not heavily debated in the US and also in the UK.
Which we teach also in our courses as role models for liberal development in modern times, right? I mean in particular we teach British history in that manner at my university in my street. And that is something that again doesn't quite spare with the experiences of our students who are 19 to 20 years old, coming to do a BA. So there's something to I think it's there too for sure.
And I might want to expand the scope beyond Central Eastern Europe where again my primary focus is and where my primary expertise is. So I think that's a great project and it's an important question and I hope that when you've got an answer and I appreciate the political skill with which you use the phrase a number of years as a department chair. I understand how this works, but I hope you'll be back on the show to talk about your book when you're done. Well, it would be most great to really talk about the chance again.
So thank you so much. Have a wonderful holiday season and thanks again for being on New Books and Genocide Studies. Thank you to answer the same, same to you. Thanks.
You've been listening to an interview with Farron Slezzo about his new book on Gary and Jews in the age of genocide in intellectual history in 1929 to 1948. You can listen to previous podcast through iTunes or from the webpage for New Books and Genocide Studies part of the New Books Network on podcast. I hope you'll join us next time while I'll interview Ed Westerman about his book, Hitler's Osprey and the Indian Works comparing genocide in conquest. Until then, thanks for the download and have a great one.
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