Hungary and the Holocaust. The past reassessed

Date: 24/04/04

The impact of a new museum in Budapest

HUNGARIANS agree about little in their turbulent history. But on one issue they have been as one: that they bear little responsibility for the Hungarian Holocaust, in which over 500,000 Hungarian Jews were killed. This view may be challenged by the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Centre, based around a restored synagogue on Pava Street in the capital, Budapest, that was used as an internment camp in 1944.

The opening was attended by a host of dignitaries, including the prime minister, Peter Medgyessy, and his predecessor, Viktor Orban; from abroad came France's finance minister, Nicolas Sarkozy (who is of Hungarian descent), and Israel's president, Moshe Katsav. To add drama, a Budapest imam was arrested, with two Syrians, on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act against a Jewish target to coincide with the opening.

Until the Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944, Hungary's 800,000 Jews had lived in comparative safety, hoping to escape the horrors all around. But the swift co-operation of Hungarian authorities facilitated the deportation of over 430,000 Jews to Auschwitz between May and July 1944. Most were killed on arrival. Others fell victim to roving bands of Hungarian Nazi Arrow Cross militia. Survivors talk of the shock of betrayal, and disbelief that the motherland would dispatch them to their deaths.

Yet despite this history, the post-war communists blamed the Holocaust solely on the Nazis plus a few Hungarian “extremists”. The confusion is shown in the Museum of Military History in Budapest, where two memorials pay homage to those who lost their lives in the second world war: one to Jewish victims, and another to paramilitary gendarmes who put them on the trains.

Hungary, which joins the European Union on May 1st, has one of Europe's largest Jewish communities, some 100,000-strong. Jewish cultural and religious life is reviving, at least in Budapest. But the country's image took a battering when its far right became openly anti-Semitic, prompting sometimes half-hearted denunciations from mainstream politicians. Today, as the new museum suggests, support for Jews is a rare point of consensus in Hungary's acrimonious politics. The former Fidesz government initiated a Holocaust Memorial Day. Writing in the Magyar Nemzet newspaper, Mr Orban described the Hungarian Holocaust as a “wound inflicted on the heart of the nation”, whose “mortification and shame still lingers”. A powerful message, for all its 60-year gestation.

Feature on the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Hungary.