Leslie Meisels - Suddenly the Shadow Fell

The catastrophe of Hungarian Jewry during World War II came late. Its speed and ferocity were unrivalled, as was the unwillingness of those caught up in its maw to foresee its inevitability.

The First Anti-Jewish Law in twentieth-century Europe was introduced in Hungary as early as 1923 but, given that Jews had been relatively well integrated into Hungarian society since the latter half of the nineteenth century, most Hungarian Jews did not consider this to be a serious threat. It limited the number of Jews admitted to universities to 6 per cent, the percentage of Jews in the general population, but it was allowed to lapse eight years later. Nevertheless, it did end up being a harbinger of worse to come.

In the aftermath of World War I , conditions in Hungary changed dramatically. At Trianon, a sideshow to the main treaty negotiations at Versailles that ended the war, Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory and three-fifths of its people. By a stroke of a pen, Transylvania became part of Romania, the Upper Province part of Czechoslovakia and the Bcska area part of Yugoslavia. There is little doubt that Hungary suffered the harshest terms dealt out by the victorious Allies. The diminution of the country has haunted Hungarians for the rest of the twentieth century and even the beginning of the twenty-first.

Throughout the 1930s, Hungary developed closer ties to Germany, which shared Hungarys outrage and bitterness over the treaty conditions imposed on both countries. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler, head of the National Socialist Party the Nazis became chancellor of Germany. The Nazis established the Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo, with powers to arrest, interrogate and imprison without due process, and violent attacks on Jews in Germany became the norm, not the exception. As antisemitism rose in Germany, the contagion began to spread to other European countries and Jews began to look for safe havens.

Refugees flooded into Hungary. In 19381939, following the annexation of Austria and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, between 15,000 and 35,000 of those refugees were Jews from Austria, Germany, Poland and Slovakia. Hungarian Jews, however, still felt that the turmoil would pass them by, that they would be protected by the laws and by their fellow citizens in the place that had been their homeland for a thousand years. Not only were there Jewish politicians, academics, journalists, businessmen, land owners, industrialists, poets, writers, doctors, lawyers, famous actors and impresarios as there were in Poland and Czechoslovakia but in Hungary Jews had experienced unprecedented tolerance. When Germany occupied and annexed Austria in 1938, in what the Germans termed a friendly gesture, Hungarian Jews still felt secure. They had fought with honour in World War I , thousands were decorated and wore their medals with pride. Most Jews viewed themselves as Hungarians who, incidentally, were of the Jewish faith. Many of them followed no organized religion at all.