Remembering the Hungarian Holocaust

Hungary today is mourning its sons and daughters who died in the Hungarian Holocaust. It was on April 16, 1944 — exactly 60 years ago — that the first group of Hungarian Jews were rounded up in eastern Hungary and sent to Auschwitz. Remembering those dark days, two personal experiences come to my mind.

In 1979, my father took me to Auschwitz where many of his kin had died in 1944. As we entered through the gates of the concentration camp, he, whom I had never before seen crying, broke down in tears and said: “I am sorry, son, but I could not take it any longer.”

A few years later, my mother told me a story from those days. She, who grew up a devout Catholic, and saw her Jewish girlfriends deported from her native city of Vac in June 1944, when she was only 24, asked the archbishop of the city for letters of baptism proving her girlfriends’ Christian origins.

With these letters she traveled to Kassa, where all trains of deportation transited, went to the train station and tried to get her girlfriends out of the cattle cars. She remembered people crying for help, for water, for mercy. However, she had to return to Vac without having been able to save even one of them. And she, too, broke down crying and said: “I am sorry but I was not able to save them.” She had kept this story to herself for more than 55 years.

In these two stories, in a nutshell, is the tragedy and sadness of the Hungarian nation. Make no mistake: The people being deported in 1944 were Hungarians. And while the German occupation ignited the process, it cannot be denied it was Hungarians who deported Hungarians to the death camps.

The deportations could not have happened without the willing participation of the Hungarian gendarmerie, state bureaucrats, and the Arrow Cross Party — Hungarian Nazi — thugs. Hungary in 1944 was a country gone insane, a country that had totally lost its sense of orientation, a country that was failed by its leadership, betrayed by its government, by its elite, and which failed to protect its own citizens. It was a country that allowed the mob to take over.

I want to say: What happened between April and July 1944 in the Hungarian countryside should stand as a reminder for what happens when the leaders of a country fail their people.

We are today at the same time paying tribute to Raoul Wallenberg, Karl Lutz, Per Anger, Giorgio Perlasca and others who used their diplomatic immunity in a heroic effort to save the remaining Jews of Budapest. But we also have to pay respect to those hundreds and thousands of nameless Hungarians who were not among the silent millions and who took the hands of their Jewish brothers and sisters and led them to safety — or at least tried to do so.

Hungary today is a proud, strong, prosperous democracy — a nation ready to face her past. We Hungarians know that if we face the past and share the shame, our generation and the generations of Hungarians after us will not have to share the responsibility for those crimes in 1944.

Where our responsibility does not cease is that we have to make sure this will never, ever be repeated in Hungary, in Europe, in America, or elsewhere.

One could ask, then: Is there no anti-Semitism in present-day Hungary? Yes, there is — just like, unfortunately, there is all over the world. But I hasten to add that Hungary as a country, or the Hungarian nation as a whole, is not anti-Semitic. You cannot condemn an entire nation because to do that provides a cover under which real anti-Semites can hide.

We are proud today of our vibrant Hungarian Jewish community. Consecutive Hungarian governments since the fall of communism have made steps toward opening the history books and facing the Holocaust and the responsibility of Hungarians for the death of over half a million of our countrymen — people from all walks of life who are missing to this very day from the fiber of the nation.

While we must admit we are not there yet, each year we get closer to the truth. We are today much closer than we were 10 or even five years ago. The time will come when we will have put behind us those dark days — but only in terms of the lessons learned and not in terms of the responsibility we all share, Jews and Christians, Muslims and others, for our common fate, to ensure such a tragedy will not happen again.

And when we have finally found the truth and we have closed our history books, it will still be a time for us to remember — always. For the living and for the dead, we must not forget.

Andras Simonyi is the ambassador of the Republic of Hungary to the United States.