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CHAPTER 1
THE FIRST ACT: The Deportation of the Jews
AROUND six o'clock on a Sunday morning in the early spring of 1944 a vast number of aircraft could be seen swarming over the city of Budapest. No alarm was heard, no bombs were dropped.
Practice flights performed by Hungarian squadrons?
No, the planes were German — with swastikas. What were they doing here, with no visible enemy around, and why were they circling round and round and round, and not returning to where they had come from? Nobody could say, but evidently something was brewing.
My telephone rang at eight o'clock — did I know what was going on? Not the slightest idea, but it certainly looked damned strange ...
Half an hour later the explanation arrived. A Hungarian newspaperman had the information —'The entire city is overrun by Germans. They've taken command of police headquarters, the General Post Office, telegraph and radio stations. Long columns of German military vehicles are scouring the streets. The Palace and the Ministry buildings up on the hill are under German guard, patrols are out arresting all the political leaders who have shown little or no sympathy for the Germans. Mainly they're after people of Jewish descent and liberal attitudes.'
And the Regent?
He had been invited to visit Hitler, who wished to persuade him to promise to make available a large Hungarian army contingent, and he should have been back on the Saturday. On the way home, however, some hindrance had 'regrettably' prevented His Excellency from continuing his journey until the following day.
During this time German tanks and lorries had sped over the border straight for Budapest, a distance they covered in a couple of hours. When Horthy was finally released and reached the capital, he found it already 'kidnapped' as Copenhagen had been in April 1940. Our mighty 'ally's' tactics had been well rehearsed in the assaults on Denmark and Norway, and the Germans' widely celebrated striking power and organisational capacity did not fail to meet expectations this time either. The choice of day could not have been better, either: Sunday, the day of rest in government offices and ministries, at least for those whose boss was not tipped off in advance of the plot; out of a dozen or so ministers there were at least four or five reliably sympathetic to the German cause, whom it was not necessary to render harmless. The remainder were pulled in with unerring precision by the Gestapo, which had taken immediate possession of police headquarters and other essential detention centres, and had set up its own centre of operations in a couple of well-appointed hotels up at Schwabenberg on the Buda side. Prime Minister Kállay was able to reach safety at the very last minute in the Turkish embassy, where he was protected by extraterritorial immunity but was unable to confer with the Head of State as the telephone had naturally been cut off.
Within a few hours the Germans were certain that no highly placed official remained in the civil and military administrations capable of joining a popular revolt against the occupying power, or who had not immediately gained a secure hiding place. At the Palace, surrounded by German troops, the Regent's hands were firmly tied by threats of bombardment and destruction of the capital unless he agreed to appoint a new government, clearly in line with German wishes. In order to avoid bloodshed and the risk of a civil war, he found himself forced to yield to these demands, most probably in the hope that, remaining at his post, he could better serve the country rather than by burning his boats and allowing himself to be carted off to Germany as a prisoner.
A few days later the composition of the new government — thus arrived at in 'legal' form — was made known. General Sztólay, the Hungarian envoy in Berlin, was appointed both head of government and the now largely unimportant Foreign Minister: his collaboration in the coup had probably been assured of beforehand. In order to put a suitable complexion on the whole matter — at least outwardly to satisfy Hungarian national feeling — it was decided to retain in their posts those ministers whose loyalty to the German regime could not be called into question. It was openly reported that Imrédy was urged to join the government, but that he had made conditions that were unacceptable to the Germans.
The Ministry of the Interior, of prime importance at this juncture, was handed to the former leader of the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia, Jaross, a marked nationalist. He had no hesitation in appointing as his Permanent Secretaries two of Hungary's wildest anti-Semites, the former gendarme Major Baky and the civil governor in Pest, Endre. Knowing something of the previous careers of these gentlemen — Endre wanted everybody who was not of pure Hungarian blood chased out of the regained territories, and Baky was considered to be even worse — it was not difficult to work out that what was under way was the extermination of the Jewish population, following the German pattern.
During the very first week following the coup, not only all prominent Jewish businessmen but also Jews who occupied important positions in the cultural life of the city were either arrested or deported to Germany. Similar measures were taken with the leaders of the political left, in the event they had not found a safe place abroad, as was the case with the Liberal Party boss Eckhardt and a few leading Social Democrats.
The observation was later made in some quarters that a few Hungarian regiments loyal to the government could well have outflanked the Germans and nipped the coup in the bud. But were there such regiments at hand? And even if there had been, it is difficult to see what could have been gained by such a move. The Germans had air supremacy and the element of surprise, while the Russian steamroller in the east was still an immense distance away, and what there was of a Hungarian army lay mostly at different points along the German frontline; the border guard would hardly risk leaving its positions at Siebenbürgen for fear that the Romanians would seize the opportunity to immediately occupy the territory, which could then never be recovered. In addition to which corps commanders and officers in general were invariably either pro-German and secret members of the Arrow Cross, or they were indecisive. The army lacked leaders capable of inspiring others to join a resistance movement of any size. The cunning calculation which had provided the country with what was formally a fully legal government would have meant that any armed revolt was interpreted as just that — open revolt — and would have led to the risk of those involved being tried for treason should it fail. No such bold venture was on the cards.
The government had the support of the enormous war machine provided by the Germans. Knowledge of what had happened to the Poles and the Yugoslavs, the Belgians and the Dutch, the Danes and the Norwegians, was depressing enough for a small, under-equipped nation, which was also split and disunited. No aid was to be expected from the West, and Russian help at that point in time was not to be thought of. Matters would have to take their course, and it turned out to be anything but pleasant.
Endre and Baky were not slow to move. The systematic persecution and total annihilation of the entire Jewish population — only the capital's broad masses were spared for the moment — started as early as April, and proceeded along two routes. One of them, for which Endre was responsible, was the setting-up of fenced-in Jewish ghettoes in the larger provincial cities, with the aim of concentrating all Jews in one place where they could be dealt with in an entirely arbitrary fashion. The other, led by Baky and employing his newly-hired gendarmes as executioners, was the deportation to Germany of hundreds of thousands of Jews.
For the moment, however, this latter procedure — which also included the confiscation of all real and personal property as well as clothing and food — was restricted to the countryside, where it was far easier to deport people than in the capital, the Jewish population of which numbered a quarter of a million. These were left in peace for the time being, probably because immediate removal would have met with insuperable practical difficulties. Besides, it was obviously feared that too much attention abroad coupled with possible riots in Budapest itself might be the result if this huge mass of people (approximately one-fifth of the city's population) were to be transported out of the country in hundreds of overcrowded railway trains.
Instead, another — let us call it — 'preparatory' expedient was found. The order was issued for every Jew who had reached six years of age to wear a fully visible 'Star of David' — a large, six-pointed yellow star, made according to a set size, sewn on the left side of the chest. The first failure to comply with the order brought a heavy fine; a repetition generally led to deportation. The wretched system of informers which immediately began to flourish — in a way which even took the Germans by surprise — meant that it was a dangerous thing even to poke your nose outside your house without wearing the star. A close friend of ours, a well-known Christian literary man, who committed this terrible crime, was at once reported and convicted. After being notified he duly made for the police station to pay off the fine personally. He has never been seen since; in a roundabout way we managed to find out that he had been taken to an internment camp on the German border, but every attempt to get him freed was frustrated. There were other instances in which little children in a family would observe the 'decorative' star on the adults' clothing and burst out: 'Mummy, when can we get a pretty little star on our clothes like the one you've got?'
In point of fact, of course, the star amounted to a sign showing that the person in question belonged to a despised class of people, persecuted as an outcast. This was naturally wholly detestable to everyone who had to put up with it, but most of all perhaps for the vast number of people with Jewish blood who fell under the category defined by the law as 'considered to be Jews', but who right from early infancy had been baptised and admitted to the Christian faith. These people, who would never have thought of themselves as Jewish and who had never had anything to do with the Jewish religious community, felt deeply offended at having to give the outward appearance of being Jewish, and were often prepared to receive punishment rather than bear a mark which distinguished them as belonging to a race of pariahs. They frequently managed to avoid identification, however, particularly if their physical appearance did not resemble that of the classic image of a Jew, even though we are talking here of a society where dark-complexioned people with dark hair and eyes were the norm. They could be fortunate enough to move around for weeks at a time without being accosted, unless an informer had been busy and had alerted the authorities.
The extent to which this informer activity had spread across the country can be shown by the following example. A domestic servant of Polish origin, who was in my employ as well as in that of several other homes in the inner city, but who lived far out in the suburbs, told me that she was repeatedly approached by neighbouring housewives wondering whether, knowing as she did so many of the 'better families', she couldn't supply them with names and addresses of any of the Jews so they could report them to the proper authorities. Either these hyenas were hoping for some economic recompense, a prize per head, or that their intervention would bring them prestige and render them unimpeachable. We found this standard of behaviour more nefarious even than the persecution itself of entirely innocent people, whose only offence was to allow themselves to be born of wholly or half-Jewish parents.
My own excellent chauffeur, a particularly skilful mechanic, who had previously served as chauffeur at the embassy but who had been called up for national service two years back, was a case in point. Under no circumstances did he wish to travel around in my car with a yellow star pinned to his chest, and through the assistance of several generals of my acquaintance I was able to exclude him from further service of this nature. On the other hand he was threatened now with punishment and deportation if he were reported and denounced by a colleague whose malevolent nature we were only too aware of. Some means of saving his skin and that of his family and getting him out of the country was now urgently needed. Remarkable to say, the plan we formulated was successful. He had a sister, a young widow with two small children, who lived far out in the country. In the utmost secrecy my wife drove her into town via a series of adventure-packed routes, and we managed to get the whole family — the chauffeur was married and his wife was expecting — together with other protégés into a transport column which finally made it across into Switzerland, where the new 'world citizen' later saw the light of day. A particularly crafty and skilful Zionist had bribed his German connections to permit safe passage to Palestine for no fewer than 1,700 Jews who, according to the agreement, were to be shipped along the Danube to the estuary and by sea to their destination. Negotiations went on for weeks, and in the end the would-be refugees were dumped on a train and landed up in ... Hanover! They were held there in an internment camp — the now-infamous Belsen — for several months, until the bribed Germans, to their credit, kept their word and had the entire transport ferried group by group over the border to Switzerland. They were given a friendly welcome there, and could thank their lucky stars they had escaped the most dreadful place of all: the extermination camps in the Polish General Government.
After the regime change described later in this book in the 'Intermezzo' chapter, the order to wear the yellow star was somewhat relaxed and many Jews stopped wearing it. Following the Arrow Cross coup on 15 October, however, they paid bitterly for this neglect when entire buildings where Jews lived had to be equipped with a large yellow star placed above the doorway. If they ventured out of doors, or had been brazen enough to dispose of their racial symbol and were identified as Jews, they were immediately in mortal danger.
For deportation purposes huge concentration camps were put into operation, often in open brick-walled barns or under the open sky exposed to wind, rain and cold. The wretched people were shoved into sealed cattle trucks in long goods trains under a rain of kicks and blows, treatment not even reserved for cattle, pigs and sheep. Men and women, the elderly, and small and older children, were squeezed in — sixty, seventy or eighty to a wagon — as long as there was an inch of room to spare, whereupon the sliding doors were fastened and locked. No allowance was made for food and water, let alone for relieving themselves during the long days and nights the hellish trip took en route to the 'Ostmark' or the Polish General Government. I fortunately was spared the sight of such a train, but unbiased witnesses abound and are so many in number that further confirmation is superfluous.
The following observation may be of some interest, however. Reliable sources claim that amazement was expressed in German quarters over the state in which the deportees were found when they were unloaded in Vienna for further transport to their respective work locations. Some had to be dragged out dead, others' hair had turned white and they had lost their reason owing to the horrors of their journey — the entire picture offered a scene of human misery exceeding anything the wildest fantasy could conjure up. Food and drink were now available, since it was a matter of having slaves fit for work in the production of essential items for the war industry — but what sort of use were these human rags!
This was in Vienna. In the Polish General Government matters were somewhat simpler. There the cargo, dead or alive, was carted off to the extermination camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. The ingenious construction of these camps permitted the instantaneous putting to death of the victims by gas emitted from the showers, and further transport of the naked corpses by rail to the cremation ovens. The daily killing capacity at just one of these institutions was reported as 6,000 ...
In my capacity as the Swedish embassy's consultant on Jewish affairs, I was provided with a complete layout of the installations and accurate figures concerning transportation of people. When at the beginning of May the figure had reached 60,000 and in a report home to the Swedish foreign office I wanted to quote this figure, the head of the department reacted by claiming that this figure was undoubtedly far in excess of reality, and it was reduced by two-thirds. To check, I sought out an officer attached to the Hungarian general staff whose job was to distribute the 300,000-strong male Jewish workforce which the Hungarian government had reserved the right to dispose of for its own needs in road repairs and construction. He was an amiable man, who did his best to save the situation, and who was extraordinarily well informed about the entire nasty business.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Reign of Terror"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Valdemar Langlet.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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