Just over 70,000 Jews from Łódź ghetto arrived in Auschwitz that summer. Among them were Max Epstein and his mother.47 ‘The ghetto was no picnic,’ says Max, ‘and I’m not trying to defend the style there, but it was still home. It was still families … as pitiful as it was, it was something.’48 It took Max a mere ‘twenty minutes’ to realize that Auschwitz was an altogether different place. ‘The smell,’ he says, ‘it was like burning film or hair, you know, organic. So it was crystal clear [that the SS were killing people].’ Because Max’s transport contained skilled workers who had specialized in the repair of communications equipment, they were not selected on arrival but admitted straight into the camp.
Shortly after they arrived Max remembers: ‘I was sitting with my mother and they brought us water. Now in the ghetto we had a lot of typhoid fever, so we never drank unboiled water. So I turned to my mother and I said, “I presume it’s not boiled.” So she got into hysterical laughter, I mean, she has got on her hands an idiot of a kid, who thinks that now he’s going to worry about boiled water. The people around, who are sitting there, thought that she’d become hysterical because she heard about the crematorium.’49 Max’s mother was sent to the women’s quarantine camp at Birkenau. While he was ‘upset’ to see his mother leave, he didn’t ‘start screaming’. He realized that he had to contain his emotions or ‘I wouldn’t be living two minutes afterwards.’ Subsequently he shouted through the wire to his mother, ‘Why are you crying, why are you crying? We are going to be dead anyway, so what’s the point?’
Max and his mother were unusual, because they survived the war. Most of the Jews from the Łódź ghetto sent to Auschwitz died there – including Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski. In the end all his collaboration, all his machinations, did not save him from the gas chamber. But, ultimately, what other realistic options did he have, other than to bow to German demands? His counterpart in Warsaw, Adam Czerniaków, killed himself when the deportations from the ghetto began, but that was of little help to his fellow Jews.
Whether or not Rumkowski should be criticized because of his eager collaboration with the Germans is debatable. What is certain is that he should be utterly condemned because of his personal conduct towards his fellow Jews – especially the way that he used his immense power within the ghetto to sexually assault young women. There had been rumours about his sexual behaviour before the war when he ran an orphanage, and once he had power in the ghetto he assaulted women with impunity.50 Lucille Eichengreen, for example, remembers vividly how Rumkowski ‘molested’ her when she was a teenager in the ghetto. She felt that, if she did not let him do what he wanted, ‘her life was at stake’ since he had the power to have her deported. He chose to exploit her intense vulnerability for his own sexual pleasure.51 Other Jews confirm that Rumkowski was a sexual predator.52 His abuse of the Jews he led was a terrible crime for which, had he lived, he should have been called to account.
By the time the Jews from Łódź arrived at Auschwitz Birkenau in the summer of 1944 the camp contained inmates from many different countries, including Italy, Belgium, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Slovakia and Greece. Jews had even been sent to Auschwitz from the Channel Islands. But it was the deportations from one particular place that came to dominate the camp during 1944 – Hungary. And, for a whole variety of reasons, the history of the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews at Birkenau sheds light on the unparalleled nightmare of the Holocaust.
17. Hungarian Catastrophe
(1944)
At the end of February 1944, Adolf Hitler left the claustrophobic surroundings of his military headquarters in a forest in East Prussia and travelled to the Berghof, his home in the mountains of southern Bavaria. The reason for his change of location illustrated Germany’s fortunes at this point in the war – his headquarters in East Prussia were no longer safe from air attack and had to be fortified. So while that work took place, he returned home to the landscape that had inspired him since the 1920s.
When Hitler stood on the terrace of the Berghof he could stare across at the Untersberg, the mountain in which according to legend the mighty warrior Frederick Barbarossa lay sleeping. But by now his own dream of becoming an all-conquering hero stood little chance of turning into reality. German forces were in retreat. The Wehrmacht had abandoned the vital Ukrainian iron-ore mines, and Germany’s supply of oil from Romania was threatened. In late February 1944 the Americans had launched a series of massive bombing raids against Germany’s industrial base. These attacks, later known as ‘Big Week’, didn’t just destroy key factories, but demonstrated that Germany’s air defences were wholly inadequate to deal with the Allied threat.
Yet Hitler was nothing if not self-confident. Despite all these setbacks, when Goebbels visited him at the Berghof in early March he found his Führer ‘fresh and relaxed’ – almost upbeat. The new front line in the east was shorter, said Hitler, and that was to Germany’s advantage. Moreover he was ‘absolutely certain’ that the expected Allied landings in France would be repelled. German soldiers could then be moved from the west for a new offensive in the east. ‘I hope these prognoses made by the Führer are correct,’ wrote Goebbels in his diary. ‘Lately, we’ve been disappointed so often that you feel some scepticism rising inside you.’1
Hitler’s anger was directed, as always, against the Jews. The week before his meeting with Goebbels, he had spoken to Nazi leaders in the banquet hall of the Hofbräuhaus in Munich on the twenty-fourth anniversary of the foundation of the party. In his speech he had promised that the Jews of Britain and America would be ‘smashed down’ just as the Jews of Germany had been. His words had been greeted with ‘thundering applause’.2 Now, back at the Berghof, he brought up with Goebbels once again the question of troublesome partners – to begin with, Germany’s difficulties with Finland. The Finns, whom Hitler had always thought unreliable friends, looked to be trying to exit the war, just as the Italians had done. He didn’t need to mention – since both he and Goebbels knew it – that the Finns, even more than the Italians, had refused to cooperate in the deportation of their Jews. Not that the Germans had particularly pressed them, since they knew in advance that the Finnish government would be loath to agree to German demands for a comprehensive ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish question’ in Finland. While the Finns had handed over to the Germans several thousand Soviet prisoners of war, a number of whom were almost certainly Jewish, and eight non-Finnish Jewish refugees, the remainder of the Jews in Finland – fewer than 2,000 – had been kept safe. Moreover, the Finns had not put in place any anti-Semitic legislation, and Finnish Jews were even serving in the Finnish Army fighting against the Soviets. This led to the ideologically strange situation, from the perspective of the Nazis, of Jews fighting on the same side as the Germans against Bolshevism, an ideology that the Nazis believed was backed by Jews.3
Just as he realized he could do little to make the Finns cooperate over the deportation of the Jews, Hitler accepted that he could not do much to prevent them leaving the war.4 It certainly wasn’t, from his point of view, worth the effort to try and force them by military means to do what he wanted. But, as he told Goebbels, that was not the case with every one of the Germans’ recalcitrant partners. In particular, said Hitler, the situation in Hungary was very different. While the Hungarians – like the Finns – were trying to extricate themselves from the war, Hungary – unlike Finland – possessed not just enormous numbers of Jews but also valuable raw materials, food stocks and other supplies of use to the Germans. So Hitler had decided that he wanted to confront the Hungarian leader, Admiral Horthy, occupy the country, seize whatever the Germans wanted and deal with the Hungarian Jews once and for all.
Hitler met Admiral Horthy at Klessheim Castle near Salzburg on 18 March 1944. Horthy had hoped Hitler would be prepared to discuss bringing home Hungarian soldiers from the eastern front. He was wrong. Hitler wanted to talk about something else entirely. As soon as they met, Hitler launched into a tirade. He said
he knew about the continuing Hungarian attempts to renege on their alliance with the Germans, and claimed that the best way forward was for Hungary to contribute more to the war, not less. The problem, as Hitler had said many times before, was that the Hungarian government refused to deal with the Jews who lived in Hungary. Germany would not tolerate this security threat existing so close to the approaching enemy. As a result, Hitler said, he was about to order the German occupation of Hungary and he demanded Horthy agree to this course of action. Horthy refused and started arguing with Hitler. When Horthy said he would resign sooner than sign, Hitler threatened that if that happened he could not guarantee the safety of Horthy’s family. Horthy, outraged, left the room.
Eventually, after the Germans had employed various tricks to prevent Horthy leaving – such as pretending the phone lines were down and faking an air raid on the castle – Horthy was persuaded to agree to the Wehrmacht entering Hungary and to the deportation of 100,000 Jews. The next day, 19 March, German troops occupied Hungary and two days after that Adolf Eichmann was installed in Budapest, ready to implement the destruction of the Jews.
The occupation of Hungary was not, as the Nazis saw it, an act motivated only by a desire for vengeance against the Jews, even though Hitler certainly believed that the Jews had sabotaged the Hungarian will to fight. The Nazis had a good deal to gain in practical terms from Hungary. Not just raw materials and strategic military advantage – given that the Red Army were advancing ever closer to Hungary’s borders – but also the wealth of the Hungarian Jews. Not only could the Jews be robbed, but those who were deemed fit enough could also be used as forced labour. Given the enormous numbers of Jews in Hungary, that prospect appeared an attractive one to the Nazis.
For many of the Jews of Hungary, the sudden arrival of the Germans, although frightening, did not seem necessarily to mean their obliteration. ‘I could see the fear on my parents’ faces,’ recalls Israel Abelesz, a teenager living in the south of Hungary, ‘and I could see the whole atmosphere had changed. [Maybe] it’s the beginning of something horrible. Though we were hoping this was just a military manoeuvre and the Jewish population will not be affected.’ He read in the newspapers that ‘the Germans had to occupy Hungary in order that they could carry on the war better. We thought it won’t affect the Jewish population. That was the hope. That was the hopeful side. I mean, in a situation like that there’s always hope and despair – it keeps on alternating in one’s mind.’5
Despite the German occupation, Eichmann and his team knew that it would be impossible to deport the Jews without the support of the Hungarian authorities. Eichmann had studied what had happened in Denmark and knew that lack of local assistance had caused immense difficulties, so it was vital for the Nazis to have Hungarian administrative and police help. And that is just what they received. The new Prime Minister, Döme Sztójay – the former Hungarian ambassador in Berlin – was appointed only after the Germans had given their approval, and the two state secretaries with responsibility for the Jewish ‘question’ were both proven anti-Semites. One of them, László Endre, was particularly eager to assist the Nazis. Endre enthusiastically collaborated with the Germans and implemented a whole series of restrictive measures against the Jews – such as banning them from owning vehicles and phones and compelling them to list all their valuables. Also keen to help was a commander of the Hungarian gendarmerie, another anti-Semite called László Ferenczy,6 and Eichmann soon struck up a warm relationship with him.
The recent background to anti-Semitism in Hungary would have been familiar to Eichmann. Hungarian anti-Semites – like German and Austrian anti-Semites – had pointed to the influence that Jews were alleged to possess in the media and in key professions, and also to the supposed links between Judaism and the hated creed of Communism. At the end of the First World War there had even been a Communist government of Hungary for a brief period, dominated by the revolutionary Béla Kun who was of Jewish origin.
Despite this history, and a group of Hungarian anti-Semites willing to assist him, Eichmann knew he was embarking on a vast enterprise that was fraught with difficulties. The potential, from the Nazis’ perspective, for the whole project to fall apart was large. Suppose the Jews learnt that they were all to be shipped to Auschwitz, where the majority of them – particularly the most vulnerable – would be murdered? Wouldn’t they then do all they could to hide and even resist? Eichmann was aware of the precedent of the Warsaw ghetto uprising – what if something similar happened in Budapest?
Eichmann, given the chance for the first time to be the man on the spot rather than directing operations from a desk in Berlin, was determined to avoid the issues that had dogged Nazi plans in both Denmark and Warsaw. To this end, he not only ensured that compliant anti-Semites were in key positions within the new Hungarian administration, but he also moved to calm the anxious Jews about their fate. As a first step, Jewish leaders were told to form a Jewish Council. On 31 March, Eichmann met with four members of the newly formed council at his office in the Hotel Majestic in Budapest and told them that while measures were to be introduced against the Jews – such as the wearing of the yellow star – they should not be concerned about what was going to happen to them, as long as they behaved themselves. He said that ‘the Jews had to understand that nothing was being demanded of them except discipline and order. If there was discipline and order, then not only would Jewry have nothing to fear, but he would defend Jewry and it would live under the same good conditions as regards payment and treatment as all the other workers.’7
The members of the Jewish Council seemed to have been reassured by Eichmann. In one way, the restrictive measures against the Jews implied that the Germans were not going to kill them, but might be seeking a longer-term accommodation. In short, why make Jews wear the yellow star if you just want to shoot them? That was certainly the interpretation that Israel Abelesz and his family favoured. ‘After a few days they came out with restrictions,’ he says. ‘We thought, all right, this is something which we can live with. Because we were aware that the war was not going well for the Germans. It’s just a question of time. They will be defeated. Look – we had been brought up strongly in Jewish history and we realized that all through the generations in different places, Jews have suffered for being Jews. I mean, the original anti-Semitism of course originates from the Jews not accepting that Jesus is a saviour, and that kind of hostility to the Jews has persisted through the centuries. And so we’re not surprised at all that we are being discriminated [against]. It’s just a question of to what degree.’8
Again learning from mistakes that had been made by Nazis elsewhere, Eichmann planned on conducting the deportations not in one massive operation but piecemeal. He would start with the Jews in the east of Hungary, far from Budapest. This had the double benefit, from the Nazis’ point of view, of first tackling the Jews who were closest to the advancing front line under the pretext of military security, while simultaneously not yet attempting the difficult task of deporting the large number of Jews in Budapest, who had more opportunities to hide than Jews in the countryside.
Jews in the east of Hungary – including many who lived on land that had been annexed by the Hungarians – were forced into ghettos as soon as early April. In an operation of great speed, which would have been impossible without the cooperation of the Hungarian gendarmerie, nearly 200,000 Jews were imprisoned in ghettos or in hastily constructed temporary camps in less than two weeks.
The initial agreement with the Hungarian authorities had been that the Germans would deport 100,000 Jews, but once the ghettoization process began the Hungarians themselves lobbied for all the Jews to leave. A crucial element in their thinking was the question of what they would do with the Jews who had not been selected for forced labour. Just as in Slovakia two years before, the Hungarian authorities believed they were better off asking the Germans to take all their Jews, including old people and children.
As the Hungarian Jews waited in the ghettos, most we
re still uncertain about what lay ahead. Though sometimes they heard clues. Alice Lok Cahana, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who lived with her family in western Hungary, remembers one non-Jewish Hungarian saying to her, ‘You know, we make soap out of you.’ ‘I said “Really? So remember if you wash yourself with the good-smelling soap it’s me.” ’ Later she ‘cried’ and felt ‘so humiliated that he dared to say something like that, so vile, so horrible to me’.9 But such offensive remarks still did not amount to proof that they were to be killed. Many Jews, like Israel Abelesz and his family, still thought they might be sent to work as ‘compulsory’ labour. ‘That was the best hope,’ he says, ‘the families will stay together and we’ll just have to survive for another few months, because the war is coming to an end. I mean, we were taken away in the last stage of the war.’10
At first sight this lack of certainty among Hungarian Jews about the fate they faced at the hands of the Germans seems strange. Several thousand Hungarian Jews, for instance, had returned home in 1943 from work in labour battalions in the heart of the killing zone in Ukraine, and they would surely have learnt what was happening. Indeed, one Hungarian writer confirmed that by 1943 ‘we had already heard much about the massacres from Hungarian soldiers and Jewish conscripts back from the Eastern front.’11
However, not only would there almost certainly have been a different level of knowledge between sophisticated Jews in Budapest and Jews in remote agricultural areas, but a potent mix of uncertainty and hope still remained in many people’s minds. There were always ways of rationalizing what was going on. For example, even if the Germans had been killing Jews in the east, perhaps that policy of murder applied only to Soviet Jews? It simply made no sense, so one argument went, for the Germans to be killing Jews now that the war was going badly for them. Surely they now needed workers more than ever before? It was these kinds of thoughts that Eichmann encouraged with his promise of safety for Jews who kept their ‘discipline and order’.
The Holocaust: A New History Page 49