Escape from Munkacs

Part I: Passover in Hungary, 1944

“In every generation, they rise over us to destroy us. The Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands.” These words, uttered with wine glasses raised, give the essence of the Seder service, to be held tonight in Jewish homes at the start of the Passover festival.

For some, the traditional process of telling the story of the exodus from slavery in Egypt is so lengthy, is subject to so much explanation and discussion before the unleavened bread can be tasted and at last the meal can be served that jokesters abbreviate: “They hated us; they tried to kill us; we won; let’s eat.”

Even allowing for the strong emotional need for hope, is this view of Jewish condition over millennia either realistic or fitting? Do the tragic events and ongoing conflict initiated by the brutal Hamas attack against Israelis on 7 October 2023 allow confidence about a happy and just outcome [if this, indeed, is what “deliverance” should mean]?

My late Mother told me many years later how she had interrupted a dinner – probably the Passover Seder — to express her not uncommon anguish about the question: “Where was the Almighty at Auschwitz?” Two rabbis – one a close family friend – were seated at the same Los Angeles table. It had been a conversation stopper. At the time, Newsweek issued an annual ranking of American rabbis. Both of the rabbis present were listed in the top ten. To their credit, neither had an adequate reply. One of them attempted to deflect her question.

I have to admit to sharing some of my Mother’s feelings, especially when attending Holocaust memorial events, and even a standard phrase used by the late Sir Martin Gilbert, pre-eminent among Jewish historians. He subtitled one book on a well-known group of UK Holocaust survivors: “Triumph over Adversity”.

Really?

These questions have been preoccupying me this year in particular. Passover and the seven following weeks to Shavuot, or Pentecost, marks exactly eighty years between the creation of the ghetto in Munkacs on 18 April 1944 and ending on the day before Shavuot, 26 May 1944, when the final deportation cattle trucks from the town arrived in Auschwitz. On 30 May, Munkacs was declared judenfrei.

Less than a year old at the time, I thankfully do not remember that Passover.  A cousin, Sori, who was there as a young girl, will celebrate the Seder in Manchester with many of her descendants. She and I are the last living persons who were at that final Munkacs Seder. She has left a vivid memoir of the wonders of Passover visits from Bratislava, Slovakia, where her mother had moved when she married. Both Sori and her mother, my great aunt Roszie, will feature in this story.

Of course I should have asked my Mother, her friends and other relatives much more when they were still living. Equally, a paternal cousin has been urging me not to wait too long before putting pen to paper or, better, starting to record and type up what I know.

My friend Daniel Johnson, as editor of TheArticle, has agreed to publish a series of pieces. Each of them will coincide with stages of my story between April and July 1944. At the very least, this will expose gaps in my knowledge and research.

The Holocaust in Hungary was particularly brutal and effective. My family’s fate and mine are linked with important, unresolved Holocaust controversies. The basic facts have been sufficiently well established to withstand all but the most malign of Holocaust deniers and revisionists. The endless flow of books does not abate about how Adolf Eichmann and his small team of extermination experts were able to deport some 437,000 people, virtually all of them Jews, mostly to Auschwitz, within the first four months after the Nazi entry into Hungary on 19 March 1944.

SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962),

Yet I have a feeling that much remains unresearched, untold, and often misinterpreted. Despite many studies and memorial projects [including thousands of recorded interviews, unfortunately often conducted by under-qualified interviewers], history has a long way to go.

This first article will cover the creation of the Munkacs ghetto, the intractable question of how much Jews in the town and elsewhere in Hungary knew of what lay ahead, and the extent to which some of them at least took steps to avoid their coming fate.

A set of sequels is due to deal separately with Munkacs on 5, 19 and 23-24 May 1944, Budapest 30 June 1944 and Budakalasz July 6-8 1944. It is aimed to publish each of them on the corresponding day this year.

My conclusions about the extent of Jewish “triumph over adversity” will be more nuanced than in much historical and journalistic literature. Without notable acts of initiative and bravery, neither my Mother, nor Sori and her sister Ruthie, nor I could have survived.

Most did not.

More could have.

I am in the curious position of knowing that I was there, but too young to remember anything. Moreover, from the age of five I was raised in London by a beloved aunt who was the widow of my Hungarian [paternal] great uncle. But Auntie knew no Hungarian and was not part of a survivor community. Though always aware of my background, I very soon forgot all my Hungarian. It was not until much later that I set out to look seriously into those early years.

Part II: Hitler, Horthy and the Jews

The instruction that the Jews of Munkacs were to move immediately into a few streets in an especially Jewish part of town came on the last day of the Passover. The festival was earlier in that year than in 2024. Jews living outside the designated ghetto were almost immediately to abandon their homes, lock the doors, and hand the keys in marked envelopes to the Adolf Eichmann-led Hungarian [mostly but not universally willing] gendarmes.

Munkacs was a town then in eastern Hungary and now, renamed Mukachevo, in Western Ukraine. Its 13,000 to 14,000 Jews constituted nearly half of the population. The more assimilated and richer Jews of Budapest and even members of what have come to be known as “modern Orthodox” congregations tended to look down on Munkacs as an impoverished Hasidic backwater. This was only partly accurate.

My Mother’s father was a charitable Hasid; her mother was, at least when away alone on holidays with my Mother in Vienna, Italy or the Tatra Mountains, rather different. The family business prospered. It consisted of preparing quilts and other trousseau needs for brides.

Munkacs and the surrounding Carpathian territory had been transferred from Czechoslovakian to Hungarian rule in 1938, following the Munich Agreement. The Hungarians passed increasingly harsh anti-Semitic laws and supported Hitler in the Second World War. Jewish living standards declined drastically. Nevertheless, by 1944, my Mother’s family, the Seidmans, had not yet become destitute. Jewish men were forced into labour battalions where they had dangerous and dirty assignments, such as clearing minefields for the Hungarian army. In 1941, thousands of Jews whose citizenship papers did not satisfy the Hungarian authorities were deported across the border with the Soviet Union. This particularly affected Carpathian Jews. The territory into which they were expelled was captured soon afterwards by the Nazis when Hitler launched the German attack on Stalin. Most of the deportees were then shot by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen.

Yet Hungary remained until 1944 a relative haven for Jews. At least they had not been subject, as in nearby countries, to systematic extermination. By 1944, the tide of war had turned in favour of Britain, the USA, the Soviet Union and their allies. Hungary’s Jews could hope to survive Hitler.

Paradoxically, this brought disaster to Hungary’s Jews. UK and US agents attempted to persuade Hungary’s authoritarian, pro-Hitler but non-Nazi “Regent”, Admiral Horthy, to bring the country over to the Allies. Some relatively moderate Hungarian politicians actively backed this effort. The British Special Operations Executive had gone as far as to persuade Horthy to accept radio communications equipment in his governing castle in Buda. Negotiating with an enemy state planning to change sides is an inherently dangerous business.  The talks became known to Nazi intelligence.

Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary

As a curious side note, before the publisher George Weidenfeld died in 2016, I had meant to ask him about a related matter — one which would not have pleased him. After the war, Lord Weidenfeld had published the memoirs of the senior Austrian intelligence agent Wilhelm Hoettl, who seems to have been instrumental in passing to Hitler information about Horthy’s planned betrayal. Hoettl thereby doomed Hungary’s Jews. He was by no means the only Nazi agent who, soon after Hitler’s fall — and in Hoettl’s case while the war was still in progress — served various Allied secret services. Weidenfeld faced an accusation of libel for an aspect of the Hoettl memoirs. He therefore agreed to Hoettl’s suggestion that he meet Nazis on the run from Allied justice who could provide Weidenfeld with evidence on Hoettl’s [and thereby also the publisher’s] behalf. In his own memoirs Weidenfeld describes this meeting.

Part III: My grandmother prepares

Across the border, Slovakia’s clerical fascist government for a time in 1942 and 1943 actually paid the Nazis to transport many of its Jews to Auschwitz. My paternal aunt, who lived in Slovakia with her husband, his parents and their four children were all deported, except for the eldest child who escaped to Hungary, where she became friendly with my Mother. Separately from this, my Mother’s aunt lived with her husband and their two young girls in the Slovakian capital, Bratislava. To escape the Slovakian deportations for the comparative safety of Hungary, the two girls were smuggled over the border to Budapest, where my grandmother had to arrange ever changing places of refuge.

When the Hungarian government eventually legalised the status of escapees from Slovakia, the two girls, my Mother’s first cousins, moved to the family home in Munkacs. But following the entry of the German Nazis, the girls once again became illegals. This created a special problem when on 18 April, my Mother and I, together with the rest of the immediate Seidman family, as well as Cousins Sori and Ruthie, were forced into the few streets assigned to Jews. Sori’s memoir describes the initially distant, then growing noise of what she assumed were German forces as they approached to announce the new ghetto.

As if the normal special work of preparations for the Passover had not been enough, the four weeks between the entry of Eichmann and his team into Budapest and the ghettoisation of Munkacs had seen a succession of outrageous anti-Jewish demands and no fewer than one hundred regulations. These were designed to frighten, rob, and confuse: in other words, to make it hard for Jews to communicate with each other, to hide or to resist.

Following an initial reign of arbitrary SS terror, many of these anti-Jewish regulations were announced late in March. From 5 April, Jews would be obliged to wear the yellow star to identify themselves in public. From 7 April Jews would be prohibited from travelling. Also from 7 April, it would be illegal for them to own radios. There was a mass of financial regulations and related measures designed to prevent Jews from drawing cash from their bank accounts; jewellery and other valuables had to be registered; it was forbidden to pass them for safekeeping to non-Jews.

Meanwhile, the small but fully prepared team of German SS extermination specialists lost no time. Rich Budapest Jews were arrested so that they could be extorted. Many Jews were arrested at railway stations in Budapest; the Jewish Council faced lightening demands to produce pianos, mattresses and varied luxuries to provide accommodation for the Nazis in the style which they felt was their right.

The immediate Nazi aim was to secure compliance by the Jewish Councils in Budapest and then elsewhere. The Nazis achieved this quickly and easily. Nazi troops entered Hungary on 19 March 1944. This followed immediately after Hitler had summoned Admiral Horthy to a castle in Austria to present the Regent with a (successful) ultimatum: to replace the then Hungarian premier with another far more pro-Nazi one.

Until then, though Horthy had been actively pro-Hitler on the battlefield, he had resisted demands to deport Hungary’s Jews. The richest Jews remained vital to the economy. We can detect elements of an indirect deal between Horthy and right-wing elements within the British Foreign Office. If the Allied air forces refrained from bombing Budapest, Horthy would refrain from agreeing to Hitler’s demands that he deport the country’s Jews.

This deal explains a document I found many years ago in the Macartney archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. During the Second World War, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) housed a research and press department at Balliol College, Oxford. Headed by the anti-Semitic Arnold Toynbee, its Hungary expert was another anti-Semite, Carlyle Macartney of All Souls College. (Macartney’s anti-Semitism is acknowledged in biographical writings after his death and was confirmed to me by another former fellow of All Souls.) Macartney, though non-Nazi, sympathised and was friendly with leading rightist Hungarian political figures who might be tempted to steer Hungary away from the Nazi camp. The document in his archive consists of an appeal by the head of the Jewish Council in Budapest, Samu Stern, to the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann and other prominent Jews in Allied countries that the Allies should refrain from bombing Budapest. This would benefit Hungary’s Jews.

This apparently informal deal worked until the Nazi entry into Budapest. Less than two weeks later the Allies bombed Budapest. The Nazis responded with the threat that 100 (later reduced to 10) Jews would be killed for every Hungarian killed in such raids.

Along with oppressive regulations and confiscations, poorer Jews in Munkacs and its Carpathian surroundings faced hunger and disease. On April 23, five days after ghettoisation had been implemented, there was an outbreak of typhoid in one of its sections.

The Seidman household in Munkacs had two advantages. It was not yet impoverished. Even more important was my grandmother’s prior experience of arranging hiding places for her young nieces, Sori and Ruthie, while they remained “illegals” after their escapes into Hungary from the deportations in Slovakia. It is reasonable to conclude that this left her with no illusions about what was likely to happen in Hungary. In any case, the sheer extent of her preparations for the worst makes it clear that these were already largely in place before the instruction to Jews to move into a ghetto. One part of these arrangements involved other Jews, so she was not alone.

My grandmother prepared in at least seven ways, two of which will feature in a future article. She arranged to hold a store of banknotes. She obtained condoms, not an item for which any in the house had regular use. She attempted to find a gentile with whom my Mother could hide as his wife. Though my grandmother, with her blond looks, could easily pass as a non-Jew, the same did not apply to her Hasid husband. So she did not pursue that avenue of hiding for herself and the project of arranging a false marriage for my Mother was abandoned for a reason which my Mother did not tell me.

Then came my grandmother’s plans to turn money into diamonds, which could be hidden if she or my Mother were deported or otherwise needed in the future to exchange diamonds for cash. A hiding place for diamonds was carved in my Mother’s shoes. For bulkier valuables, such as silver objects used for Jewish ritual and normal household purposes, burial was the method. For clothes, trousseau goods and perhaps other objects, my Mother told me of a collective arrangement with some of my grandmother’s friends: they had found a gentile willing to house them. The belongings of each depositor were somehow marked, so that any women who were able to return after deportation could identify what was theirs. Finally, a separate gentile agreed to keep some other clothes.

Though my grandmother, her father and the other senior members in the house all perished, all four of the junior generations survived, as did 2-3,000 of the 13-14,000 Jews living in the town at the time of the Nazi occupation.

This is the first of a series of articles, to be continued on 5 May.

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