Escape from Munkacs: Part VI

The Budakalasz brickyard, 8 July 1944

This is the last of six articles. Each one has been written to tell of an event as nearly as possible exactly 80 years after it occurred. Each episode has been an exploration into a pers onal history I cannot remember. I was ten months old at the time of my escape from the Munkacs ghetto in 1944 and nearly thirteen months old during the happening at the Budakalasz brickyard which I attempt to deal with here.

This last essay is a few days’ late because it has involved a greater than anticipated amount of research, which remains incomplete.

1. Budakalasz brickyard, 30 June – 8 July 1944.

The historical event of 80 years ago at issue here was the last mass deportation from Hungary during the Holocaust.

On 26 June 1944, Hungary’s Regent, Admiral Miklos Horthy, felt pressured by external threats (especially the Allied bombing of Budapest) to announce at the Crown Council that Budapest’s Jews, unlike those from the rest of Hungary, would not be deported to Auschwitz. Plans for that final act of destruction, the largest and most dramatic of all, were well advanced.

The German extermination experts who followed Adolf Eichmann into Budapest on 19 March 1944 and equally avid Hungarian mass murder specialists were not to be so easily deterred. They were determined that Jews from the outskirts of the capital — not strictly from the capital itself and thus by way of a bureaucratic nicety excluded from Horthy’s declaration — should proceed to Auschwitz. They rounded up the victims on 30 June to 3 July and packed them into brickyards at Monor and Budakalasz. Since railways were used to move bricks, such yards were placed in reach of rail tracks. Brick factories regularly became makeshift entrainment camps during the Holocaust.

The technique was to gather Jews into an unsuitable place, rob, starve, demoralise, make them soil themselves for lack of basic sanitation and, when it came to rich Jews, to torture them to produce hidden jewels and valuables. Then, once they had been brought rapidly to a point of despair, to lead them — hoping for relief — into cattle trucks of transports destined for Auschwitz.

According to Randolph Braham, 24,148 Jews were deported in eight trains from these entrainment camps and others in “Zone VI”, excluding Budapest proper, on 6-8 July 1944.

A miniscule number of Jews were excused from deportation. Fewer than 100 were taken from Budakalasz by bus to the Jewish deaf mute home on Columbus Street in central Budapest.

Together with my paternal grandmother, aunt, first cousin and a few added children, I was among the saved.

2. What was Budakalasz like?

As the Hungarian historian Borbola Klacksmann has written, municipal archives are uninformative about the Budakalasz entrainment camp because Eichmann’s team ran it. I still have a way to go in gathering evidence about the day to day experience of the first week of July 1944, when it was in operation.

Imre Kertesz, the Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian author — a Jew from an assimilated family who was a teenager at the time — wrote of his experience in Budakalasz in the very week I was there. In his famous book Fatelessness, he chooses to regard the experience of his fictional self as part of a theatre of the absurd. Auschwitz, his next port of call, was in his hero’s description “boring”. He is none too flattering about the role in Budakalasz of representatives of the Jewish Council of Budapest. His absurdist dream is at once an act of rebellion but also of denial and self-defence.

While Kertesz was still alive, I had intended to try to fix a meeting with him. He did not survive long enough. Last week, though, I met a friend from undergraduate Oxford days who had contacted me on reading an earlier episode of “Escape from Munkacs”, the town (then almost half-Jewish) from which his mother had come to England in the 1930s. As a central banker in Frankfurt, it had been his task to host an event of the European Central Bank at which Kertesz was the speaker. They met afterwards. Though I received considerable information, I was left feeling that I hadn’t missed much by not meeting the celebrated writer. That, maybe, is an illusion. But my friend’s description of their encounter left me feeling that the writer had draped himself — with great success — in literary garb by way of distancing himself from historical reality. He had stressed to the Frankfurt audience that, though he had been through the experiences relayed in his book, the hero was fictional. By contrast, I am searching for the history.

A valuable set of survivor interviews recorded soon after the Nazi defeat, the DEGOB archive (with transcripts translated into English), provides grim reading about their humiliations. Here, too, Borbola Klacksmann is a good source.

In the rush to finish this piece for the 80th anniversary of the operation involving my release, I have not re-found the source of a report I remember in an archive held in a computer under repair. The account of Budakalasz was sent by a Swedish diplomat to Stockholm after a visit to the camp. From there, it was reported back to the US War Refugee Board. A senior member of President Roosevelt’s State Department then sent a protest to the Hungarian Government — far too late, of course, to save the inmates from the Auschwitz cattle trains. The Swedish report, sent from one of Budapest’s neutral legations, demonstrates — as if that were needed — how open the process of persecution had become in Hungary by the Summer of 1944.

That the heads both of the Swiss and the Swedish legations in Budapest visited Budakalasz, as did Cardinal Seredi, is reported separately in a study of the war crimes trial, held in Hungary months after the end of the war, of Eichmann’s three main Hungarian co-operators: Baky, Endre and Jaross.

My paternal Aunt Rachel, herself one of the most significant historical sources on the camp, was later to remark how meagrely guarded it had been. She named someone who had merely walked out of Budakalasz without hindrance. How many others might have done the same?

So: should Jewish resistance organisations have been more active in issuing warnings. Should they have done more to encourage evasion and escape, rather than engage in negotiation with Eichmann and his crowd?

3. Dealing with the devil

The effort by Dr Kasztner and his colleagues on the Budapest-based Relief and Rescue Committee [ Va’adat Ezra ve’Hazalah ] to negotiate with Eichmann and other senior SS officers was to become the subject in 1954 of Israel’s most famous and most damaging libel action. Brought in 1954 by the authorities of Prime Minister David Ben Gurion’s administration to defend Dr Kasztner of the Budapest Va’ada against accusations of collaboration with the Nazis, the judge sided largely with the accusers. Judge Halevi famously stated that, in his futile quest for a “Blood for Trucks” bargain to save Hungary’s Jews, Kasztner’s dealings had led him to “sell his soul to the devil”.

There were two main accusations against the Jewish negotiators. The first was that their false hope of securing a big deal to persuade Eichmann to abandon the plan to murder Hungary’s Jews led the Jewish negotiators to keep silent about what they knew about the fate of victims deported to Auschwitz. The second was that they were tempted into side deals which allowed them to save their own families, other wealthy Jews and political associates at the expense of their co-religionists from whom the knowledge of their likely fate was kept.

The initial case lasted 18 months, ending in 1955. By the time the Israeli Government had successfully appealed against the verdict, Kasztner had been assassinated in Tel Aviv in 1957. Grandmother Lea Duschinsky, like me a Kasztner beneficiary, had a nephew, David Goitein, who was a member of the Israeli Supreme Court panel which posthumously exonerated Kasztner.

An interim scheme involved allowing a special train to depart from Budapest on 30 June with nearly 1,700 favoured passengers who were to be exempted from the ongoing deportations to Auschwitz. With a very few exceptions, the privileged passengers would eventually find safety in Switzerland and subsequently make their way toward Palestine. But this was by no means the only side-deal with Eichmann.

In 1946 Kasztner, by that time in Switzerland, wrote a report to Zionist authorities, defending his wartime negotiations with the Nazis. In that document, he also described the smaller bargain which led to the inclusion of my Grandmother Duschinsky’s family group in the list of 17 favoured families saved at Busakalasz.    

Aunt Rachel was later to speak with pride of her own actions at Budakalasz. A history of my paternal grandmother’s Goitein family records the deportation from Rakospalota, the town where my grandfather and then my Father and then my Uncle Hersch were successively the Orthodox rabbis:

“One morning the police entered Rakospalota and transported all the Jews to a building block factory out of the city next to the rail-road. … For six days the Jews were given neither food nor water. On the seventh day just before being sent to Auschwitz, the police called out the names of 17 families who were ordered to come to the main Gate. The last of the names was Lea Duschinsky and her family.”

Apart from Rachel’s three year old daughter, my first cousin Katica [Rivkah], and myself, the account recalls how Rachel included as family members and thereby saved four other children, one of them a cousin’s child and the others unrelated. This was highly risky, since including non-family children might easily have led to exclusion of the entire group from the saved.

Kasztner’s 1946 account (the Bericht ) gave this account. [I am most grateful to Paul Bogdanor, both for sending me a copy and for a great deal of other information collected when he was preparing his excellently researched but controversial book Kasztner’s Crime .]

“On the night of July 8, the last deportation train set out from Budakalasz and left the country.

Referring to our agreement, I repeatedly demanded that Eichmann release a group of Jews, this time from the brickworks of Budakalasz. … he finally agreed to the release of 25 people. Accompanied by one of the SS guards from the Columbus camp, Sandor Offenbach drove to Budakalasz in a truck, to pick the people up. The SS were ‘influenced’. The chaos at the brickworks helped us and thirty people were loaded onto the truck instead of twenty-five. The accompanying SS man was in a good mood. He said that he was prepared to go there again. This time 33 ‘prominent individuals’ were brought to Columbus Street. The agreed ‘twenty-five’ still had to be fetched … the brickworks was already empty, the last train was about to depart. Offenbach managed to get 25 people out of the last cars at random, including 5 unknown children without knowing their names or their parents’ further fate.”

I do not know how relevant or even decent it is to probe further. It is possible that I was one of the “unknown children”. Aunt Rachel may have been unclear about the meaning of the instruction that Grandmother Lea Duschinsky’s family was to join the group of the saved.

According to a story I only vaguely remember being told, Rachel knew the circumstances in which her sister, my Aunt Sarah, and four [not three as written earlier] of her children had lost their lives during an earlier deportation from Topolcany in nearby Slovakia. The tragedy had occurred when she, four children and her in-laws were facing deportation. It seems that her husband had been deported separately and died, probably in Treblinka, the extermination camp of Warsaw’s Jews. Unless the story is garbled in my mind, it was because my Aunt Sarah had been unwilling to leave her husband’s parents to enter the transport that she and her whole family were forced to join them on the deportation train.

By venturing at Budakalasz to increase the definition of what constituted Grandmother Lea’s family, was she risking a repetition of what had happened in Slovakia? Would all of us have been relegated to the cattle train? In any case, how could Aunt Rachel have known in July 1944 what had occurred to her sister and her family two years earlier in Slovakia? But why doubt such a highly intelligent and educated woman as Aunt Rachel, later for many years a school inspector in Israel? What is so clear is that her actions at Budakalasz in saving extra children largely determined her identity and in ways which may not have been wholly positive.

The Goitein family history records that Rachel gave a lecture on what happened at Budakalasz at the bar mitzvah in 1999 of her grandson Roni Genizi. I have discovered this too late for this article and have yet to track down the document. 

At this stage, I am torn between two realities: that memories even when retold are too easily disbelieved and that trauma and constant retelling in a survivor’s mind also demands caution. My own prejudice, as readers of Part V will be only too well aware, is that professional historians are far too ready to demean and disregard survivors.

4. Who saved me?

Aunt Rachel was to spend her remaining life coping with and expressing gratitude for the deliverance at the brickyard. Referring again to the entry in the Goitein family history, three times a day Rachel would recite the psalms of praise, the Hallel, usually reserved for Jewish holy days, for the rest of her life.

She undoubtedly saved me. But had my Father’s family been less possessive after I had arrived in Budapest, having been smuggled out of the ghetto in Munkacs, I would not have been deported to Budakalasz in the first place.

Having seen the conditions in Munkacs, which Jews in Budapest could not yet imagine, my Mother sought a hiding place, not only for herself but for me. Her close friend, Vali Mermelstein, one of eight daughters, had found a Christian family willing to provide refuge.

5. Columbus Street

I have very rarely visited Hungary.  On one visit, I searched Columbus Street for any signs of the camp to which our family group was taken in July 1944. There were no traces. I have not yet examined the details of events at the Columbus Street Camp while my relatives and I were there. Nor have I yet determined how Grandmother Lea and family came to be selected for such favourable treatment.

Columbus Street was the main one of three places where Jews selected in the controversial Kasztner-Eichmann negotiations were kept.

The Budakalasz deal was one of a whole series. They had a logic for all who were involved. Eichmann rushed to complete the destruction of European Jewry in the ever lessening time available before Hitler’s military downfall. Jews trapped by Nazi occupation were desperate to live.

It was unashamedly a place of sanctuary for Jews reserved as bargaining chips. Though the choice of who was to be “privileged” was complex and, though not all of the lucky ones were wealthy, money and family influence undoubtedly played an important part in the ghastly selection process.

Since the inmates of the Columbus Street Camp seemed destined for the next stage of ransom, many Jews battled to gain entry into the camp. Team Eichmann went as far as to post five SS guards at the camp: not to prevent Jews from escaping, but to protect them from raids by Hungarian gendarmes and to limit entry by Jews seeking refuge.

6. The Budakalasz brickyard deal in historical context

Some Jewish attempts to “deals with the devil” before and during the Holocaust  have been greatly discussed. They include, most famously, the Ha’avara agreement of the 1930s, the Europa Plan of the Bratislava-based “Working Group” in 1942 and the “Blood for Trucks” negotiations, involving Eichmann and the Budapest-based Jewish Va’ada in 1944.

Some lines of criticism of Jewish actions under Nazi rule have been indecent. Other more reasonable criticisms have too easily been brushed aside. Concerning Kasztner, it should be possible to give critical assessments without any implications of Jewish self-hatred. I do not agree with all of Paul Bogdanor’s criticisms in his book Kasztner’s Crime. Yet they need to be read alongside Sir Martin Gilbert’s criticisms along some of the same lines (most recently cited by Lady Esther Gilbert in her monthly blog). Buried in Randolph Braham’s magisterial 1,200-page masterwork on the Holocaust in Hungary, The Politics of Genocide , are harsh words about the inadequacies of the Budapest Jewish Council.

To those of us fortunate enough not to face the same threats of extermination as Jews in Hungary from March 1944, it is all too easy to see through Eichmann’s method. His tactic, seen in the Budakalasz deal as in a number of others, was to give minor concessions as a distraction from the remorseless procession of cattle trains to Auschwitz. He wanted to delay and parry outside responses.

In July 1944, when so many of the country’s Jews had already been murdered, Hungary’s senile, anti-Semitic Regent Miklos Horthy was wavering about whether to endorse continued deportations. The prospects of Allied bombing of Budapest, followed by Hitler’s defeat and after that the threat of the hangman’s noose for himself made Horthy rethink. But he did so in a remarkably inconsistent, cowardly fashion.

If Budapest’s Jews were to escape their planned deportations, then Jews in the suburbs would not be so lucky. If he agreed to stop deportations altogether, as he announced early in July 1944, that went along with talks with the Nazis about restarting them. Hungarian diplomats prevaricated, sugaring the pill of further deportations by the promise that they would be carried out more humanely. Train carriages rather than animal wagons on the way to the gas chambers could be substituted if that eased the consciences of the Allies. If Horthy were to satisfy the Germans about resuming deportations, he would permit the exit of 7,000 Jewish families. So it went on.

The most remarkable feature of the account of Horthy’s ongoing negotiation from July 1944 with the German Plenipotentiary, Edmund Veesenmayer, was the latter’s constant badgering of the old man to continue the destruction of Hungary’s surviving Jews. Releasing less than one per cent of the Jews at the Budakalasz brickyard was not a bad idea for Nazi exterminationists, if Auschwitz swallowed the rest.

Outside Budapest the technique of “kill big, save small” flourished. Team Eichmann worked hard from early May 1944 to seal the border between Kolozsvar and Romania. This was Kasztner’s home town. Team Eichmann, as a concession, permitted nearly 400 Jews from the town to go to the Columbus Street Camp while the rest went to Auschwitz. It would have been less than human to expect Kasztner to have missed a chance to protect his own loved ones, by including them in the “privileged” (again the same word) group. It was outrageous that he should have been faced with this grim choice. Though blame cannot reasonably shift from the perpetrators, the feelings of Jewish survivors of families who were not among the “privileged” must be more respected than has often been the case.

Apart from events on the Hungarian-Romanian border relating to Kasztner’s dealings with Eichmann, there is evidence of considerable other traffic involving aspects of potential Jewish resistance, where German intelligence agencies (themselves in turmoil in 1944) had relationships with Jewish bodies. They sometimes tolerated and even aided the project of “tiyul” — namely cross-border “outings” by members of Zionist youth groups. Tolerating and even helping youth activists to exit Hungary for Palestine meant that persons who otherwise might be anti-Nazi activists had their attention drawn away from assisting resistance within Hungary. I have come across credible evidence of collaboration, or at least knowing toleration, between the opposing sides. Again, the essence of the matter is that the leading members of the forces within the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews felt it tactically wise to divert Jewish attention and to deceive the Jewish side with the illusion of grand deals such as “blood for trucks” in return for non-resistance and limited warnings to ordinary Jewish citizens.

7. Allied assistance to persecuted Jews: too little, too late.

There has been a belated effort from within the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC to play up the work of the US War Refugee Board in assisting persecuted Jews through various means in 1944. This is a large subject. US encouragement of Swedish activities in Budapest in the final months before Soviet troops captured Budapest is rightly stressed and praised. Nevertheless, the role of the War Refugee Board’s office in Switzerland is too easily exaggerated by its advocates. Moreover, Allen Dulles, the operative in Switzerland of the OSS (the precursor of the CIA) arguably was already paying attention to America’s likely future alliance with Germany against the Soviet Union, in preparation for placing Nazis on the US payroll.

I wish it were possible to be more upbeat about the wartime record of British officialdom. Winston Churchill is not the intended target of this remark. A re-read of Bernard Wasserstein’s Britain and the Jews of Europe is no easier now than when it was originally published. Wasserstein cites Lord Moyne’s cynical reason for favouring the despatch of Jewish parachutists to the European arena on the ground that, since they were likely to be killed, British troops in Palestine would not need to face them after the War.

Deployment of these parachutists, including Israel’s Joan of Arc heroine Hannah Senesh, raises questions for me. What was the purpose in sending them? Aid to local Jewish communities explicitly was not to be their prime duty. Helping Allied airmen shot down on the return from missions to bomb the Romanian oilfields was a credible and useful aim. But I wonder if there was another reason.

In the spring of 1944, the UK was involved in the vital strategic aim of deceiving the Nazis about the place of the expected invasion of Europe (D-Day). Among the plans was Operation Zeppelin. By leading the Nazi defence staff into anticipating an attack in the Mediterranean rather than on the English Channel coastline, the USA, Britain and Allies could persuade the Nazis to keep troops in other parts of Europe. If pro-British parachutists were landed in Croatia, might that not add to the Zeppelin objective? The implication that the parachutists were seen as expendable by the British is sad and, I must stress, rejected by a leading Hannah Senesh historical expert.

A different dimension of my cautious view about some 1940s wartime opinion among UK officials comes from the papers in the Bodleian, cited earlier in this series, of C. A. Macartney, the academic, Foreign Office intelligence analyst and broadcaster to Hungary. Controversy about his record of anti-Semitism and the decision to stop his wartime broadcasts to Budapest has re-emerged.

All these are highly sensitive topics and caution is needed. Condemnation of some then popular social attitudes must not overwhelm judgements about the overall heroism and massive sacrifice of the British people in the battle against Hitler.

But we need a similar sense of caution and balance when it comes to the action of Jewish leaders and organisations in Nazi Europe. Jews who suffered or whose families suffered as the result of Jewish attempts to deal with the Nazi need compassion, respect and understanding. So arguably do those who, like Dr Kasztner, acted in intolerable conditions to save fellow Jews, even if their actions often back-fired.

8. Coda: Veesenmayer, Haller, Hacke and Oxford

One of the saddest and most significant themes of Braham’s The Politics of Genocide is the failure after 1945 to bring most of the perpetrators of the Holocaust in Hungary to justice and, in many cases, their premature release from prison.

As if this were not enough, writers such as Hannah Arendt used their literary skills to pour more scorn on her fellow Jews than on Adolf Eichmann in her bestseller Eichmann in Jerusalem . Self-criticism is not necessarily unhealthy. Parts of this series reflect concerns not altogether different from hers.

But it also is dangerous to play down some trends in current Holocaust historiography. Sir Richard Evans is a leading and balanced figure in the world of German history and Holocaust studies. Our only two meetings have been positive and cordial. Occasionally, he is in my opinion off-beam when he launches into an attack. I am the subject of a whole chapter of his vitriol in a piece he included in a set of essays. This is not the place to answer point by point.

The underlying issue essentially concerns the Holocaust in Hungary and its afterlife in Oxford and Cambridge a few years ago.

Three of the most objectionable Nazi players in Budapest in 1944 went on to work for a Hamburg merchant and avid propagandist with a dreadful record called Alfred Toepfer. His long-time company assistant, Haller, had been one of the Nazis’ most important agents in Budapest during 1944. He seems to have been significant in the process which eventually toppled Horthy in October 1944 and introduced the Szalasi regime, which presided over a bloodbath in Budapest in the final weeks before the fall of the city to the Russians. Toepfer’s postwar secretary, Barbara Hacke, was also an unrepentent Nazi, as is clear from the Macartney papers. She had been the Nazi Plenipotentiary Veesenmayer’s secretary in Budapest. Veesenmayer’s extremism while in office in Budapest is clear from Braham’s study. Veesenmayer’s pre- and postwar records are currently under study. Evans’s defence of Toepfer seems to be that Toepfer did not employ him for long.

Universities have felt obliged to re-examine their associations with arguably tainted sources of money related to the slave trade. I am less than satisfied about methods of assessing controversial sources of money dating from Nazi Germany.

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