Although Hungary was in an alliance with Germany and Italy, we were as Hungarian as our non-Jewish neighbors. Hungary would take good care of us.
As told to Toby Orlander Thaler by Mr. Yosef Herczl
Iwas a scrawny, undersized, 12-year-old Hungarian Jew in 1939, when war came to Europe. Father was emphatic that it wasn’t a war against Hungarian Jews — perhaps against Polish, German, Lithuanian, and Czechoslovakian Jews, but not Hungarian Jews. Although Hungary was in an alliance with Germany and Italy, we were as Hungarian as our non-Jewish neighbors. Hungary would take good care of us.
By 1941 Hungary had become home to many Polish refugees. We listened with politeness and fascination to their stories of Nazi atrocities against Polish Jewry stories of ghettos and mass murder yet thought they were spinning gizmos — gross exaggerations. When we heard that the Hungarian government had expelled more than 20 000 of those Polish refugees to Kamenets-Podolski where they were massacred by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen we were sad. But we still thought we Hungarian Jews were safe.
Soon afterwards all men of military age were taken into forced labor battalions (“Munka Tabor”) and sent to the Ukraine. By the end of the war 27,000 of these men had been killed many of them by their Hungarian overseers. Yet even this forced conscription didn’t set off warning bells.
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