George Eisen. <i>A Summer of Mass Murder: 1941 Rehearsal for the Hungarian Holocaust</i>

For the author, George Eisen, this book began as a personal pilgrimage to a remote town in Ukraine called Kamenets-Podolsk. This name has for years been spoken with dread and apprehension in his family’s history because this small, otherwise nondescript town is the place where two of his uncles, Samu (Samuel) and Karcsi (Charles) were taken and killed in a three-day frenzy of mass murder of Jews that took place between August 27 and 29, 1941. According to the author, this book was, because of the personal dimension, the hardest and most challenging he had ever written. The author gives voice to the victims through testimonials gathered from survivors and witnesses.In the early chapters, Eisen provides an overview of the historical role of Jews of Hungary and the Ostjuden [eastern Jews], the term used for Jews from Galicia. The late nineteenth to early twentieth century was a flowering time for the Jews of Hungary. After 1840, Jews were given the freedom to move and settle in cities in Hungary, and in 1860 they were allowed to own agricultural plots of land. The Emancipation Bill, in which Jews were declared to have the same civil and political rights as Hungary’s Christians, became law in 1867. By 1895, the Law of Reception provided that Judaism was included on an equal basis with the other state-accepted religions of Hungary. Although Hungary’s economy remained largely traditional, feudal and agriculture-based, during the late nineteenth century many parts of the country saw a transformation to an urbanized, commercial-industrial economy. As part of the general legal equality introduced by liberal nationalists, Jews received full legal and economic emancipation. In light of the liberal laws and opportunities afforded Jews in Hungary, their situation was unique when compared to other countries in East Central Europe. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, they migrated to Hungary in great numbers. By the turn of the century, the number of Jews living in Hungary approached one million (out of a population of 18,264,533).1The liberal and modernist Neolog Jewish congregations were inclined toward full integration into Hungarian society. Eisen points out that this assimilated segment, cosmopolitan and urban, “felt a sense of embarrassment about their backward co-religionists, and also felt threatened by looming competition from these newcomers” (21). The author also outlines the background of the Jewish presence in both the 1918–19 Mihály Károlyi government and the leadership of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, led by Béla Kun. Both of these short-lived regimes took place following the chaos of the end of World War I, when “Red Terror” was followed by “White Terror.” In the wake of the defeat and dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire and Hungary’s enormous loss of land, natural resources, and one-third of the Hungarian-speaking population, Hungarians were left disillusioned, angry, and bitter, looking for a scapegoat. The ensuing Miklós Horthy regime soon passed a numerus clausus law, followed by more anti-Jewish legislation in 1938, 1939, and 1941.Chapter 3, “Galicia: An Exile into the Unknown,” begins with the moving words of László Zobel, one of the oldest survivors of the 1941 deportations. The quotes and testimonials by survivors constitute one of the unique strengths of the book. These quotes and interviews humanize a shameful chapter in Hungarian history. As the author writes in the epilogue, “human stories are what history is made of. The role of the historian is to corroborate such narratives” (263).Eisen has scoured a wide range of sources and archives in Europe, North America, and Israel in compiling the primary sources used in writing this book—including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives along with several other archives in Budapest, DEGOB (Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság [National Relief Committee for Deportees]) interviews, letters, and correspondence—and countless secondary sources.In June 1941, German forces had begun the invasion of the Soviet Union. Hungary was at the time an ally of Germany, as was Romania. Both countries had implemented the curtailing of the rights of the Jewish minorities within their borders via anti-Jewish laws. In addition, both countries deported stateless refugees, mostly Polish and Russian Jews, to Nazi-occupied Ukraine. The rounding up and deportation of “alien” Jews in Hungary began in Transcarpathia on July 14, 1941. Three institutional bodies—the government commissioner; the agency responsible for foreign nationals living in Hungary, KEOKH (Külföldieket Ellenőrző Országos Központi Hatóság [Central National Authority for Controlling Foreigners]); and the military—were entrusted with carrying out the expulsions. Jews who couldn’t demonstrate Hungarian citizenship were collected and transported first to the border town of Kőrösmező (today Yasinya, Ukraine), near the Polish-Hungarian border.Some Jews who could prove their Hungarian citizenship were also caught up in the net of rapid expulsions. Eisen writes about the inconsistent way in which the orders were carried out. On the one hand, there were members of the military who were meticulous at checking documents, such as Captain Nándor Batizfalvy, the official representative of KEOKH, who carefully examined the papers of the arrivals to the internment camp at Kőrösmező. As the deportees disembarked, Batizfalvy sent back those who had proper documentation. Others, such as camp commander Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Orbán, opposed such follow-up checks, and once the detainees were in the camp, forbade administrators to conduct them.From Kőrösmező, as Eisen writes, the unfortunate Jews were transported by Hungarian army transport trucks to Galicia, over the Dniester river, where they were often unceremoniously ordered to disembark in fields in the middle of nowhere, under the open sky. Sometimes they were told to go to the “castle,” which in reality was a tsarist fortress. They were then instructed to march to Kamenets-Podolsk and forced to do so by roving bands of Ukrainian paramilitary groups, who robbed and brutalized the defenseless groups. No estimates exist of the number of Hungarian Jews who were slaughtered by Ukrainian paramilitary groups. Romanian authorities had at the same time deported tens of thousands of Jews from Romania. As a result, the countryside was crowded with wandering groups of deported Jews. As the author points out, the resident population resented the unwanted intrusion of thousands of foreign Jews, causing rapid escalation into lethal clashes. The author also points out that to this day, it is unclear who gave the order to the Ukrainian militias to march these defenseless Jews toward Kamenets-Podolsk.Survivor testimonials include gruesome stories of Ukrainian peasantry beating and driving them from villages. Ukrainian militias and peasants would form cordons wherein the Jews were brutally assaulted. In one such eyewitness testimonial, over the course of their march, Jews were beaten with cudgels so that about 15 of them died and all others were injured. The wandering Jews encountered Hungarian soldiers only sporadically. Based on a few accounts, Eisen also writes that these encounters still proved to be useful and sometimes even lifesaving for the deportees because the soldiers, seeing their terrible condition, dressed in rags and starving, not only gave them food but sometimes helped them find accommodation and reined in the violent Ukrainian militias. Some soldiers were so moved by their fate that they were willing to smuggle deportees back to the mother country, some driven by potential payment, others by humanitarian impulses. The reports of the deplorable conditions and murders of deported Jews filtered back to Hungary through military reports and other eyewitness testimony.Among the many varied sources used by Eisen are the reports of Margaret Slachta, a Roman Catholic nun and first female member of parliament in Hungary, who railed against the Jewish laws and led groups of parliamentarians on fact-finding missions to Kőrösmező. She wrote extensive reports about the inhuman conditions there, the continued deportations, and the fate of these unfortunate Jews. Her reports were circulated at the highest levels of government.The deportations were officially ordered to end by direct decree of the Minister of Interior, Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer, on August 8, 1941. As related in chapter 7, “Return from the Abyss: Rescue and Survival,” the tone of the telegram transmitting the order was unambiguous; the minister stated he “forbids the removal of Jews to Poland [sic] effective immediately” (178). Miklós Kozma, the government commissioner of Carpathian Ruthenia, wrote on the return telegram sent on August 10, 1941, two days after the original order, “I have taken action.” Unfortunately, this order was not enforced by some ranks of the military, and as the author points out, the deportation of Jews from Kőrösmező continued for some time.Tragically, the order to stop the deportation of Jews from Hungary issued by the minister of interior had no effect on the terrible fate of those already in Kamenets-Podolsk, where the brutal mass murder of Jews took place in the last days of August 1941. The murders were committed by the German Reserve Police Batallion 320, led by General Friedrich Jeckeln’s SS Einzatzgruppen and Ukrainian auxiliary police. Of the 23,600 Jews killed by gunfire during those three days in 1941, it is estimated that some 14,000 to 16,000 were from Hungary, including Eisen’s uncles.In chapter 8, “Opening Old Wounds: Responsibility and Consequences,” Eisen traces the fate of those who played a role in the deportations. Kozma is dealt with extensively. He was a conflicted individual, who, as the owner of radio stations and one of the largest film production companies during the interwar years, had spoken out against the Jewish laws. He practiced, according to his biographer Mária Ormos, “selective antisemitism,” despite the fact that after he died on December 8, 1941, documents came to light demonstrating that he was of Jewish origin.2 Haunted by the events in Kamenets-Podolsk and his own role in facilitating the deportations, he gave a deathbed confession, saying “million secrets out there . . . during the nights . . . murdered bodies litter the forest. The act itself is on our conscience. Do you understand? We are the ones who are killing them” (241).George Eisen has written a readable and accessible book about a horrific chapter in the history of the Holocaust and the role of Hungary in delivering these victims to Ukraine, where the mass murder took place. Historically, deportation, or ethnic cleansing, has always been the worst way of “solving” a country’s “problem” with ethnic minorities, usually with calamitous results. The testimonials of those who were deported and escaped, and the accounts of the few individuals who actually witnessed the massacre, as gravediggers or small children, are at times too painful to read. Yet in order to fully comprehend what happened at Kamenets-Podolsk in 1941, their stories must be heard.

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