László Borhi. <i>A túlélés stratégiái: Élet és halál a náci és kommunista diktatúrákban (1944–1953)</i> [Strategies of survival: life and death in the Nazi and Communist dictatorships, 1944–53]

László Borhi is best known to specialists as a scholar of postwar diplomatic relations and a recognized authority on the political history of the Cold War. The present volume takes a different direction from his previous works: instead of analyzing political events and processes, it focuses on society. More specifically, the book focuses on the survival of the individual in the totalitarian dictatorships of twentieth-century Hungarian history. The author’s basic thesis is that patterns of behavior classified under the concepts of resistance, passivity, or collaboration cannot be understood in isolation. In Borhi’s novel approach, survival is the motivation that links all three behaviors. In other words, the search for survival has always been the driver of these types of actions, and which of these was chosen by individuals in the hope of securing better chances of survival for themselves or their families varied from situation to situation.Borhi narrows down the individual survival strategies to three distinct areas of study and then discusses the everyday survival strategies within these spatially and temporally distinct places. The three areas are: (1) the Hungarian ghettos and German concentration camps under SS control during 1944–45, (2) Budapest under Hungarian National Socialist (Arrow Cross) rule between October 1944 and February 1945, and (3) Stalinist Communist Hungary between 1948 and 1953. Common to all three periods is that they were environments of terror or dictatorship, constituting relatively closed spaces for Hungarian citizens.Borhi uses the term “survival” in the broadest possible sense, in line with the mainstream approach of Holocaust studies, meaning not only biological, literal survival in the face of Nazi and Communist oppression but also the struggle to maintain the economic and social status of the average person and to preserve human dignity, “or even the need to live one’s life as one used to live it” (8).The author’s stated aim is to clarify the relationship between power and the ordinary citizen by examining survival strategies. To do this, however, it is necessary to examine from a historical perspective the feelings and emotions inherent in contemporary sources, in particular frustration, fear, and anxiety, and the many forms of hatred and aggression that these generate on the part of the authorities. Borhi rightly recognizes that the emotions and strategies of victim groups cannot be understood in isolation. Therefore he also examines the emotional motivations and driving forces behind the actions of perpetrators: concentration camp Kapos, SS guards, and even members of the Budapest Arrow Cross groups, as well as party and state officials of the Mátyás Rákosi dictatorship, thus contributing to a more complex understanding of the techniques of survival.The book comprises three parts, which are divided into chapters. The first part (“Jews, Christians, Gas Chambers”) is the most comprehensive and at the same time the most problematic in the volume. Using the so-called DEGOB (Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság [National Relief Committee for Deportees]) protocols, the author attempts to show the strategies used by Hungarian Jews and Christians deported to the camps to survive in these extraordinary conditions.1 The 3,500 or so protocols (4,800 testimonies in all) represent one of the best-known sources on the Hungarian Holocaust. And for good reason: the protocols are a series of interviews with survivors who returned directly to Budapest and, as Borhi rightly points out, these sources have the virtues of memoirs and diaries as an intermediary between contemporary and posthumously written ego documents. However, precisely because they are ego documents, these records do not reveal facts as they were lived, but rather they can be seen as subjective impressions of events, which in their case are further distorted by a retrospective perspective. Moreover, the DEGOB protocols were written by Jews (primarily citizens of Jewish origin within the scope of the anti-Jewish legislation in force between 1938 and 1944), who are by no means representative of Hungarian Holocaust survivors as a whole, certainly not the Hungarian “inmates” of the Nazi concentration camps since the latter also consisted of different groups of political prisoners. The DEGOB protocols are also not representative of the Jews deported from Hungary: the majority of these sources were written by DEGOB officers based mostly on testimonies of Jewish residents from Budapest, although it is well known that it was mainly the rural Jewish population that was deported to the concentration camps. Other demographic characteristics of the protocols further undermine their representativity. In view of this, I believe that the DEGOB protocols cannot serve as a representative sample for the kind of analysis Borhi intended to use them for, let alone for the mapping of survival strategies in the camps with “anatomical precision” (15). Even if the far-reaching conclusions of the chapter are to be disputed, it should be acknowledged that, despite the often erroneous generalizations, Borhi has demonstrated via a multitude of examples how the witnesses in the DEGOB diaries (and not former camp residents in general!) used a wide variety of techniques to survive the different phases of ghettoization, deportation, and camp life. Moreover, they successfully adapted or replaced these strategies with others, depending on the “hollowness” of the enclosed spaces in which they found themselves.The second major part of the volume (“The Massacre”) focuses on the period of Arrow Cross rule under Ferenc Szálasi, that is, the few months between October 15, 1944 and February 1945. It focuses exclusively on the Arrow Cross atrocities and murders committed in Budapest, which the author—following Tim Cole’s fundamental work on the Jewish Ghetto of Budapest, but broadening its term for the entire city—impressively describes as a place of terror and genocide.2 Why the focus is only on the capital is, unfortunately, not clear from the book and all the more strange since a significant part of the massacres during the Arrow Cross regime did not take place in Budapest but in the countryside on the “death marches” toward Germany, during the forced labor service (drafting Jewish or Sinti and Roma citizens), and—after Ferenc Szálasi had resumed the deportations from Hungary in November—in the German concentration camps under the control of the SS (the subject of the preceding chapter). In this part, the author works with completely different sources, analyzing only the criminal court records and testimonies of the prosecutions of the former Arrow Cross murderers, recorded after the events, during the new democratic transition after the war and during the various periods of communist dictatorship (1945–46; and 1966 and 1971, respectively). It was not an easy task, as these narrative sources were also influenced—often decisively—by the communist dictatorship itself. Borhi sensibly demonstrates that the Szálasi government was explicitly opposed to street raids, atrocities, and murders resulting from individual excesses. He gives numerous examples to demonstrate the decisive role of individual interests and motivations, whether in relation to the activities of the building managers or even exploring the emotional world of torture.The third thematic part (“More Than a Victim?”) is the shortest and most concise section of the volume. Here Borhi has achieved his most ambitious goal: a complex portrayal of the multiple oppressions by local power structures and individual responses. However, I should add that cooperation also played a key role in not just the establishment of the communist regimes but their stabilization in the region as well.3 Analyzing everyday cooperation with the Rákosi regime across societal levels could give us a better understanding of strategies of survival as well. In contrast to the time periods addressed in the foregoing thematic parts, it was during this period that opportunities for strategizing on a societal scale over a stretch of several years became possible in Hungary. Most noteworthy is the agrarian population among whom the real strategy became one of indifference, passive resistance, maintenance of religious education, “black cutting” (illegal pig slaughtering in rural households), and more as a reaction to the violent colonization of the countryside. Viewed in comparison with this part, then, it seems that between 1944 and 1945, during the Nazi dictatorship, it was not a question of strategies, that is, conscious behavioral constructs, but rather of survival techniques, which the persecuted improvised and adapted to a difficult situation.László Borhi’s narrative in each of the three thematic parts proceeds as follows: after outlining a political-historical framework, he presents the main research questions for that part. Then, in smaller chapters, Borhi presents dozens of sources corresponding to the thematic parts, or, more precisely, an extracted description of the sources. The problem is that the interpretative answers to the questions posed at the beginning of each thematic part are largely omitted. In this context, the work, which runs to more than 300 pages, contains a large number of names, places, institutional names, and concepts for which the Hungarian reader is given no clues as to their interpretation and placement. For example, the role of the concentration camps, their importance and relation to each other; the geographical location of the camps, the ranks of the Häftlinge [detainees] in the Nazi concentration camps, or the dozens of street names in Budapest are difficult for the reader to locate and interpret. In the absence of maps, infographics, and tables, the interpretability of the corpus is compromised.The problematic nature of the volume is also reflected in the fact that the same question posed by the three large parts, namely what strategies citizens used to survive the everyday life of total dictatorship, is answered by Borhi on the basis of completely different, nonanalogous sources. Borhi’s choice is, of course, legitimate within the scope of his study, but it hardly facilitates the reader’s comparative interpretation of the three terrains of the volume. Borhi has obviously not sought to compare the different systems to provide his readers with a general conclusion. The reviewer is thus left with a sense of omission, as if the last chapter of the volume were missing.The author seems to give in to the totalitarian paradigm—which he also criticizes—by consistently confusing the concepts of dictatorship and terror. Yet even totalitarian regimes have not been completely permeated by everyday terror directed against ordinary people. The volume would certainly have benefited from exploring this subtle distinction and interpreting it through the many life situations presented.Bori’s analysis of the sources shows convincingly that totalitarian dictatorships were not monolithic creatures. In these closed spaces, there were many gray areas, precisely because of the shifts in collaboration and the identities necessary for survival. The building managers of Budapest during the Szálasi dictatorship, or the numerous denunciators of their neighbors under the Rákosi regime, could be either servants of the dictatorship or citizens who went overboard to protect themselves and their families. From the point of view of power, the natural diversity of local conditions, diverging interests, general corruption, or even chance could have shaped radically different relationships. These cannot be attributed to the fact that, as the author shows in the case of the Soviet-style regime, many people identified with the regime’s aims. The hope of survival, as the book demonstrates with many convincing examples, lies as much in the flaws and imperfections of these systems, and in the disorganization and corruptibility of the actors who run them, as in individual ambitions and actions.László Borhi’s book is an important contribution to the literature on totalitarian regimes, the Holocaust, and Stalinism. The questions he raises and the sources he presents draw attention to a number of blind spots that have been neglected in historiography. His findings are both courageous and controversial and can therefore be expected to stimulate the discourse on dictatorships in Alltagsgeschichte.

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