László Borhi, <i>Survival Under Dictatorships: Life and Death in Nazi and Communist Regimes.</i>

This is a superbly researched book that meticulously documents three distinct periods in Hungary with implications for the larger region of Central Europe and our understanding of dictatorships more generally. It is a remarkable achievement on multiple levels, with access to extraordinarily important personal testimonies. For the section on the Hungarian Holocaust, which began in 1944, László Borhi uses 3,500 interviews conducted with 5,000 Hungarian survivors immediately after their return to Hungary. For the Arrow Cross Terror section, Borhi adds court documents and police investigations alongside personal testimonies. For the Stalinist period, he relies on state security documents, trials, tribunals, and individual cases.Borhi wants the reader to understand the behavior of individuals under extreme circumstances. By doing this, he raises the issue of consent within these situations and the wider notion of dictatorship by consent that is an important subject of discussion among specialists. Freedom to choose, Borhi writes, “existed even in situations where choices seemed choiceless” (p. 342). The book touches on at least two important aspects of our already well-documented understanding of the 1944–1953 period, and he goes further than anyone until now in documenting the Arrow Cross terror of 1944–1945. Although most of the book documents extraordinary cruelty, there are a few examples of human kindness that somehow lead Borhi to conclude that human decency was still a choice.Divided into three distinct parts, the book holds well together without becoming repetitive, which is not easy given the similarities of fates that befell thousands of Hungarians and the striking similarities of the systems in place. Indeed, as Borhi writes, there were links between the pre-1945 world and the Stalinist one that followed. The Stalinist regime exploited the habits that had been acquired by then. Terror, whether perpetrated by the Arrow Cross or the Nazis or the Communists, had a degree of ideological continuity in the march to modernity that pitted them against all kinds of existential enemies. Societal divisions persisted: the undesirable versus those deemed desirable. Redemption was impossible. Borhi rightly argues that ideology took center stage in the role of aggression against enemies. The list of enemies just got longer and longer.The key to the book lies in the sources already mentioned that Borhi uses to chart the story. His archival research is exemplary, and indeed the sources are what makes the book essential. The section on the Hungarian Holocaust is chilling, insofar as the Hungarian Jewish community “reached the camp system during the deadliest phase of its existence” (p. 346). Until then, the Jews of Hungary were, according to a U.S. intelligence report, the “best treated.” But the bar for treatment was extremely low, and by then the Jews had already faced multiple deprivations and humiliation. In 1944, Hitler decided it was time to act and launched an invasion of Hungary to ensure that Hungary's 700,000 Jews did not escape an ominous fate (p. 19).Access to the archives containing personal testimonies of an extremely wide cross-section of people has allowed Borhi to trace what happened in riveting detail. The book is a valuable tool for teaching the period and getting students to understand why people behave in the way they do and how dictatorships function. In the process, students will gain a better understanding not only of how dictatorships appear and thrive but also of how individuals cope in such circumstances. Borhi makes a major contribution to our understanding of life in an arbitrary state.What Borhi does is by no means easy, as he tries to reconstruct a very dangerous and complicated time. The book is an incredibly important addition to our understanding of this period. He recounts people's lived experiences in a way that is both intellectually sound and sympathetic. Indeed, what stands out in the book is the personal nature of it, given Borhi's own background and experiences. He is right to argue that people who live under these systems often fail to make successful transitions to democracy. This book, and ongoing controversies over the Holocaust in Hungary from the memorial to German occupation and its counter-memorial to Terror House, may tell us more about Hungary's present than we realize. Moreover, as Borhi notes, “Perhaps the worst aspect of the legacy of communist regimes was that they fostered hatred and a mindset that upholds those hatreds even after those political systems are gone” (pp. 339–340). So true.

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