The Forgotten Massacre

Budapest in 1944

Andrea Pető

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110687590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

The book discusses a formerly unknown and invisible massacre in Budapest in 1944, committed by a paramilitary group lead by a women. Andrea Pet? uncovers the gripping history of the fi rst private Holocaust memorial erected in Budapest in 1945. Based on court trials, interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and investigators, the book illustrates the complexities of gendered memory of violence. It examines the dramatic events: massacre, deportation, robbery, homecoming, and fi ght for memorialization from the point of view of the perpetrators and the survivors. The book will change the ways we look at intimate killings during the Second World-War.

Watch our talk with the editor Andrea Pet? here: https://youtu.be/dV6JEcE2RFk

1 Introduction

In 2003 I held a public lecture in Budapest on the history of the Arrow Cross women’s movement. At the end of the lecture an elderly grey-haired man approached me with a question: “Have you heard about Piroska Dely?” “Of course – I answered self-assuredly –, the literature on the people’s tribunals mention her name. She was the bloodthirsty Arrow Cross woman who was executed after her people’s tribunal trial.” My colleagues in Hungary never exhibited much enthusiasm when I told them about my research on women in the Arrow Cross Party.¹ Still, everyone knew Dely’s name, because every volume on post-Second World War justice listed the names of those female war criminals, among them Piroska Dely, who were sentenced to death and executed.² The elderly man with impeccable silver hair nodded and said: “I met her.” This is how I met a group of the Csengery Street massacre’s survivors who for decades fought for a dignified remembrance of the bloody events. János Kun’s sentence gave an entirely new dimension to my research, which led to my Hungarian Academy of Sciences doctoral dissertation and to the writing of this book. I thank them for helping in my research and I dedicate this book to them.

During the Second World War Hungary was Germany’s loyal foreign ally. From 1938 four Anti-Jewish Laws were put in effect, that is laws that limited the employment, marriage, and property rights of Jewish Hungarian citizens. On April 11, 1941 Hungary’s armed forces participated in the German invasion of Yugoslavia with the aim of returning territories lost at the end of the First World War. For these territorial gains Hungary paid a huge price: the Hungarian economy was sacrificed to Germany’s war goals. In the meantime, Hungarian propaganda machinery emphasized the Hungarian government’s independence and its national commitment, but the country’s territorial demands and geopolitical realities tied Hungary to Nazi Germany, while Germany increasingly expected commitment and support from its allies.

In popular memory it seems as though Hungary only entered the Second World War in 1944. Newspapers and newsreels were full of military propaganda and, due to effective censorship, the military success of Germany and of course Hungary. The strategy of the Hungarian political elite was framed by the devastating experience of the First World War when Hungary was expected to sign a peace treaty without a functioning army. That explains the reluctance of Hungary as an ally of Nazi Germany to send troops to Yugoslavia in 1941 and to the Soviet Union. The fact that hundreds of thousands of soldiers were on the front did not have an impact on the ‘business as usual’ attitude of civilian life back in Hungary. Somehow that was also the case with Jewish citizens of the country, as the fact that the increasing deprivation of their rights by Anti-Jewish legislation, with Jewish men drafted in to do labour, was considered the ‘new normal’ by the gentile population. In oral history interviews, however, the starting point of the Second World War is usually only 1944, when the war moved inside the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary.

Aware of Hungary’s faltering loyalty, Germany occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. This date marked the beginning of the Second World War for Hungarian Jewry because soon after, and without direct German orders, Hungary commenced the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews based on the April 4, 1944 6136/1944 No. VII decree of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Between April 28 and July 8, 1944 more than 435,000 Jewish Hungarian citizens were deported to German concentration and annihiliation camps with the Hungarian administration’s active participation. For non-Jewish Hungarians only the threat of the approaching Red Army and the Allied bombings marked the beginning of the war. On October 15, 1944 the Hungarian far-right seized power and thus began the short but bloody and chaotic rule of the Arrow Cross Party.

After the mass deportations of Jewish people from the Hungarian countryside the fate of the largest Hungarian Jewish community, the Budapest Jewry was increasingly unpredictable. On June 16, 1944 a mayoral decree was issued for the forcible relocation of the Jewish citizens of Budapest into approximately 2,600 designated yellow Star of David houses. The deadline for the move was midnight June 24, 1944. About 12,000 Christians remained in the yellow star houses, among them the Strucky-Szamocseta family of the janitors of Csengery Street 64, the site of the events central to this book.³

October 15, 1944 was a nice sunny day. People listened to Regent Horthy’s radio speech in which he proclaimed that Germany had lost the war and Hungary was ready to sign an armistice with the Allied Powers. In Budapest’s Csengery Street, 64 yellow star-wearing people gathered on the courtyard to listen to Horthy’s historic declaration. This radio earlier belonged to one of the Jewish tenants of the house, but as the Anti-Jewish Laws came in effect, which prohibited Jews from owning a radio, it came into the possession of the only Christian family that remained in the house, the janitors.⁴ The janitor put it on the windowsill so the Jewish tenants could also listen to the news while standing in the courtyard.

Horthy’s radio proclamation had a very different effect on the tenants and the janitors. The Jews thought that the war was indeed over and they took the yellow star off the gate.⁵ At the same time the janitors felt rather sorry at losing their lucrative position: since June 1944 they had had full authority over the building’s Jewish tenants including the building’s former owner, which helped them secure considerable financial gains. The janitors requested money for all their otherwise free services, thus the yellow star houses were turned into “private prisons” where the tenants lived according to rules set by the Christian janitors.

A few hours later the radio announced that the Arrow Cross Party had come to power. The janitors celebrated their regaining of authority, while the elderly men and young boys who gathered on the courtyard decided to keep guard at the gateway. The night that followed the coup by Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the Arrow Corss Party, marked the lives of several dozen families in Csengery 64. This book is about them and about that night.

During that night of October 15, 1944 armed people intruded into the yellow star house and after a bloody massacre left 19 dead behind. Why this house? Perhaps they were there to break down alleged Jewish resistance, or maybe they were there to rob the jeweler living on the first floor; there is no way to know. The final resting place of the tenants is also unknown. It is certain though that the intruders, with the active collaboration of the Christian janitor family, robbed the tenants, murdered probably 18 of them although the numbers, as I will argue in the book, are uncertain. The armed intruders also forcibly took away all the other Jews hoping that they would never return from deportation and so their crime would remain unnoticed. However, most of the tenants returned during the next few days because the deportations were temporarily halted. There was another wave of deportations in November this time organized by the Arrow Cross Party, but some tenants returned after liberation, and with that the battle for justice and the dignified remembrance of the Csengery 64 victims began.

Piroska Dely’s case was among the first trials of the newly established people’s tribunals in Budapest. The massacre was also covered extensively by a press hungry for new stories of the first atrocity committed by the Arrow Cross after the takeover. In the daily press, Piroska Dely was portrayed as the “Beast” of the Arrow Cross, a woman responsible for the gravest wartime massacre of civilians in Budapest. The people’s tribunal exposed the image of Hungarian women, alleged members of the Arrow Cross Party, who had used violence while looting. This was the first time female perpetrators were portrayed in public, and explains why, even today, the name Piroska Dely is associated with the “Women of the Arrow Cross” – even though, as I show below, she was never a member of the Arrow Cross Party.

The survivors’ testimonies were central to the trial process during the Dely case in 1945 as well as during the people’s tribunal trial of the Strucky–Szamocseta janitor family in 1947. On March 23, 1946 Piroska Dely was executed, although as this book shows the people’s tribunal trial could not quite confirm whether she participated or that she was at all present at the massacre. Still she became “the” Piroska Dely, the embodiment of the bloodthirsty Arrow Cross woman.

Based on the story of the armed robbery in Csengery 64, I will examine the so far neglected intersection of perpetrator research, political radicalism, memory politics and gender studies to reveal why some female perpetrators of the Hungarian Holocaust became overly visible while others remained invisible. A certain version of Piroska Dely‘s story has become the part of the historical canon about the Holocaust in Hungary. But, as I will argue here, exactly how this integration into official historiography happened made the most important elements of this story invisible. Unlike mainstream Holocaust research on Hungary, which until recently has focused on political history, this book shows the disturbingly human dimension of collaborators and perpetrators that were so far “invisible” to history, and also examines the factors which contributed to their invisibility.

After the Second World War their battle for remembrance took place on different levels. The book uses several sources to map those levels. The transcripts of the people's trubunals have been used before. This book will show the process of how testimonies in the people’s tribunals shaped multicolored and multilayered memories, or using Assmann’s words, moved from communicative memory into collective memory.⁶ Based on records of police hearings, people’s tribunal documents, and the contemporary press, I will analyze how the testimonies changed over time and also reflect on the phenomenon that they were different depending on the audiences, because the witnesses appropriated the language that seemed the most effective in a given situation to achieve the aims of punishing the perpetrators.

I also conducted interviews with the survivors and with the perpetrator family. The interviewing process with the survivors was another space where memory was shaped. My research was primarily inspired by my conversations with the survivors. They honored me with their trust. They shared with me their family stories and the story of the battle they have been fighting with various institutions including the people’s tribunals and with the Jewish congregation to keep the memory of the massacre alive. Csengery Street 64 is the setting of what was probably the very first privately erected Hungarian Holocaust memorial. One of the survivors had enough of waiting for unresponsive institutions and made a memorial plaque from his marble kitchen counter. The plaque was installed on the first anniversary of the massacre, October 15, 1945, still, it never became the space for official commemorations, although it adapted the anti-fascist terminology and never mentioned that the victims were Jews. Then after 1989, another fight began as the survivors had to protect the plaque from those tenants who, in fear of rekindled anti-Semitism, wanted to remove it. The survivors also hoped that the municipal district would protect this commemorative plaque. The complicated story of the plaque demonstrates how the framework within which the Holocaust could be discussed in inner city Budapest has changed with time.

I also conducted an interview with the family of perpetrators, the Strucky-Szamocseta family who resided as janitors in the house. It is a specificity of Hungarian memory politics that it has developed in a parallel, unconnected and polarized manner. The interviews with the survivors required different methodological preparation than the interview with the perpetrators’ relative. For the survivors, the story that they told me multiple times during our meetings represented the genuine truth, the only possible narrative of the events. I had to be exceptionally careful so that they would not feel as if the analytical methods I used, such as source criticism and discourse analysis, in any ways questioned their authenticity and legitimacy as witnesses and survivors. During the perpetrator interview the challenge was to not judge the interviewee’s narrative, which was handed down in his family through generations and had obviously nothing to do with the real events.

The historiography of Holocaust is defined by the dynamics of closures and openings: monuments, schoolbooks and commemorations ritualize and thereby provide a closure for happenings, while the survivors’ remembrance as well as the newly discovered private open new possibilities for interpretation. The Csengery Street story demonstrates how the story of a murder gets ritualized through a process during which various institutions (such as the people’s tribunal), media (photographs, movies), the survivors, the perpetrators and the historians’ works transform communicative memory into collective memory.

Hungarian Holocaust research has mainly focused on deportation and the descriptions of concentration and death camps.⁷ Hungarian perpetrator research started only recently and thus far it has focused solely on the stories of politically important men. The Dely case is an atypical Holocaust story as it does not cover a history of deportations. This is an example of intimate violence when in inner city Budapest armed Hungarians killed Hungarians in their own apartments, when the Hungarian state still attributed to German or Hungarian occupied territories. Furthermore, the people‘s tribunal sentenced a woman to death as the main culprit, which is again not typical in the history of the Hungarian Holocaust. The figure of the far-right’s “new man” has only recently become the subject of scientific research and thus far researchers have not had much more to say about the “new woman” other than she was the “new man’s” companion.⁸ That the Csengery case is not only an atypical event but has contributed to its own selective forgetting is a central concept of this book.

The analysis of the sources unwrapped the history of emotions – resentment, hatred, violence, envy, greed – in a very challenging historical period. This book will not discuss whether the operation of the people’s tribunals fell within the existing legal framework or not, or how the trials constructed the remembrance of the Shoah (although I will necessarily touch upon these). Rather this book focuses on the ways survivors and perpetrators constructed memory of the events to create legal meaning and emotional content. It also shows how the perpetrators’ stories became simplified and untellable due to the people’s tribunals, which necessarily led to a polarized me...