Poland, Hungary, and the Holocaust

In a speech last Wednesday at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., FBI Director James B. Comey made the following statement:

"“In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do. That’s what people do. And that should truly frighten us.”

The Poles were furious and summoned the U.S. Ambassador in Warsaw to the Foreign Ministry for an official apology. The Hungarians also expressed anger and accused Comey of "astounding insensitivity."

I find it very difficult to sympathize with the Hungarians. There is a nasty, disturbing trend of historical revisionism in Hungary these days. A far-right party, the Jobbik, holds 20% of the seats in Hungary's parliament. There is a movement to reclaim the legacy of Miklos Horthy, the Hungarian regent who led the country during the Second World War; statues of Horthy have appeared in provincial towns throughout the country, though not (yet, anyway) in Budapest. Budapest itself contains a controversial memorial depicting a ferocious eagle swooping down upon an angelic being. The eagle represents Nazi Germany and the angel, of course, Hungary. The statue commemorates the German occupation of the country, beginning on March 19, 1944, and is dedicated to the "victims," who go nameless. Is it the Jews? Or is Hungary draping itself in the cloak of victim? What happened between 1939 and 1944, when the Germans came out of the clear blue sky? Or between 1941-44? (The same can be asked of some of Budapest's history museums, which awkwardly elide the years before 1944 as if nothing happened until March of that year.)

The uncomfortable truth, of course, is that Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany, a member in good standing of the Axis Powers, if a minor one. Hungarian soldiers fought alongside Germans, Finns, Italians, Romanians, and others on the Eastern Front, and suffered over 100,000 casualties in the Battle of Stalingrad alone. Furthermore, and more relevant for our purposes, the Hungarians were deeply, and officially, complicit in the murder of the Jews. Jews in the Hungarian Army did not fight; they were confined to labor battalions and lived dank, miserable, exhausting lives before expiring. Tens of thousands died on the Eastern Front doing the most dangerous work imaginable. Hungary's misappropriation of the label victim, and the attempt to somehow bamboozle the world, or at least the naive tourist, that Hungary, too, was but a victim of the Nazi war machine is not only misleading: it's a crime against historical memory. 

After Stalingrad and particularly Kursk in July 1943, the Red Army was an invincible tide that swept all before it. The Germans were able to defeat the Soviets in local, limited, tactical actions but not strategically, and not long term. Their momentum was broken, the Red Air Force dominated the skies, and the exhausted Germans, and their allies, marched west. The Hungarians saw the writing on the wall and began to put out feelers for a separate peace with the Soviet Union. An enraged Hitler summoned Horthy to Schloss Klessheim, a palace near Salzburg, Austria, where he berated the Hungarian leader. Horthy agreed to send tens of thousands of Jews to work for German war production. The conference, actually, was a ruse. On March 19, 1944, while Horthy and other Hungarian officials were in Austria, the Germans marched into Budapest. With them came the sinister Adolf Eichmann, who temporarily put up his headquarters in Budapest's Grand Synagogue (where Theodor Herzl was bar mitzvah'd). He was not there for any nice reason. Dome Sztojay, who had no compunctions at all about murdering the Jews, was appointed Prime Minister. 

The Jews of Hungary were the last remaining substantial population of European Jewry that had not been murdered by the Nazis. It was the provincial Jews' turn first. Approximately 400,000 of them were sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau in a matter of weeks in the summer of 1944. There were so many of them that Jews had to "wait their turn" for the gas chambers in a little wood outside of Crematorium V; in their turn, the crematoria could not keep up with the corpses, so many of the bodies were burned in a field behind Crematorium V. The photos of the famous Auschwitz Album, which depict the entire process of extermination in Auschwitz-Birkenau, from the selection on the ramp to the wait outside of the gas chamber, were taken by an SS man in the summer of 1944. The Jews that appear in the photographs are provincial Hungarians. Again, these deportations took place under the aegis of a Hungarian government, and Hungarian gendarmes rounded up the Jews to send them to their deaths.

Horthy, at this point confined to house arrest, ordered a halt to the deportations although several more trains traveled to Auschwitz-Birkenau under Eichmann's supervision. Eichmann was recalled to Berlin, and due to military issues outside of the scope of the present post, future deportations were canceled. 

The Jews of Budapest, while they were to survive in much greater proportions than their provincial brethren, were to suffer horribly. The brutal, fascist, native Arrow Cross party took power in Budapest in October 1944. Jews were confined to ghettos in the city and over 10,000 were forced on foot to Vienna, where they were to build fortifications against the Soviet onslaught. In the meantime, Arrow Cross members shot the Jews in the streets, or forced them to walk, shivering and naked, into the near-frozen Danube River, where they were shot. Their valuables, no need to mention, were taken. Today, not far from the Budapest Parliament building, there is a moving memorial to these dead: life-sized sculptures of shoes, in all sizes, stand silent testament on the banks of the Danube. I remember going to that memorial one evening, staring at the shoes in a kind of numbed disbelief, and at the moving letters that had been left near them by visitors. I walked down a nearby flight of stairs to rocks onto which the waters of the river lapped; a non-smoker, nonetheless I smoked several cigarettes as I contemplated the dark waters of the river. It was, frankly, a lovely sight; Buda Castle atop the hill across the river looked stunning. What this spot had witnessed 70 years earlier was simply not within my ability to imagine.

Suffice it to say, Hungary was no angel in all of this, despite what the ridiculous statue in Budapest would suggest; in fact, quite the opposite. What, however, of Poland?

Poland is a more complex case. First, let me say that the the FBI director erred in uttering the word "Poland" alongside "Germany" and "Hungary." Poland was the first true victim of Hitler's aggression. It was where the Nazis' gloves first really came off. The Poles were detested Slavs. They were to be made eternal slaves to the pure "Aryans" and Heinrich Himmler and Hans Frank, the General Governor with his seat at Wawel in Krakow, decreed that Poles would not be allowed an education beyond being able to write their name and count up to a few hundred. Nothing more was necessary, because they were to serve as no more than mules. Poland did not fight alongside the Nazis; its government fled and set up shop in exile in London. The government established an official underground body, the Home Army, to resist the Nazis. The Home Army was ultimately to lead the Warsaw Uprising of August-October 1944, the largest uprising the Nazis faced in the Second World War. 

Poles, Jew and Gentile, in the western part of the country (the Warthegau) were deported to the central part, the General Government (Hans Frank's domain), which was to become a dumping ground of the "unwanted." Their place was taken by ethnic Germans. Polish children who "looked" German were literally stolen from their parents. In heartrending scenes after the war, these children were sometimes taken from their German "parents": the children, very young, often did not even remember their original parents or how to speak Polish. There was no winning here: either the devastated Polish parents were never to see their precious children again, or the children were to be taken from the only parents they ever knew, to be shipped to a strange country with a strange language. Another horrific crime on the Nazi ledger.

Polish intellectual life was disrupted and the Polish intelligentsia was murdered in the tens of thousands in the initial invasion. 40,000 people were murdered in the initial bombardment of Warsaw. To anticipate events, six million Poles died during the Second World War: three million Gentiles and three million Jews. The Poles suffered very real pain, which has come to dominate that country's national ethos (on top of the rest of the country's anguished history - it has the terrible misfortune of being located between Germany and Russia). 

Polish behavior was often ugly, however - very ugly. Many Poles looked the other way when their Jewish neighbors were deported to Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka beginning in spring 1942. Many gladly took their erstwhile neighbors' possessions, including their homes. Indeed, when many surviving Jews returned to their homes, they discovered Polish occupants. Sometimes the Jews were even killed. Jews who tried to hide among Poles, including after revolting and/or escaping from the death camps, were sometimes killed outright or turned over to the Germans for a reward.The local economies around the death camps boomed. The Jews of Poland, but also of other European nations, arrived in their hundreds of thousands to the camps, bringing with them a range of valuables - currency, gold, jewelry, furs, etc. Many of these items found their way into the villages outside of the camps. Ukrainian guards in particular were known to pay for Polish whores, often brought all the way from Warsaw, with absurd amounts of jewelry, gold, or cash. Polish villagers at times sold their own daughters to these guards for the influx of goodies it provided them. After the Nazis destroyed and fled these camps, Polish villagers would descend upon the sites with shovels and pickaxes, digging through skeletons and ashes for valuables. This is not pleasant history, but it happened. Pogroms of Jews occurred after the war, most notoriously in Kielce, in central Poland. In the village of Jedwabne, particularly thuggish, monstrous, and opportunistic Polish villagers locked the Jewish inhabitants into a barn and burned them alive. The Home Army at times expressed savage anti-Semitism. It was skeptical to say the least when the Jews of Warsaw demanded weapons, and gave only a negligible amount, mainly revolvers, to the Jewish fighters. 

There were some extenuating circumstances, at least regarding Polish inaction. The Nazis treated the Poles with a savagery unseen and unknown to the countries of Western Europe. Discovery that you had helped a Jew meant immediate death for you and your family, even if it was just a sip of water or a roll of bread. Some have argued that the Home Army barely had enough weapons for itself to fight the Nazis, let alone to give some of them to the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, and elsewhere. It is very easy to sit in a comfortable chair, in a warmed, or air-conditioned, room in the United States of the 21st century and to cast judgment. The Jews of the Judenräte of the ghettos and the Sonderkommandos of the death camps, who deceived the Jews who were to be killed, led them to the gas chambers, removed the bodies, and then burned/buried them have faced similar judgments. But nothing justifies the murder or despicable looting. And overwhelming silence in the face of genocide is very disturbing, to say the least. 

The Poles were no strangers to anti-Semitism, although theirs was of the traditional, Christian variety rather than the racialist, "scientific" anti-Semitism of the Nazis. For many Poles, anti-Semitism was a narrow bridge over which the Nazis could connect. Pre-war hatred of the Jews in Poland was not an isolated phenomenon. There were many Poles of great bravery, kindness, and conviction, such as Irena Sendler, who saved Jews from certain death, but the extent to which the Poles collaborated troubles me. More troubling, actually, is the deafening silence with which the vast majority of Poles greeted the Holocaust. It was not "their" problem; some on the far right of the political spectrum even expressed their approval. Some of the underground literature produced by the Home Army, the underground with the official seal of approval from the government-in-exile, seemed only to care about the Jews' murder insofar as they saw the Poles as next, not about the murder of the Jews in and of itself. 

The problem does not, I don't think, lie with the people of Poland. It lies with the people of Europe as a whole. Many countries, particularly and most importantly Germany, have taken major steps to address the crimes their countrymen committed during the Second World War. Others, especially Hungary, have not. Poland has taken many steps in commemorating the dead of the Holocaust, and many Poles have shown a remarkable admiration of and respect for the memory of the Jews of their country. Major sites of murder such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek have been preserved very well. The fact of the matter is that the initiators of the Final Solution were the Germans, but they had their helpers in every country of occupied or Axis Europe. The Holocaust was a continent-wide crime, and a stain on all of Europe. 

What frustrates me is that instead of looking at the broader picture, and at the mass suffering that the war and the Nazis' genocidal policies caused as a whole, there seems to be a contest over who suffered more. The extermination of the Jews is simply in another category: the methodical, thorough nature of the genocide; its continental scope; its factories built specifically and only for the most efficient way to murder the most people possible; the ferocious, unfathomable, and unstoppable nature of the ideology motivating the perpetrators: these are all unique. But the non-Jewish Poles suffered horrifically as well. Their capital of Warsaw was entirely, and purposely, ruined and millions of them were killed. In one particularly devastating instance, in Krakow in July 1943, Germans buried all of the men of a particular parish alive and forced the women to watch on as it happened. The Poles didn't even experience the joy of being liberated in 1944-45; the Soviets moved into the Nazis' place and brutally oppressed the Polish people and suppressed their yearning for independence for an additional 45 years. This is not a contest. Isn't it enough to note that both Jews and non-Jewish Poles were victims of the Nazis? 

This is a deeply concerning, and complex, topic that I hope to explore further. I understand what Comey was saying. There was indeed disturbing collaboration among Poles. I do believe, however, that it was a mistake to mention Poland in the same company as Germany and Hungary, two outright perpetrating nations and governments. Poland happens to be the site of the Nazi death camps and therefore is often thought of, in an overly simplistic fashion, as somehow a perpetrator via osmosis. The haunting image of the gatehouse at Auschwitz-Birkenau is seared into all of our consciences, and it happens to lie in Poland. Suffice to say that the picture of wartime Poland is a very complex one, with darkness and light - I'd argue mostly darkness. But where in continental Europe did darkness not rule the skies?