Having just read The History of Transylvania recently published at Budapest, I must note with sadness and indignation that in spite of the august body - the Hungarian Academy - that sponsored it, that book strays both from scientific honesty and from historical ethics with a perseverance worthy of a more noble cause.
Having been born on Transylvanian soil, a Romanian citizen of Jewish nationality, and it having been my fate to drink the full glass of indignities and sufferings caused by hatred and strife, I thought myself entitled to hope that a book published nowadays in a socialist country, a book that proposes to treat extensively the history of Transylvania in three massive volumes, will be - or at least will try to be - a warm and sincere plea for cooperation among our countries and nations, energetically and unreservedly condemning all those ideas, theses and outlooks that have propagated hatred, diversion, oppression and disrespect at various times in history, up to that rampant terror of Horthy that achieved the physical liquidation of scores of thousands of Romanians and Jews in the north-west of Transylvania. I believe - and nobody can extinguish my belief - that, based exactly on the knowledge gained studying history, a book of history must propound a better acquaintance, a coming together, a feeling of reciprocated respect for the past of our peoples.
That was on my mind when I opened the first volume of The History of Transylvania; when I closed the third one I was completely disillusioned, and my soul was full of pain and revolt. Yes, pain and revolt, because in the pages of those three volumes are crowded not only errors and tendentious statements,not only imprecise and incorrect dates, but also and especially misrepresentations and falsehoods, going so far as to desecrate the memory of the most luminous moments in the history of the Romanian people, to insult the dignity of the nationalities that have lived together for centuries on the ancient Romanian land of Transylvania, to refurbish and launch again extremely evil chauvinistic and revisionist contentions that we thought had died long ago. Instead of bringing together our neighboring countries' peoples and nationalities, instead of that, by spreading gross falsehoods and unacceptable deliberate omissions, mocking remarks and downright calumnies, the three volumes of The History of Transylvania call forth confusion and revolt, create enmities and dissensions, poison the atmosphere, and through direct attacks undermine a boon obtained in the course of a tumultuous history - namely cooperation and understanding.
It is not only as a whole that the book we are discussing here presents a distorted view of the history of Transylvania; each and every one of its chapters misrepresents the phases and the historical moments it treats of.
I will not treat here of the deeds long since condemned by history perpetrated by Horthy's rIgime in the years 1940-1944 against the Romanian population that made up the majority in the north-western territories of Romania invaded as a consequence of the Dictate of Vienna of August 1940: the mass-murders, the unparalleled terrorism, the repression, the concentration in forced labor camps, the deportations. Out of the multitude of issues connected with Horthy's reign of terror, of the falsified or misrepresented or simply omitted facts I will treat and illustrate only one aspect: the deportation and extermination of the Jewish population of the north-western part of Romania invaded by Horthy's Hungary.
It is hard to believe yet it is true: of the 2,000 pages, or rather, of the 90,000 lines they wrote, the authors allotted only 4 lines and a half to the extermination of Jews in Northern Transylvania by Horthy's Hungary. Thus, they dismiss with barely one sentence the deportation and physical annihilation of a population that had lived on those lands for centuries. To be precise, to be topical, we givethe entire sentence here: "After the German occupation, in 1944, the Hungarian authorities - in spite of brave objections raised by progressive intellectuals and of church dignitaries such as for instance Bishop M;rton :ron - transported a significant part of the Jewish population of Northern Transylvania, approximately 90-100,000 persons, to concentration camps in Germany, condemning them to death."1
Apart from the fact that minimizing to that sentence the physical liquidation of the Jews of Northern Transylvania is a reduction which is a downright desecration of one of the greatest mass-murders of the history of mankind, the above-quoted sentence misrepresents, falsifies and misleads the world public opinion both by unpardonable omission and by every word and every statement it contains.
Let us take them one by one.
The authors [of The History of Transylvania edited by the Hungarian Academy] begin the evocation of the holocaust of the Jews of Northern Transylvania by writing on paper without hesitation and without tremor the words: "After the German occupation ...". However, readers cannot but ask themselves: until then, until the German occupation, nothing at all happened to the Jews of Transylvania? I consider that it is both an insult and a desecration of the memory of the victims and of the sufferings of the survivors to spread persistently in this and in other writings the idea that "nobody touched as much as a hair" of the Jews of Hungary and of the territories invaded by Hungary before March 19, 1944, as some like to contend. It is a desecration that I feel called upon to protest in the name of the painfully long list of victims of the northern Transylvanian towns and villages killed by the bullets of some of Horthy's officers and soldiers, killed by pistol-whipping, by flogging to death, or by having their heads smashed against the wall by the gendarmes and policemen of the Hungarian reign of terror, or driven wholesale to the great massacre of Kamenec-Podolsk.
As a matter of course, having invaded the north-west of Romania as a consequence of the arbitrary Dictate of Vienna, the entire repressive apparatus, the entire machinery of Horthy's oppression was directed against the Romanian population, againstwhom they perpetrated thousands of individual and collective murders, laying waste and mistreating, spreading fear and terror in towns and villages, installing a reign of terror unparalleled in history for its savageness.
But even then, from the very first day on which the Hungarians crossed the border into Transylvania, ever more Jews appeared among the victims alongside of the Romanians. In the great massacre of Traznea of September 1940 there were also killed six Jews. Alongside of the Romanians, Jews were shot or slashed to death by Horthy's bullets and bayonets at Cerisa and Marga (county of Salaj), at Viseu and Tasnad, and other places. At Sucutard, near Gherla, following the advice of the Hungarian landlord of that village, two young Romanian peasants, Iosif Moldovan and Ion Cotin, were murdered. The same day lieutenant Papucs ordered the murdering of two young Jewish girls, Roza and Esther Rozenberg. Reporting that crime in his book, Michael Bar-On of Israel notes: "The bodies were exhumed after the war. The Hungarians who like to pride themselves on their chivalrous spirit, had buried the victims in an infamous manner: they had laid the girls at the bottom of the grave, and the two men on top of them."
Is it possible that not one of the authors of the book we discuss here knew that it was Horthy's Hungarian authorities that provided from the ranks of the Jews of Northern Transylvania and Sub-Carpathian Ukraine, about 16,000 of the 20,000 victims of the first mass-murder in the long sequence of those that punctuated the implementation of the "final solution" of the nazis, that is for the massacre of Kamenec-Podolsk of 1941? It is hard to believe so, because the book of Ghideon Hausner, who was attorney general in the well-known trial of the war criminal Eichmann, was published in Hungarian at Budapest under the title Sentence in Jerusalem; and that book shows that in the summer of 1941, shortly after nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the Hungarian authorities rounded up all so-called "eastern Jews", that is all those who did not have Hungarian citizenship (former Polish, Romanian and Czech Jews) and herded them to the newly invaded areas of East Poland. There, SS-Obersturmbannfghrer Jeckelm pledged that "he would liquidate those Yids to the last man before September 1" (thosedeported from Hungary, from Northern Transylvania, and the local ones). And he kept his promise. Einsatztruppe C under his command butchered all of them at Kamenec-Podolsk and the neighboring towns. The number of the victims exceeded 20,000. A few managed to escape almost miraculously and returned to Budapest to tell what had happened.
And how can we forget the sufferings of over 50,000 Jewish men in the vigor of their youth - of whom 15,000 were from Northern Transylvania - whom Horthy's rIgime sent to the Ukraine in forced labor and penal divisions, with the premeditated aim of liquidating them? As can be seen from the memoirs of the Hungarian Minister of Defense in Horthy's government, Nagybaconi Nagy Vilmos, out of every seven Jews sent to the Ukraine, six died: of hunger, of cold, beaten to death, shot or burned to death at Dorosici.
The text reads further: "...in 1944, the Hungarian authorities - in spite of brave objections raised by progressive intellectuals and of church dignitaries such as for instance Bishop M;rton :ron...". It would have been absolutely necessary to refer specifically here to at least one single document, to at least one single letter publicly signed by a reputed Hungarian intellectual or by a group of intellectuals. We who were in the ghettoes were holding our breath in the expectation of such a protest. But neither then nor later when the deportation began was there ever such a protest heard of. Yes, the only one whom these authors cite, M;rton :ron, protested bravely; only that he was not at the head of any church in Hungary, as the authors imply, but was a bishop who resided at Alba Iulia, that is, in Romania; from that country he passed the temporary border [into occupied Transylvania] and on May 18, 1944, he read his protest in the St. Michael Cathedral of Cluj, for which act he became at the end of that very month persona non grata on the territory occupied by Horthy's Hungary and was sent packing back.
True, at the beginning of June there had been an attempt on the part of the Protestant Church to organize a common protest of the Hungarian churches. However that attempt miscarried because ofthe position taken by the head of Hungary's majority church, SerIdi Jusztini;n. Years later, his apologists were to assert that, like a military strategist, he waited in order to attack "at the proper time, with the needful force and at the proper place." Yet when people are carted toward their death a the rate of 12,000 a day, there was no strategy and no tactics involved in "waiting and postponing"; what was involved was simply abandoning the victims.
So, the authors continue, in spite of brave protests (to ascertain which we are not given any documentation), the Hungarian authorities "... transported a significant part of the Jewish population of Northern Transylvania, approximately 90-100,000 persons, to concentration camps in Germany, condemning them to death."
It is not possible for me, a survivor of that ordeal, to understand how the authors dared misrepresent facts to such an extent, to omit in such an unscrupulous manner, such a deplorable reality. Leaving alone the word transported* - although I cannot deny that I feel deeply cut to the heart every time I encounter an attempt to adorn a reality so cruel and so barbarous as to be unparalleled in the history of mankind - I cannot and I have no right to stifle my protest when truth is not observed even as concerns well-known facts and figures. How can one state that "only a significant part" of the Jews of Northern Transylvania was deported, when it is well-known that Horthy's police and gendarmes searched every house in every village and every town, with a precision and a thoroughness that amazed even the Hitlerites, and, using the data from the bureaus of "population registration", and lists previously prepared, rounded up all Jews of Northern Transylvania into ghettoes, every single one, and then, cramming them 60-90 to a railway wagon, sent them to their death in trains of 50 wagons each. Those who were excused - a few badly crippled war veterans etc. - are such a small number that they do not change the data.
Neither does the assertion that "they were transported to concentration camps in Germany" contain any truth. Indeed, nazi Germany was covered at that time by a network of concentration camps in which inmates from all European nations were made to perform exhausting work and were subjected to unbearabletreatment. But the Jews of Northern Transylvania were sent without exception to the extermination camp of Birkenau-Auschwitz, where 70-75%, sometimes even 80% of the newcomers were taken directly from the railway station to the gas chambers. And only the 20-30%3 that survived were later sent on to concentration camps in Germany.
Although at Birkenau-Auschwitz a death factory had been set up and there was an experience of several years in ensuring its flawless functioning toward the anticipated arrival at an unprecedented pace of those deported from Hungary and from the territories she had occupied, a series of special measures were taken. SS Lieutenant-colonel Rudolf H_ss, the camp's former commander, was again put in charge of Auschwitz.
Appliances were refurbished, furnaces revarnished, chimneys reinforced with steel bands; kilometers of ditches were dug in the immediate vicinity of the crematories, preparing for the open burning of the bodies that could not be burnt in the four crematories in those days and nights when their capacity would be exceeded.2
Even the primitive gas chambers used before the modern ones were built, were again made functional.
A new railway was built between Auschwitz and Birkenau, and the landing point was brought 200 meters closer to the crematories. The numbers of the inmates in the two special detachments (Sonderkommandos) who worked in the gas chambers was increased from 224 to 860, and the Kommando of those who sorted out the loot that came in the trains was increased to almost 2000. In spite of all those measures Rudolf H_ss had to travel to Budapest several times to bring the exaggerated pace of Horthy's deportations in agreement with the gassing and burning capacity of Birkenau-1.
As for the number of 90-100,000 persons given by the authors, it can be explained in no other way but by the deliberate tendency of reducing the magnitude of the crime perpetrated by Horthy's rIgime and implicitly of diminishing the responsibilities of the perpetrators.
It is easy to make a reckoning reasonably close to the truth. The 1941 census that Horthy's occupation forces took in Northern Transylvania evinced the existence of 151,125 Jews there. It is aknown fact however that following anti-Jewish laws, among the people who suffered persecutions, rounding up in ghettoes and deportation were also some of those who considered themselves Christians but had Jewish parents or even only Jewish grandparents. Thus the number was increased by 10 %3. It is an established fact, from data given in specialized literature, that the number of Jews from Northern Transylvania who suffered the extermination procedures exceeded 166,000, of whom over 150,000 were sent by Horthy's rIgime to Birkenau-Auschwitz, and about 15,000 were sent to die in the Ukraine. I cannot understand how the authors came to state that the number of the victims was at most 100,000. Even had they limited themselves to the examination of the incomplete data registered at the Hungarian military command of Kosice, where the trains with deportees to Birkenau-Auschwitz passed through, they would have seen that 27 trains were registered, with the date when they passed through, the number of deportees in the locked wagons, and the ghetto they came from, duly entered.
Summing up those numbers they would have reached a total of 131,641, to which the 15,000 sent to the Ukraine must needs be added.
Then it would have been meet, even necessary, at least to mention, if not even to comment on, the shattering reality that of the deported - or transported, in the euphemism the authors prefer - persons, 84.5 %3 were exterminated.3
As a matter of fact, that is not the only serious omission. Unfortunately, omissions are so numerous and so grievous that in certain regards they are even more unpardonable than the misrepresentations.
I reread the paragraph several times; I could not pass it over. I could not believe, I could not conceive that in a book with a pretense to history, published under the sponsorship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and in whose editorial committee we find an important member of the Budapest government, theannihilation of an entire population should be recorded without commenting in any way on that heinous crime, without referring in the least to the causes that generated it, without uttering a single word of condemnation of the perpetrators.
In the first place I must state downright clearly that the "final solution", in other words, "the final solution of the Jewish problem in Horthy's style" was the direct outcome of the fascist, chauvinistic, racist, and anti-semitic policy pursued by Horthy's rIgime. As a matter of fact, the grandees of that rIgime loved to boast - and with good reason - that after World War I, Hungary was the first state in Europe to legislate anti-semitic measures. In fact, as early as 1920 they adopted the law regarding admission to higher learning, where the declared aim of the law was to "scale the numbers of students with wise discretion". In truth what was achieved was setting limits within certain percentages for students coming from the national minorities.
In 1938 another anti-Jewish law was promulgated with an apparently innocent title: "The more efficient ensuring of a balanced social and economic life", but whose aim was to limit Jewish access to economic and social life in Hungary.
Only half a year later, the Hungarian Parliament promulgated another anti-Jewish law, which stated that all Hungarian citizens who had one parent or two grandparents of Jewish origin at the moment or before the law was promulgated must be considered Jews, alongside of those who had Jewish religion. The meaning of "Jew" was then extended through the law of 1941 concerning "defense of the race".
Based on those facts, vitIz Endre L;szl[, appointed State
Secretary in the Minister of the Interior by Horthy, in a speech
broadcast by radio and reprinted by the entire Hungarian press,
debated vehemently the notion according to which there was a
renewed emergence of the Jewish problem (i.e. after March 19,
1944) as a result of the world political situation. He stressed that "it
is almost 25 years since the Hungarian society unanimously
defending racial purity urges the finding of a solution to the Jewish
problem. Hungarian anti-semitism is not a fashionable policy, and is
not a copy or an imitation of current tendencies and ideas. It is notfor one or two years, but for decades on end, that we Hungarians
were so to say the first in Europe to feel directly the catastrophic
danger of the ever growing Jewish influence. During decades of
struggles the conviction has grown that only a radical solution can
lead to a final and satisfying solution desired by both sides.
"Our immutable conviction -
Summarizing that reality, in May 1946, at the trial of the war criminals who were followers of Horthy and were guilty of the extermination of the Jews of north-Western Transylvania, the People's Tribunal of Cluj showed in the charge that "the oldest fascist rIgime in Europe was Horthy's Hungary, as it was the first to promulgate anti-Jewish laws as early as 1920 through the legislation of the institution of 'numerus clausus' in Hungary's universities. It practiced the same oppression persecuting the workers, the progressive elements, perpetrating political murders, and maintaining ties from the very first moment of its coming to power with Hitler's rIgime of Germany. As a consequence of setting up such a fascist rIgime in Horthy's Hungary, a series of anti-Jewish laws were promulgated, inhumane measures were taken such as the deportation of a number of Jews in the summer of 1941 to Kamenec-Podolsk, the exile decreed by the military commandment of Northern Transylvania, the pogrom of UjvidIk and other similar acts."5
I feel bound to stress these realities because if we were to keep silent about them, as the authors of the alleged History of Transylvania do, we would generate confusion and the younger generations would be misled. It is not a mere omission. Presenting the holocaust of the Jews of Hungary and the territories she invaded as an accident, suggesting even indirectly that it was nothing but the consequence of the entry of the nazi troops in Hungary, is a serious political and historical error, and a reprehensible attempt at diminishing - even exonerating - the responsibilities of the thenHungarian state. Such a position on the part of historians can only misinform public opinion and the younger generation whose moral obligation it is to watch and to struggle actively so that such a disaster never strikes again anywhere in the world.
The survivors of the ghetto of Gherla are perfectly justified when they reveal their most intimate thoughts in the memorial volume about their ordeal entitled Gherla, Iclod and the Surrounding Area, saying: "We must write, we who witnessed those horrors, who saw with our own eyes the bloodshed unleashed by monsters with human appearance, who felt the barbarousness of the gendarmes who wore rooster's feathers in their hats ... if not for our sake, then for the sake of our descendants, who one or two generations later will not believe that a thing like that actually happened. We must write for the world to know ten thousand years later that there have been such countries at one time where the end was seen approaching, where the losing battle front came to their boundaries, and where the concern in those critical moments was only to exterminate the Jews."
The fact is significant, I think, that Iank[ PIter, the president of the People's Tribunal of Budapest that functioned in the first two years after World War II, felt compelled to say in his description of the harm and the danger contained in the chauvinistic and racist propaganda of Horthy and of the disastrous consequences of inflaming the passions: "In spite of the presence of German troops and of Hitler's violent demands, that bloody deed (deportation) could not have been accomplished so completely if stronger opposition had prevailed on the part of the Christians, as happened elsewhere. In my opinion, that shameful, inhumane action was possible not only because the Szt[jai government made it so, but also because the Hungarian people was misled and their hatred was exacerbated through deceitful anti-Semitic propaganda of decades and last but not least through the inflammation of the gregarious instincts of loot-hungry thugs ...".6
It is my belief that it was the duty of the authors of The History of Transylvania to stress the harm done by Horthy's propaganda, exactly in order to make clear that it was not the people that was to blame for what happened, but first and foremost Horthy's rIgimeand its representatives and theorists who, from various hierarchical positions, spread and exacerbated dissension, racist hatred, terrorism.
Dwelling again on those reprehensible omissions discussed above, I also consider that what must be and should have been stated, in the second place, is that the implementation of the "final solution", in other words, "the final solution to the Jewish problem in Horthy's style", was performed in Hungary and the territories she occupied with unparalleled zeal and cruelty, going far beyond whatever happened in other European countries, including Hitler's Germany.
In his book, Singer Z[ltan exclaims: "No, the Hungarians did not sell the Jews to the nazis; they merely paid the nazis to take them away. (Eichmann testified that the Hungarian government paid 5,000 mark for the deportation of every Jewish family). We may state in good conscience that there was no people in Europe that treated the Jews in a more horrible and more cruel manner than the Hungarians".7
In his book A Ierusz;lemi per (The Jerusalem trial), Sch_n Dezs[ writes that he talked to several people from Liska 06, that is, with those who for a year night and day studied the holocaust exclusively, in order to bring Eichmann to trial. Thus he reached the conclusion: "The Hungarians were the most pitiless. I never found so much barbarousness, so much inhumanity against the Jews in any other nation of Europe. ... It is painful to write this finding down, and it is especially painful to write it down in Hungarian."
According to the investigation of Stern Samu, the then president of the Central Jewish Council of Budapest, the conditions had become so unbearable that "in the middle of April we approached Eichmann for help against Endre L;szl[. We described to him the horrors of the ghettoes of provincial towns and we asked him in the name of bare humanity to help us. Naturally, his answer was a cold refusal. Then did Eichmann make the famous remark: "Endre will die Juden mit Paprika fressen" (Endre wants to eat up the Jews with paprika).8
Wisliceny, Eichmann's co-worker, said on the occasion of a conference with Freudiger Fgl_p, the president of the Jewish community of Budapest: "The Hungarians appear to be the true descendants of the Huns; we would never have brought about such a performance without them". Krumey, Eichmann's deputy, said along the same lines: "the Hungarian gendarmes do their job with genuine Asiatic brutality".9
Lev;i, one of the experts in the Hungarian holocaust, summarizes what happened as follows: "Because of their reduced numbers, the nazis could practically not even supervise the deportations, let alone accomplish them. It was possible to mark the Jews with the Star of David, and to round them up in ghettoes and concentration camps, only because the gendarmes - well informed about the situation and having a manpower of approximately 20,000, could always count everywhere on help from the local police."10
Hitler's chargI d'affaires in Budapest Veesenmeyer, reported to Ribbentrop at the very beginning of the action, on March 31 1944, that "considering conditions here (in Hungary) developments can be described as unusually fast-paced". Only a few days later he stresses again in a cabled message that because of its anti-Jewish measures, "the Hungarian government advances extremely actively and with outstanding speed".
It is also significant that upon examination of the anti-Jewish laws of Hungary the nazis of Berlin found that "some of the provisions are even harsher than the German ones".
The zeal of the Budapest government and of Horthy's followers generally in applying "the final solution" reached proportions of such magnitude that it not only surprised and amazed their elder brethren - the nazis in Berlin - but also repeatedly forced the latter to temper it, to interfere - how ironically! - in order to "defend" the Jews against excesses that could backfire and bring them prejudices worldwide.
In this respect the minutes of the meeting of the Council of Ministers of Budapest of May 3, 1944 are relevant, where it was discussed how to manage the property of inimical Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, and of Jews who held foreign citizenship: the prime minister said among other things that it was in the common interestof the two peoples (German and Hungarian) that managing of the property of inimical citizens (especially Jews were meant here) and of Jews of foreign citizenship should be done properly, observing the regulations.
"One of the counsellors of the German Embassy in Budapest visited the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs three times and stressed forcefully that it is in the common (nazi-Horthy-ist) interest that no police excesses be perpetrated that could generate a reaction worldwide not only against Hungarian citizens but also against German citizens ... The treatment to be given citizens considered enemies and their property was especially brought to the attention of the Hungarian government; an overview of the German regulations regarding that area was transmitted, expressing the wish that the Hungarian part not undertake measures that exceed them (emphasis ours)."11
There is no stronger indictment against the zeal of Horthy's followers than the devilish haste with which they expedited the pace of the transportations to the crematories.
Horthy's mayors received verbal instructions and, without waiting for written instructions, they proceeded with fanatical zeal. With inexplicable haste they crowded tens of thousands of Jews in impossibly confined areas, without previously ensuring even the most elementary hygiene, and then asserting the danger of epidemics and of infection to the surrounding areas they requested the higher authorities, including the German ones, the speedy removal of "those undesired and dangerous agglomerations", "the doing away with those sources of infection". The mayor of Ungv;r wound up his memorandum to the Ministry of the Interior as follows: "We respectfully request that you urgently order that the Jews gathered together at Ungv;r in a camp system be sent away as soon as possible."12
SS Hauptsturmfghrer Dieter Wisliceny would state later in 1946 from his prison cell of Bratislava:
"At the beginning of April I passed through Munk;cs, to
supervise the rounding up in ghettoes. The commander of the
gendarmes of Sighetul Marmatiei came to me and told me that he
could not accomplish ... the rounding up in Sighetul Marmatieibecause there were no proper buildings, no sanitary installations. It
was necessary either that he abandon the action or that the 'surplus
people'(i.e. of Jews) be taken away either to western Hungary or
even to Germany ...
As soon as I arrived in Budapest I contacted Eichmann and drew
his attention to the fact that Baky would telephone him soon and
ask that a decision be made. At midday, between 2 and 3 p.m., we
met in Baky's office [...] State Secretary Baky told Eichmann about
the state of the matters in the Maramures, then said:
- I am asking you, dear Adolf, shall be stop rounding them up or will
you take them off our hands?
- Mein lieber Laci (my dear Laci) I can tell you right now with
approval from my superiors that we are ready to take all Jews.
The entire discussion
In spite of their preoccupation with speeding up the procedures, the nazi authorities had initially stipulated that 3,000 Jews be transported daily to Auschwitz in trains of 50 carriages each. Consequently, Veesenmeyer had reported to Berlin: "... Discussions were initiated about their (the Jews') transportation and, beginning with May 15, we planned to transport daily 3,000 Jews ... Destination: Auschwitz".
Going far beyond what the nazis did in the implementation of the "final solution", Horthy's followers undertook, under strained war circumstances, when every railway carriage mattered, to ensure - since it was about the liquidation of the Jews! - not one but four trains of 50 carriages each. And thus it passed that there were transported daily from Northern Transylvania to Auschwitz not 3,000 but 12,000 (sometimes even 14,000) Jews.
I never understood then or in the intervening 40 years: why so much haste? How could an entire country subordinate in times of war everything, forces and means, not to the needs of the front, not to the balancing of the economy, not to the providing for the population, but to the rounding up, the embarkation, and the sending to their death of hundreds of thousands of innocent people? There were insufficient railway engines to transport food, there were not enough carriages for the wounded, trains were stuck, the circulation of goods and persons deteriorated daily. But the trains of death had "free passage" day and night; no ghetto ran behind schedule for lack of trains. The schedule of the train arrivals from the north-west of Romania to the death ramp at Birkenau was never disturbed thanks to Horthy's zeal. Where does so much hatred for mankind come from? Why did we, the Jews of North-Western Romania occupied by Horthy, had to enter the gas chambers in the greatest proportion as compared to the deportation from all the rest of Europe?
I cannot explain why the authors of The History of Transylvania say nothing about all that. They do not even mention Horthy's name in this context, whose name has become in the 25 years synonymous with terrorism, and who more than once expressed publicly in words and especially in actions his hatred for the Jews.
True, Horthy, realizing no doubt the unprecedented magnitude of the monstrous crime that he organized against the Jews, prepared for himself what he thought was an unbreakable alibi. The meeting of the Council of Ministers of March 29, 1944 which unleashed the anti-Jewish laws that were to provide - with supreme cynicism - a "legal background" to the extermination of the Jews of Hungary and the territories she invaded, began - according to its minutes - with the "reading" of Horthy's "decision": "According to the declaration of the Prime Minister, His Excellency the Regent allows free play for the government whose head he is as regards all Jewish (i.e. anti-Jewish) ordinances and does not wish to exert any influence regarding them".14
Describing what Horthy's followers were doing in Hungary, Churchill was writing to Eden in those days: "The persecution of the Jews in Hungary is probably the greatest and lowest crime in theentire history of mankind".
Horthy's immediate participation in the planning and perpetration of that crime cannot be denied. The fact that he denied having any influence in the solution of the Jewish problem shows only his cowardice. For he withdrew only "de jure"; "de facto" he took care that the horrible crime be perpetrated without pity. Consequently he took good care to appoint as State Secretaries of the Ministry of the Interior, Baky and Endre, his trusted followers, whom he knew well since their Seghedin days, and who were well-known all over the country as the most savage and vehement anti-Semites.
As a matter of fact, before the People's Tribunal of Budapest, Baky would repeat the words Horthy spoke to him when he appointed him a Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior: "You are among my old Seghedin officers, I know that you are loyal to me, I have complete trust in you, that is why I appoint you in these hard times a State Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior. We need today the best of the Hungarians ... I hate Galician Jews and communists. Out of the country they go! Out! Out!"15
And also: how can a head of state take it upon himself to divorce himself from the fate of one million of his citizens just like that? How can he watch unconcerned the insults, torturing and mass murdering of a million of the citizens of the country he leads and then claim his innocence, invoking the absurd pretext that "he did not wish to interfere?"
Who and how could exonerate a dictator such as Horthy was, of the crimes perpetrated by orders of the government he appointed? And the governments Horthy appointed, beginning especially with that headed by Szt[jay D_me, initiated, sponsored and covered up unimaginable crimes, despite the protests of an entire world.
After the liberation, the People's Tribunal of Budapest showed unequivocally the complete lack of humanity, the feverish haste, the harshness and abuses, the terrible zeal in committing the crimes of the rounding up in ghettoes and of the deportations. In the sentence no. B.X.4419 of January 7, 1946, in the trial of State Secretaries Endre and Baky and of Minister of the Interior I;ross, concerning the rounding up of Jews and sending them off to their death, the tribunal showed: "There can be no doubt that the rounding up anddeportation outside of the country of 434,351 persons who had lived in various parts of the country in only two months was possible only thanks to the cooperation of the Hungarian authorities who knew the local state of affairs. ...At that time, various German personalities (Eichmann, Wisliceny) declared that the situation in Hungary is a special one, because Endre and Baky set a more rapid pace as concerns the Jewish actions than the Germans set themselves. And, according to Veesenmeyer's testimony, Adolf Eichmann, Berlin's specialist in Hungary for the solution to the Jewish problem, told him that the implementation of the deportation is based on the Hungarian gendarmes and administration, because all he has is a small commando".16
The martyrs of Sarmas, Ip, Traznea
There were voices raised after the war trying to tone down the zeal of Horthy's followers, going as far as minimizing their responsibility, even as far as exonerating them of any wrongdoing, blaming the nazis only. Unfortunately the authors of the book we discuss here are no different. The testimonies and documents from those times - including the testimonies of the members of the Budapest and Berlin governments, and the documents bearing the official stamp of those two governments - accuse them without the shadow of a doubt. But even had no document survived, even had no witness from among former detainees been found to accuse them, the truth still could not have been hidden, for in their cruelty and inhumanity they perpetrated in their last day, in their last burst, a crime that cries to heaven, a crime that cannot be covered up, cannot be denied, the horrible crime of Sarmas.
That was in September 1944. The sufferings of the population of the north-west of Romania were reaching their end. The victorious advance of the Romanian and Soviet armies was bringing liberation and the alleviation of pain. However, here and there, along the temporary boundary, the nazi-Horthy-ist troops managed to penetrate into the south of Transylvania for a few days, beyond the unjust boundary set by the odious Dictate of Vienna. Here all Jews without exception were alive. Subunits of Horthy's army penetrated in the village of Sarmas, a few scores of kilometers from Cluj. The"knights" of Horthy were surprised to find that there were 126 Jews in that small place. And all of them alive! They did not hesitate a single moment. Without asking or being ordered by anyone on the German part, without asking even directions from Budapest, they, those knights of Horthy's army, taking the initiative, prompted by the feelings instilled in them by almost a quarter of a century of Horthy's fascist rule, fell upon the 126 men, women, children and old people, and perpetrated one of the most horrible crimes from the holocaust era, that was to become known worldwide under the name of "the horrible crime of Sarmas".
I have seen thousands and thousands of cadavers at Birkenau-Auschwitz, at Landsberg and Kaufering, in all concentration camps in which the fate ordained for me by Horthy's followers thrust me. I was an eyewitness to the death of many of my fellows who perished from hunger, cold, disease, killed by poisonous gas, shot or hanged; drowned, frozen to death or thrown down from scaffoldings. I confess that I never trembled as I did when I saw the photographs of the victims of Sarmas. I quote here a fragment only from the minutes of the unearthing performed by the Romanian authorities on February 1, 1945:
"...Very many cadavers - especially those of the second grave
where there were mostly women and children - showed traces of
violence of the most savage type, having their head smashed and
even broken to bits by violent blows with hard or sharp objects (rifle
butt, pick-axes, shovels etc.); many bodies were thrust through or
ripped apart with cutting blades; others had the bones of the upper
of lower limbs broken"
"The bodies were thrown in at random, one on top of the other,
but there were found some cadavers embracing, a husband
embracing his wife, a father holding his baby in his arms ...
How curious that the authors of The History of Transylvania who found it in their heart to write only 4 lines and a half about the holocaust of the Jews of the north-western area of Romania that was invaded by Horthy, decided to write a little more amply about the fate of the Jews from Romania - namely six lines. Those lines were used fully to increase the confusion, to carry on the cover-up and the misrepresentations.
To better understand the dangerous game of the falsification of history that the authors of this historical improvisation are playing, we must reprint a previous quotation which reveals the image they wish to create. According to these authors, after the Dictate of Vienna, a "policy of reciprocity of the nationalities took effect; exile was answered by exile on the opposite side, internment in camps was answered by internment; schools closed on one side were answered by schools closed on the other, which created a feeling of total insecurity about the fate of the Romanians in the north and of the Hungarians in the south respectively."18
Thus it is attempted to suggest to the reader the existence of a parallelism between the state of affairs in the north and in the south of Transylvania. Such an attempt is however more than revolting. When and where, in what village of the south of Transylvania were there butchered 155 innocent people - pregnant women and mothers nursing their babies, men in the vigor of young age and old people together with them - as was done in the north of Transylvania in the night of September 13-14 1940 in the village of Ip? When and where, in what village of the south of Transylvania was there a massacre similar to the one perpetrated by Horthy's followers on September 9, 1940 in the village of Traznea, ending in the death of 81 victims? When and where, in what villages of the south of Transylvania were there committed such bloodcurdling murders as the ones perpetrated by Horthy's people at Moisei, Sarmas, or Leordina?
These authors are attempting to create the image of a parallelism as concerns the treatment of the Jews also. They state it summarily, as if it went without saying: "Fascist policy went hand in hand on both sides (that is in the north and in the south of Transylvania) with anti-Semitism."19 Then comes the sentence we discussed at the beginning of the article, in which the authors present in those four lines and a half all that their heart and their conscience prompted them to write about the extermination of the Jews in the north of occupied Transylvania. Elementary logic would have urged to continue showing what happened in the south of Transylvania in order to bolster up the idea promulgated about the similarities "on both sides". However, these authors trample remorselessly on anylogic and to the reader's amazement do not make any reference whatsoever to the state of the matters in the south of Transylvania but jump disjointly to the situation of the Jews in all of Romania. Naturally, the authors had to jump because they did not have the stamina to record historical truth: in the south of Transylvania, under Antonescu's rule, the life of not one single Jew was endangered. While the Jews of Cluj and Dej, of Oradea and Satu-Mare, of all towns and villages of Northern Transylvania were rounded up and all of them to the last old man, to the last infant, were driven under the threat of Horthy's bayonets, to the crematories and gas chambers of Birkenau-Auschwitz, the Jews of Turda and Alba-Iulia, of Arad and Timisoara were not even as much as asked to wear the yellow star!
What is more, those towns and as a matter of fact the towns in all of Romania were a safe haven for all Jews of Northern Transylvania - and even of Hungarian cities - who managed to escape from the ghettoes and flee to Romania.
The cable sent from Budapest to Berlin is well known and frequently quoted in specialized literature in which Veesenmeyer reports: "from the circles of the Romanian consul general of Cluj it has transpired that the Jews who fled from Hungary to Romania are treated there like political refugees, and the Romanian government is to facilitate for them their emigration to Palestine".
These authors allege that "during World War II - according to some assessments - in Romania, especially east of the Carpathians, were assassinated approximately 387,000 Jews."20
We discuss here the book The History of Transylvania, with the forgeries and misrepresentations it contains, and not the fate of the Jews under Antonescu's rIgime. Yet since these authors have made that assertion, a few clarifications are necessary.
It is not the first time that Hungarian authors by a mere sleight of the pen, attribute to Antonescu's rIgime the entire number of the Jews who fell victims to Horthy's implementation of the "final solution" in the north-west of Romania. This is how the distortion isdone: From the data of the official census of 1930, it results that there were 728,115 Jews living in Romania in 1930. It is estimated that owing to the natural demographic increase, at the beginning of 1940 there was a Jewish population of about 760,000 in Romania. After liberation from nazi domination, there were over 350,000 Jews in Romania. True, their numbers decreased by about 400,000. But that figure comprises in it the over 160,000 Jews deported by Horthy's Hungarian authorities, of whom 84.5 %3 perished. Then it comprises the fate of the 280,000 Jews of Bessarabia and Bucovina. Without minimizing Antonescu's responsibility for the death in Transnistria of approximately 70-80,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bucovina moved there during the upheaval of the world war, we must state here that in that part of Romania that was under the control of the Romanian government within the boundaries set down in the summer of 1940, in spite of great and repeated pressure from Berlin, the "final solution" was not implemented.
Dr. Israel Gutman, college professor in Israel shows, in a report titled "The Status of Romanian Jews against the Background of a Europe Conquered by the Nazis", that in Romania the nazi plans of deporting the Jews to the extermination camps of Poland met with "energetic opposition on the part of the Romanian people and of the Romanian authorities, including the government and the dictator Ion Antonescu ... Their refusal to deliver the Jews grew with time and it was this resistance that saved the majority of Romanian Jews from the 'final solution' as conceived by the nazis. It does not seem to me that that was just the consequence of opportunistic stances or changes in alignment, but decisively in part and to a great extent it was the result of a difference in the positions and concepts as regards the Jews that prevailed in nazi Germany on the one hand and on the other in Romania under Antonescu's dictatorship."21
From the original documents at the Iad Vashem in Jerusalem, it is seen that on September 15, 1942 Hauptsturmfghrer Gustav Richter arrived in Bucharest as a specialist in "Jewish problems" from Berlin and signed the general plan of deportation for the Jews of Romania. The Bukarester Tageblatt, published by the German legation in Bucharest, impatiently announced that in the year 1942the Jews of Southern Transylvania and the Banat would be evacuated, and the next year all Jews from the Ancient Kingdom [Moldavia, Wallachia and Oltenia] would be deported, so that no Jew would remain in Romania. The publication, relying on the information it had, asserted that "This time Romania will be an example for other countries". As the intent to deport became public, a resurgence of protests began to exert pressure, coming from the most varied political, economic, cultural and religious circles of Romania.
In a letter of protest signed by intellectuals, tradespeople, industrialists and craftsmen from Transylvania and the Banat submitted to the Ministry of the Interior in Bucharest it was stated: "Whatever our view of the Jews may be, we are human and Christians, we have suffered so much under Hungarian rule and we know how much our brothers are suffering now under that rule, and we tremble to think that completely innocent citizens of any state could be stripped off of all their belongings and exiled from the land in which they were born and where they have buried for centuries their fathers, their grandfathers and forefathers." The deportation plan could not be implemented. It miscarried.22
In a study entitled "Antonescu's RIgime and the Saving of the Jews of Southern Transylvania", Dr. Jean Ancel of Israel writes that: "The problem of the Jews of (Southern) Transylvania and the Banat can be considered to be the first serious disagreement between the plans of the nazi government and the steadfastness of a small nation. If we consider Stalingrad to be a decisive event in the history of World War II, a moment which marks the beginning of the end of nazi domination in Europe, then the Romanian government's refusal to hand over its Jews may be considered one of the great acts of resistance in Europe, at a time when Germany was at the peak of its power..."23
Surely, the Jews of Romania were not exempt from a series of anti-Semitic measures, vexations and persecutions. At the time of the legionary rebellion of January 1941, among the victims there were 130 Jews. Then in the Yassy pogrom there perished several thousand.24 It has not been possible to arrive at an exact figure because of lack of documentation. Referring to the rebellion and tothe Yassy pogrom, college professor Dr. Israel Gutman from Iad Vashem writes: "It is to be supposed that the nazis were the initiators and fomenters of those tragic events, however it cannot be denied that some anti-Semitic elements from among the local population also participated."25
I said it before elsewhere and I feel compelled to say it again: as a survivor of the holocaust of Northern Transylvania, it is extremely difficult for me to compare numbers that represent crushed lives, to judge of the seriousness of a crime depending on the number of the victims, when killing as much as one man because of his ethnicity is an act that deserves capital punishment. However I think that it is unjust, that it is unacceptable to consider equal - as the authors of The History of Transylvania do - the fate of the Jews of Northern Transylvania, where 84,5 %3 were exterminated, and the fate of the Jews of Southern Transylvania, who, everybody knows, all survived. It is unjust, it is unacceptable to consider equal the fate of the Jews of Horthy's Hungary - about whom the American historian Randolph Braham writes that "they were annihilated with unprecedented speed through the most barbarous deportation and the most pitiless program of massacre that prevailed during the war" - and the fate of the Jews of Romania, a country that was, according to the same historian, "an oasis, a haven for the Jewish refugees from Hungary."26
Even Endre L;szl[, the Secretary of State in the Ministry of the Interior, writes in the overview submitted to the Council of Ministers of Budapest of June 21, 1944: "To escape the ghettoes the Jews began to flee across the borders, abroad. ESPECIALLY TO ROMANIA [emphasis ours].Of all our neighboring countries it was Romania that by a lax watching of her borders facilitated the penetration of Jews into the country. ... In this regard we have asked the Minister of Foreign Affairs to order his representatives abroad to undertake the diplomatic actions that are called for".27
As it is well known, the then government of Budapest never publicly acknowledged the crime they initiated and that they carried out with sadistic meticulousness and egregious barbarousness.
With amazing stubbornness and shamelessness, Horthy's government, and later that of Sz;las, denied their crimes against
the Jews. On November 7, 1944, the Swiss Embassy, that also represented Romanian interests in Budapest, submitted to the Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs a note in which the Romanian government requested the International Red Cross to investigate the authenticity of the news about the intention of the German and of the Hungarian governments to liquidate the Jews deported from Northern Transylvania, at the same time indicating that it was studying steps meant to make those two governments refrain from extreme measures taken against the Jews.
The answer to that note was transmitted to the Swiss Embassy on November 15. The Sz;las government asserted that the Jews of Northern Transylvania - whose bodies had months before been burned to smoke and ashes in the crematories at Birkenau - had not been deported but kept to work like all Hungarian citizens. Further the answer wrote distinctly that "not only are they (the Jews) not threatened by any danger but on the contrary they enjoy good treatment (emphasis ours), regular provisions, secure and important jobs. The condition of the Romanians who are kept for enforced labor is similar."
As I said before, today's generations cannot answer for the crimes of those times. However they have the moral duty to acknowledge them (since those crimes cannot be erased from history anyhow), to analyze the causes that gave them birth, to fight them and to do everything so they will not be repeated. In this respect great duties are incumbent upon the historians. I must note with bitterness and indignation that the authors of The History of Transylvania are not fulfilling their duty.
Notes:
1. ErdIly t_rtInete, AkadImiai Kiad_, Budapest, 1986, p. 1757.
* The nazis directly sent to their death or sponsored the sending to death through gassing and burning of approximately 6 million Jews. However in all Hitlerite documents what is mentioned is "the transportation to the East", of "the evacuation", of "the moving", of a "special treatment" for Jews. Never of killing, poisoning with gas, exterminating them. Following that sad example, in the documents of the time issued by Horthy's government, the same euphemistic language of rare cynicism is used, avoiding each time even the word "deportation". I think it is high time to call a spade a spade!
2. See also Magazin Istoric no. 2/1958, 2/1959, 5/1971, 1/1980, 2/1982, 3/1984.
3. Remember, 40 ani de la masacrarea evreilor din Ardealul de Nord sub ocupatia horthysta. Federation of the Jewish Communities of the Socialist Republic of Romania, Bucharest, 1985, p. 59.
4. V;dirat a n;cizmus ellen, Budapest, 1953, vol. I, pp. 82-89.
5. Randolph Braham, Genocid and Reward, Boston, The Hague, Dordrecht, Lancaster, 1983, p. 17.
6. LIvai Ien_, Zsid[sors Magyarorszagon, Magyar TIka, p. 139.
7. Singer Zolt;n, Volt egyszer egy DIsz, Tel-Aviv, Vol II, p. 411.
8. Tan;czi feljegyzIs 1944 majus 16 - r (Stern Samu K_ziIse).
9. LIvai Ien_, op. cit., p. 110.
10. Ibidem, p. 117.
11. V;dirat a n;cizmus ellen, p. 288.
12. Magyar Nemzet of August 24, 1984.
13. Ibidem.
14. V;dirat a n;cizmus ellen, p. 31.
15. LIvai Ien_, Zsid[sors Magyarorsz;gon, pp. 99-100.
16. Randolph Braham, op. cit., p. 29.
17. Matatias Carp, Sarmas, una din cele mai oribile crime fasciste, Bucuresti, 1945, pp. 30-31.
18. ErdIly T_rtInete, p. 1754.
19. Ibidem, p. 1757.
20. Ibidem, p. 1758.
21. Simposion stiintific romano-israelian, in Anale de Istorie, no. 6/1984, p. 88.
22. Jean Ancel, Documents concerning the fate of Romanian Jewry during the Holocaust, Vol IV, pp. 113-114. For the solidarity shown by the Romanian people, see also Magazin Istoric, no. 6/1976.
23. Simposion stiintific romano-israelian, p. 90.
24. Magazin istoric, no. 6/1976.
25. Simposion stiintific romano-israelian, p. 88.
26. Randolph Braham, op. cit., p. 905.
27. LIvai Ien_, Fekete K_nyv, Oficina, 1946, p. 288.
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