How It Happened: Nina Munk and Ferenc Laczó discuss the Holocaust in Hungary

As the long-overdue translation of Ernő Munkácsi’s How It Happened: Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry arrives in bookstores, Nina Munk and Ferenc Laczó discuss the author’s controversial role as a member of the Jewish Council, Hungary’s lingering denials of complicity in the Holocaust, and why this powerful memoir is more relevant than ever.

Portrait of Ernő Munkácsi, 1943 © Estate of Magdalena and Alfred Gergely, courtesy of Andrew E. Hegedus

Nina Munk: What makes How It Happened especially remarkable is that it’s a first-hand account of the Holocaust in Hungary as seen by an insider – a member of the Jewish Council in Budapest (aka the Judenrat). What exactly was the role of the Hungarian Central Jewish Council? How did Ernő Munkácsi become a member?

Ferenc Laczó: The Central Jewish Council was an administrative body established by Adolf Eichmann’s special operations unit immediately after the Nazis entered Hungary on 19 March 1944. Their primary task was to help execute the orders of the German and Hungarian persecutors, a job that required them to carry out directives against their fellow Jews. Members of the Hungarian Jewish elite – including Ernő Munkácsi – were pressured by the Nazis to serve on the Council to lend a semblance of continuity to the Jewish community’s leadership and to help prevent panic among the persecuted masses.

Before the war, Munkácsi had served as lead counsel and chief secretary of the Neolog community of Pest, by far the largest Jewish community in Hungary, so it must have seemed logical for him to continue as chief secretary of the Central Jewish Council even under the drastically changed circumstances of 1944. How It Happened covers precisely those decisive months of 1944, which Munkácsi observed from his special vantage point and could also, albeit marginally, try to shape. He was not directly responsible for the decisions of the Council, but he was a key witness of the genocide and deeply involved in documenting the activities of the Council.

NM: After the war, Ernő Munkácsi and other members of the Jewish Council were charged with having betrayed their fellow Jews, specifically with having “lulled them into submission” as the Germans and their Hungarian allies hauled them off to death camps. In your introduction, you propose a more nuanced and empathetic understanding of the Jewish Council. Will you explain it?

FL: The role of the Jewish Councils, not only in Hungary but throughout Europe, has been a source of much controversy and emotional polemic. Many survivors saw the Jewish Council as executors and even accomplices of the German and Hungarian génocidaires without fully understanding the circumstances under which Council members were forced to operate and the unresolvable dilemmas they confronted. Members of the Council were trapped by a lack of morally sound alternatives.

In How It Happened, Munkácsi aims to defend the Council, arguing that its members acted with the best of intentions to save as many Jews as possible. He defends their chief strategy of compliance as the least vile option available and notes that at times certain Council members, including himself, risked their own lives to resist the genocide.

The viewpoints of the accusers and the defenders of the Jewish Council have been largely irreconcilable. The accusers, recalling that the Council enforced the persecutors’ demands, stress the very real and tragic consequences of this strategy of compliance. The defenders focus instead on what the Jewish Council tried to do, how powerless they were, and how little they could have actually accomplished in 1944. The passage of time allows us to see both sides as partial truths – and to reach a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the role played by the Jewish Council. What is essential is that we avoid making the Jewish Council a scapegoat for the sins of those who truly were responsible for the Holocaust.

NM: Your introduction is titled “The Excruciating Dilemmas of Ernő Munkácsi.” What do you mean by that?

FL: As a historian, I have long been intrigued by Munkácsi – from the first time I read his text in Hungarian, I could envision the complex dilemmas he must have grappled with when writing his book.

Munkácsi was Jewish, but he was also proudly Hungarian, and so he faced the dilemma of how to acknowledge Hungarian co-responsibility for the Holocaust while continuing to identify himself as a Hungarian. Somewhat unconvincingly, he claimed the perpetrators were entirely unrepresentative of Hungarians in general. He also put forward a comforting but unfounded tale of widespread Hungarian opposition to the perpetrators.

Another major dilemma he faced was how to clear the reputation of the Jewish Council without coming off as an apologist. Surely it must have been excruciating for Munkácsi to defend the Council in the immediate aftermath of the war, as the full horror of the Holocaust with its hundreds of thousands of victims from Hungary had come to light. Deftly, but to me not fully convincingly, Munkácsi’s book acknowledges poor judgment while categorically denying guilt.

In the end, How It Happened is a testament to the fact that there was simply no way for Munkácsi to resolve such excruciating dilemmas of interpretation.

Pest Israelite Congregation assembly, 1930s. Photo by Sándor Diskay. © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives. In the state room of their headquarters at 12 Síp Street, the Pest Israelite Congregation, representing Budapest’s Neolog Jews, is gathered for its general assembly, circa 1937. On the wall at left is a portrait of the banker Mór Wahrmann (1832-1892), the first Jew elected to the Hungarian parliament (in 1869). At right hangs the portrait of Wolf “Sáje” Schossberger, president of the Pest Congregation from 1869-71. The small man with white mustache on the dais next to the speaker is Samu Stern, president of the Pest Congregation. Seated next to him is Ernő Munkácsi, then chief counsel and secretary of the Pest Congregation. A few years later, when Adolf Eichmann ordered the creation of a Hungarian Judenrat in March 1944, requiring that it be run by men with authority in the community, Samu Stern became president and Ernő Munkácsi secretary of the Jewish Council.

NM: Ernő Munkácsi was my father’s first cousin and much of his book is entwined with my immediate family’s escape from Budapest in 1944, which I’ve been hearing about since I was a child. Nevertheless, reading How It Happened made me aware of how little I really knew about the Holocaust in Hungary. In your introduction, you discuss this phenomenon; that, for all the Holocaust memoirs that exist, relatively little has come out of Hungary. Why has it taken so long for attention to be paid to the Holocaust in Hungary, at least compared to, say, Poland or France?

FL: This question has preoccupied me for many years. Despite the fact that Auschwitz-Birkenau has widely been depicted as “the capital city of the Holocaust” and that Jews from Hungary constituted the largest group of victims at Auschwitz, the Hungarian Jewish catastrophe has not received the amount of attention one would expect. This paradox is even more startling when you consider that Hungary has the largest community of Holocaust survivors in Central Europe.

I think the answer has to do with the fact that the Hungarian state was a co-perpetrator of the Holocaust. Because this fact has rarely been acknowledged in Hungary it remains difficult even today to discuss the subject honestly or openly.

After the war, when Hungary became a Soviet satellite, the state’s mandatory narrative of the war largely overlooked or suppressed Jewish suffering. Then, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 came the rise of a new nationalism in Hungary that, while allowing Holocaust victims to be explicitly commemorated, prefers to ignore the role of Hungarians as perpetrators. Headway is being made to discuss the Holocaust in Hungary more honestly and openly – particularly with the emergence of a younger and more critical generation of researchers – but it is far from assured that we will be able to make a real difference as long as the country is controlled by the anti-liberal right.

Girls’ gymnastics team at Pesti Izraelita Hitközség Leánygimnáziuma, 1941. Photo by Pál Kis. © Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives. Taken in 1941, when Jews elsewhere in Europe were being rounded up, herded into ghettos, and deported, this photograph is notable for its ordinariness, reflecting the comparatively unperturbed life of most Jews then in Hungary. The girls, members of Budapest’s Neolog Jewish high-school gymnastics team, are carefully styled, their coiffed hair rolled and pinned. They gaze at a copy of Magyar Iparművészet (“Hungarian Handicrafts”) magazine. Although we don’t know anything else about these girls, their names were noted on the back: Olga Klein, Klára Pfeifer, Eta Strasser, Éva Weisz, Edit Bartos, Lea Neumann, Gizella Bara, Éva Kaufmann, Éva Weisz, Klára Kós, Judit Bán.

NM: Many of us interested in the subject – particularly survivors or descendants of survivors – have read countless books about the Holocaust. How would you convince us that How It Happened is worth reading? What makes it special?

FL: How It Happened is remarkable and in many ways unique. For one thing, it is the key document about the activities of the Hungarian Jewish Council. For another, it is among the earliest accounts of the Holocaust in Hungary, particularly notable because it focuses on the experiences and perspectives of the victims.

How It Happened also stands out as an attempt by a leading witness to make sense of the contradictions and controversies inherent in his role as a member of the Jewish Council. The book reveals the tumult and dilemmas faced not only by Ernő Munkácsi but, more broadly, by the Jewish elite in modern Hungary. Today, How It Happened feels especially relevant. It has much to teach us about the politics of evil, morality, and responsibility in times of war and genocide, concerns that continue to preoccupy us.

Jewish inmates at the Kistarcsa internment camp, May 1944. Photo by Magyar Film Iroda (Hungarian Film Office). © Hungarian National Museum. Right after the Nazi invasion on 19 March 1944, the Gestapo and the Hungarian police used a converted factory in the village of Kistarcsa, in the outskirts of Budapest, to imprison thousands of Jews considered hostile to the Reich, including prominent industrialists, journalists, scholars, and political figures. The Jews detained at Kistarcsa were the first victims of deportations from Hungary; on 28 April 1944 1,800 inmates were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. This photo appeared in the 20 May 1944 edition of the anti-Semitic Harc (or “Struggle”) published by the Hungarian Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question with the headline: “The whole notorious gang is together now!”

Nina Munk, the editor of How It Happened, is a journalist and author. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. Her most recent book is The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty (Doubleday). Visit ninamunk.com. 

Ferenc Laczó, an assistant professor of history at Maastricht University, wrote the introduction to How It Happened. His latest book is Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide: An Intellectual History, 1929-1948 (Brill).

Click here to learn more about How It Happened: Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry >