Hungary Sets Up a State Authority to Rewrite History

(January 2014)

The physical destruction of European Jewry during the Nazi era has been probably the most thoroughly documented disaster in all human history. A huge proportion of the eyewitness accounts, expert analyses and artistic depiction of that catastrophe pertains to the organized murder of close to 600,000 Hungarian citizens of Jewish birth perpetrated by the Hungarian state in collaboration with Nazi Germany. This happened at the close of the Second World War when an Allied victory was already obvious.

Randolph L. Braham, the doyen of Holocaust studies and once a youth survivor of a Hungarian slave-labour camp, has assembled and classified the thousands of books and articles generated by the Hungarian Holocaust and made them accessible through an invaluable bibliography. It is accompanied by a magisterial encyclopaedia, edited by Braham and introduced by the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, chronicling the wartime fate of thousands of ravaged Jewish communities. Both authors are enormously influential American historians of Hungarian origin well disposed towards post-Communist Hungary.

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THE GEOGRAPHICAL ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF THE HOLOCAUST IN HUNGARY

Edited by Randolph L. Braham
Foreword by Elie Wiesel
Northwestern University Press, in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies at the Graduate Centre, City University of New York, 2013
Cloth, 1,696 pp., three volumes in slipcase with maps and black-and-white photographs throughout
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2916-0, $295.00 (introductory price)

 

 

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE HOLOCAUST IN HUNGARY

Columbia University Press, in association with the Rosenthal Institute, 2012
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These books are likely to prove useful for university courses in Holocaust studies and European history as well as political science, literature and sociology. They are being published at a critical moment.

The three-volume geographical encyclopaedia is an exhaustive research and teaching aid chronicling the tragedy of hundreds of well established East European Jewish communities deeply loyal to the indigenous society that enthusiastically participated in their destruction. Illustrated by many historic photographs, the work is organized alphabetically by county, each section prefaced with a map and a contextual history describing its Jewish population up to and into the fateful year of 1944.

Hungarian group portrait 1944 Auschwitz

Entries track the demographic, cultural, and religious changes in even the smallest communities where Jews lived before their marginalization, dispossession, ghettoization and eventual deportation to slave-labour and death camps. It provides both panoramic and microscopic views of the destruction of most of the Jews of Hungary, until then the last significant surviving Jewish community within Nazi-occupied Europe.

The bibliography is an indispensable guide through the maze of source material quantifying the tragedy. It includes close to six thousand annotated references to independent and periodical literature published in many countries and in many languages on all aspects of the recorded history of Hungarian Jewry before, during, and after the Holocaust. References to works in Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish are rendered in English translation. Each entry is provided with a succinct annotation when its title is not indicative of its content. Supplied with author, name, and geographic indexes, the book is easily usable.

Four Hungarian authors of little literary merit but notorious for their anti-Semitic views prominent during the Horthy era have been placed already on the national high-school curriculum. One of them has been honoured in a ceremony attended by high government officials. This has prompted Wiesel to return in protest the Order of Merit, Grand Cross, Hungary’s highest honour awarded to him in 2004. His repudiation letter also expressed great unease over the current proliferation of Horthy statues unveiled up and down the country amidst attempts to whitewash his Holocaust crimes.

 

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