My Experiences and Impressions in Budapest in the Period of the first Jewish Laws in Hungary (1939-1940)

By Alexander Szanto (London )

I left Berlin on 10 December 1939 and arrived in Budapest after an uneventful 18-hour train journey. In my jacket pocket, together with other papers and documents, I had the official notification, stamped with a swastika, withdrawing my residence and work permits after over 30 years of hard work living in Germany without reproach. I also had a certificate from the Berlin Jewish congregation confirming my active role with them over a long period, plus a personal letter of recommendation to the general secretary of the Budapest congregation from our director Heinrich Stahl, the chairman of the Berlin congregation.

I heard my last official German words at the border crossing from the mouth of a customs officer who glared at me martially. Having inspected my passport he asked with a snarl: You’re Jewish? I agreed and added: I’m emigrating. Huh, and about time too, he answered. Those were the last German words which set me on my way.

In the first days of my stay in Budapest as I wandered the streets I was struck initially by the great difference between the everyday life of Germany at war and that of Hungary which was still neutral. In Germany there was already food rationing, with shortages in the shops and restrictions, while here everything was still available and plentiful. Shop windows everywhere were full to bursting and there was no trace of shortage.

But I soon discovered the other side of the coin, through conversations with relatives and friends as well by personal experience. Everything had got a lot dearer, prices were wildly disproportionate to wages. Many economic sectors were in decline, state unemployment benefit did not exist, broad sections of the population were living in great misery.

The Jews were hardest hit. Following the absorption of Austria into the Third Reich in March 1938, Hungary had become directly adjacent to Nazi Germany and the Hungarian government could no longer evade the growing influence of Hitler. It enacted a rapid succession of so-called Jewish Laws, which in the economic sphere gravely damaged Jewish interests. The proportion of Jews in individual trades was limited to a fixed percentage. Where the proportion of Jewish employees exceeded this percentage, there had to be dismissals. Similarly, the total of wages paid to Jews could not exceed this percentage. Public contracts were no longer awarded to Jewish firms. Jews could no longer work in state monopoly sectors, for example the tobacco trade. The number of Jewish doctors and lawyers was drastically reduced, other free professions were affected too. Jewish theatre and cinema proprietors lost their licences. The press was de-jewified.

All of these legal measures, which in their detail were full of multiple clauses and in their complexity gave great scope to the most devious administrative interpretations and applications, resulted in great unemployment among Jews. Although the wording of the Law provided for a stage-by-stage implementation lasting over several years, 31 December 1939 did constitute an important marker date for dismissals, and so I was a witness shortly after my arrival to thousands and thousands of Jewish employees losing their livelihood.

Everybody to whom I had the chance to speak – which later on included not only the man in the street but also circles of people with inside knowledge – was unanimously and firmly convinced that the anti-Jewish economic policies of the government were due to external pressure. The Nazis were at the borders, the Nazis had helped the Hungarians to territorial gains – following the Munich agreement and the collapse of Czechoslovakia, Carpathian Ruthenia and some Slovak areas were ceded to Hungary – and now the Hungarian government had to pay the price. They also had to bear in mind that internally there was a powerful

German minority, the so-called Swabians, who were vociferously making pro-Nazi propaganda, as well as a far-right Fascist party, the so-called Arrow Cross, and the government’s Jewish policy had to take the wind out of their sails.

The Jewish organisations in Hungary for their part took measures to help economically victimised Jews, supporting those dismissed, moving the unemployed into other occupations, and so on. Since I had experience of working in just this area of economic policy, I was asked by the leaders of the Budapest congregation, the chairman Samuel Stern and the general secretary Mr Eppler, to contribute to the work of the newly established agencies.

On taking up this work I found a mood among the members of the congregation similar to that which had prevailed in April 1933 in Berlin. Many thousands of our fellow Jews sought advice and assistance from the congregation, our offices were as good as besieged by them daily. The large congregation building located in Sip utca was insufficient, and so new headquarters was set up on Bethlen ter. The offices in this building, which had previously been used for school purposes, were under construction when I began working there in January 1940.

The work took place under the auspices of the Budapest congregation, but it ranged over the whole country. It was decided to have the work carried out by two parallel organisations, both of which were based in the building on Bethlen ter. One of them was OMZSA (short for Orszagos Magyar Zaido Segitoe Akcio), which was tasked with procuring the resources for the aid programme through large collections across the whole country. The other was Partfogo-Iroda (support office), which was responsible for distributing the support and providing practical economic assistance. Its main departments were: welfare, arranging employment, changes of occupation, emigration, refugee care, legal advice, loans.

Among the many hundreds and thousands who found their way every day to the offices on Bethlen ter the main contingent was made up of unemployed workers who had been thrown out of their jobs by the Jewish Laws. There were two ways in which they

could be helped. The first was by arranging employment directly. There were still a large number of Jewish employers in whose business or trade the percentage of Jewish employees laid down had not been exceeded or had not yet been reached, so that they were in a position to engage additional Jewish workers. Tracking down these possibilities and getting the employers concerned to do their duty by their jobless fellow Jews, even at the cost of material sacrifices, was hard and difficult work, which however in many cases we did successfully carry out. The second way was by redeployment in manual occupations in which there was still room for Jews. To this end we arranged a number of redeployment courses and training programmes. I was able to make use of a great deal of the experience I had gained in Berlin in the previous years and to give much advice, although in many respects the problems faced were different.

Difficulties came from two quarters. First, the authorities. In their individual offices there was no consistent line about their attitude to the social work of the Jewish organisations. The general framework was laid down by the Jewish Laws, but the implementation of them in concrete individual cases varied according to the workings of the lower levels of bureaucracy. But that depended in turn on quite uncontrollable and unpredictable influences. For instance, on whether there was an official sympathetic to the Arrow Cross in the appropriate department or someone open to humane arguments. It depended very often on the general mood in the country, which changed according to the progress of the war. If there were reports from the front which were unfavourable for the Germans, it had an impact on the mood right down to the smallest administrative office in some godforsaken Hungarian one-horse town, the most dyed-in-the wool antisemites fell silent, and on such days the Jews could to some extent feel safe from any dirty tricks by the authorities. But if things were going the other way – and unfortunately in that first period of the war they usually were – if the Germans landed in Norway or broke through the Maginot line in France or dropped parachute troops in Crete, then the Jews all round the Sip utca had a bad day. Hungary was still neutral, but the populace followed events in the war feverishly and despite all the complexity of internal politics fell broadly speaking into only two camps: on the one hand the pro-Germans, who were also Jew-haters, and on the other the anti-Germans, whose attitude to the Jews was in some measure benign.

The varying but generally nasty attitude of the administrative authorities made our work hugely more difficult. Thus for example every redeployment course was subject to authorisation. And this authorisation was very

often denied or – what was worse – simply revoked after the course had already started and considerable funds and effort had been put into it. I recall the huge amount of inconvenience and running around caused by every single case, how often one ministry negated what the other had approved after long official processes, how in any number of cases at the end a subordinate police officer wrecked the work of many months by some trick or other. Every junior official and bureaucrat acted like a dictator towards the Jews, the fate of hundreds of human beings depended on his good or bad humour. On the other hand it was sometimes possible by means of greasing a palm to achieve instantly what otherwise would have been pursued in vain for months.

The other difficulty arose from the mentality of our own people. It is true that the Hungarian Jews – if something hit them hard – could easily get into a mood of panic, but usually that subsided and gave way to the general nonchalance which is a fundamental trait not only of the Hungarian Jews but of Hungarian people as a whole, above all in Budapest. Despite all the hardships of the situation, everyone to whom I spoke at that time was optimistic, and nobody had the slightest idea of what was to come. The general view was: the war won’t last long; the Nazis will collapse in the near future; the Hungarian Jews will get off with a black eye; so it’s only a matter of surviving this short time as easily as possible. With this attitude it was no surprise that individuals turned to the congregation when they needed support, that wealthier people were inclined to give money – but nobody thought it necessary to put in any very great trouble or effort. Thus for example most people considered it a waste of time to take a redeployment course, as they were absolutely convinced that the whole Nazi madness would be over in a short time and they could then return to their old professions. This is the reason why relatively few people expressed an interest in the redeployment courses and why, when after countless difficulties we finally succeeded in starting such a course, the numbers attending soon crumbled away.

Under these circumstances the work of redeployment in Hungary at that time was no great success. In Germany it had mainly been the emigrants who wanted to learn a new profession before their departure. In Hungary this motive did not apply either, since emigration was no longer possible after autumn 1939. One small exception was the illegal Aliyah, which since 1940 went via Romania and the

Black Sea, but was insignificant in terms of numbers.

At the end of March or beginning of April 1940 – the country was still neutral and therefore connections with the West had not been entirely broken off – a representative of the headquarters in Paris of the ORT organisation came to Budapest to discuss an expansion of the redeployment work. As a result of negotiations with him a local ORT group was formed, which took over the direction of the redeployment schemes and also continued the training courses which were already in place. The congregation in Budapest of course welcomed this warmly, since it represented a financial relief. The ORT group ran an office of its own on the Ringstrasse, but its work ground to a halt completely after Hungary entered the war.

As well as arranging employment and redeployment I was interested above all in another part of the work, which at precisely that time – the beginning of 1940 – was growing in importance, namely caring for refugees. In the previous year many Jews from Poland had fled from the German invasion across the Carpathians into Hungary, but many also came with or without passports to Hungary from Austria and other Nazi-controlled areas. Initially the Hungarian government treated them humanely and for the time being made no distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish refugees from Poland. It must be noted that after the collapse of the Polish army in September 1939 many thousands of Poles fled, partly from the Nazis advancing from the west and partly from the Bolsheviks approaching from the east, and crossed the passes in the Carpathians to seek refuge in Hungary and Romania. Even small military units up to battalion strength crossed the border as a body and allowed themselves to be disarmed here. The Hungarian authorities interned them at first, but then allowed them greater freedom of movement and turned a blind eye when they continued on to Yugoslav territory, pushing on from there by detours into the camp of the Western powers.

At the start of 1940, however, the authorities began to change their attitude towards the refugees. A practice developed of placing those refugees remaining in Hungary under police supervision but otherwise leaving them free, while those among them who were Jewish were locked up in internment camps. Within the Ministry of the Interior a special unit was created, called KHECK, which gradually showed a tendency to round up and intern all anti-Hungarian Jews who had entered the country after the outbreak of the war, i.e. stateless Jews and those of uncertain nationality. The intensification of this course of action, and the

arbitrary interpretation of its provisions were later to become fateful for me and my family too, though at this point I did not foresee any of it, but felt comfortable and secure, as I had after all entered the country with a legal and valid passport issued in Berlin by the Hungarian consulate.

In the winter of 1939-1940 the Jews placed in the internment camps were accommodated under very unfavourable conditions from a hygienic point of view. With a view to alleviating their situation the agencies of the Jewish congregation approached the Ministry of the Interior, and these negotiations met with some success. Although the request for release of the interned Jews was rejected, the Ministry did agree to assemble the Jews in special camps in the area of the capital, provided the Jewish congregation agreed to find the financial resources for the maintenance of these camps. The congregation proceeded in the following months to construct and make available temporary buildings on their own plots of land in various parts of the city. The resources to do so were found by longstanding and wealthy Jewish families; Baroness Alice Weiss, a member of an extremely rich family of industrialists, made an outstanding contribution, not only by donating large amounts of money but also by personally concerning herself with hygiene arrangements in the camps and becoming involved in particular in providing for the interned women and children. Some of the camps were given their own kosher kitchens; where that was not possible, deliveries of food were made to them from central places run by the congregation. The internees received numerous benefits through us, with the consent of the authorities, and were provided with warm clothing, linen, pocket money and medications. Visiting days were introduced, and in many cases permission was also given for them to go out in the city. If internees fell ill, they could be transported to the Jewish hospital. I inspected these camps frequently and took an active interest in the welfare of the inmates – without suspecting that one year later I would be one of them.

My role in the congregation agencies came to a temporary end in the summer of 1940 when I – together with many fellow Jews of my age – was called up for work service. This work service (called munkaszolgalat in Hungarian) was a nasty trick and an act of discrimination specially devised and set up for the Jews. The view of the Ministry of War was that Jews were not suitable for military service, because they were unreliable. On the other hand it was felt inappropriate to leave the Jews at home at a time when many generations of the rest of the population were being called up. Special work companies were therefore set up, in which Jews as well as members of unreliable national minorities (Romanians, Slovaks etc.) were enrolled. It was doubtless no pleasure at that time to serve in the Hungarian army. As far as the work companies were concerned, however, it was pure hell.

For reasons which have never become entirely clear, it was predominantly men who were not particularly young who were called up. For them the unaccustomed work (road mending, cleaning barracks etc.) was especially hard. Our lodgings and food as well as our treatment by the (usually anti-semitic-minded) superior officers were extremely bad. But fortunately the work companies in this first period were only used within Hungary and were dissolved again after a few weeks or months. In the late summer and autumn people returned to their homes. Soon the hardships suffered were forgotten and, as at the same time the economic situation improved somewhat and it was possible to place many of the unemployed, at the end of the year in 1940 the prevalent feeling among Hungarian Jews was again that they had got off with a black eye.

But the hard persecutions had not yet begun.