Hungary'S Participation in The Events of The Holocaust

Rozsa Heisler. Almost 75 years ago, Hungarian Policeman forced her and her family onto a train. Not a doubled decored train with velvet seats, air conditioning, and a cafe that serves coup’ o noodles, but a smelly boxcar packed to the brim with confused, sad people. Rozsa Heisler says, “We were crammed together for five days without food or water. We didn’t know where we were going. Then we reached Auschwitz.

Like most endings at Auschwitz, Roza’s mom and grandfather were murdered at the camp, but a thread of hope kept Rozsa and her sister alive. Now 93, she recalls the anti-Semitism leading up to the Holocaust in her old home, Hungry. ‘We didn’t see any German soldiers until we reached Auschwitz,’ she says. ‘It was Hungarians who deported us.’ For this reason, she is not sure about the new Holocaust Museum that is being built in Hungry.

Basically, leading up to the Holocaust Hungry was very Anti-semitic towards the jews. At the time, Miklos Horthy was the leader. Rozsa said that he restricted a number of Jews from going to university. Miklos also closed down Rozs’a father’s vinegar shop, sent him to a labor camp, passed laws about equal citizenship, forbidding intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews and restricting the kinds of jobs Hungarian Jews could get.

When the Nazi’s took over Hungry in 1944, the Hungarian government obeyed the german’s wishes. By then, most of Rozsa’s friend’s were no longer speaking to her, and some even went out of their way to avoid her. I think it’s crazy how some people can think that one race or religion is better than another. Expeshily if you do it just because someone in power tells you to. Anyway, a few months after the invasion of the Nazi’s, Hungarian soldiers forced Rozsa’s family out of their home and marched them down to the train station. She remembers her once friends cheering as she went.

Avenshily, Miklos was kicked out of office and was replaced with the openly fascist Arrow Cross Party, led by Ferenc Szalasi. By the end of the year, Ferenc had deported thousands more, and had shot over 20,000 jews and threw their bodies into the Danube River. Can you even imagine watching someone gets shot? Now imagine if you were the one who pulled the trigger?

And get this! Historians who favor the Hungarian government are trying to blame most of the anti-Semitism on the Arrow Cross. At the same time, they are trying to make Miklos look like a good leader! Not only that but five years ago a new research institute called Veritas was established. Veritas goal was to ‘neglected historical periods and also setting right the ones which, in our view, have been falsely presented,’ Director Sandor Szakaly tells NPR. He is basically saying that they are re-writing history the way they like it.

Sandor argues that Miklos didn’t know that the 437,000 Jews his police force was rounding up and deporting after March 1944 were going to death camps. Now almost 74 years later, Hungry is trying to cover up its part in the Holocaust, by making a museum that will focus on the Germans, rather than the Hungarians.

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