The Excruciating Dilemmas of Ernő Munkácsi

McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, 2018

Ernő Munkácsi was born on 7 August 1896 in Páncélcseh, a small village in the eastern part of the Kingdom of Hungary. 1 It was an era of peace and prosperity for the Jews of Hungary. Bit by bit, beginning around the middle of the nineteenth century, Hungarian Jewry had been granted full legal and economic emancipation. This relative freedom led to a surge of immigration from other parts of the Hapsburg Empire, mostly Moravia and Galicia. From a modest 83,000 (1 percent of the population) in 1787, the Jews of Hungary grew to nearly one million (5 percent) on the eve of the First World War, 2 just as Ernő Munkácsi was turning eighteen. In many ways, Munkácsi's family perfectly illustrated the social and economic mobility made possible to many Hungarian Jews in those years. Munkácsi's great-grandfather Bernát (Be'er Dov) Munk (1800-1852) was an itinerant peddler in rural Nyitra County in northwestern Hungary (today Slovakia) where he and his wife, Chaile Felsenburg (1805-1842), lived a harsh hand-to-mouth existence. Only three of their eight children survived to adulthood, among them Ernő's grandfather Adolf (Méir Ávrahám) Munk (1830-1907). Adolf, a talented Talmud student, quickly climbed out of poverty; first working as a private tutor for Orthodox Jewish families and then later as a corn merchant in the thriving city of Nagyvárad (today Oradea, Romania). However, it is as an adherent of the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah intellectual movement, and as a writer of poetry, short stories, and political essays that Adolf Munk made a name for himself; most notably as the author of My Life's Histories, his sweeping autobiography written in classical Hebrew in 1899 and published posthumously in Hungarian. 3 The Munk family's move from Nyitra to Nagyvárad followed a common pattern of migration for Hungary's Jews in the nineteenth century, from rural backwater or shtetl to a cosmopolitan urban centre that, in this case, soon boasted the nation's second-largest Jewish population after Budapest. Around the time that Adolf Munk's eldest son (and Ernő Munkácsi's father) Bernát, was born in Nagyvárad in 1860, about 6 percent of the city's population

There was a significant debate in the Hungarian journal of social sciences and culture Kommentár in 2008 initiated by Gábor Gyáni as to whether Hungarian Holocaust research had or had not been successfully integrated into international discourse after 1989.1 One element missing from the debate was that after 1989, main concepts and the language of the discipline derived from the Western side of the (fallen) Iron Curtain. The histories of the Holocaust survivors had been only descriptive in nature, while the experiences of Jewish communities, the members of which had lived under communism was of predominant focus. There was no theoretical inquiry in Holocaust scholarship as long as the objective fact-finding was taking place, expanding on questions as to when, where, and what had happened to which actors. Historical inquiry, however, needs to extend further to explain the uncovered events and experiences. For instance, a significant element missing from the scholarship in its entirety is gender analysis, and this observation brings to the fore the lack of discussion on methodology and the consequent absence of acknowledging developments. Hungarian scholarship of Holocaust historical inquiry with a central aim evolving around gender analytical perspectives is still nonexistent, yet there are some contributions about women and the Holocaust in the English language, for instance by Andrea Pető.2 This special edition of the Hungarian Historical Review lines up studies which draw on new modes of analyses and frameworks with the aim of achieving knowledge production on a whole new level about the Holocaust in Hungary.

Luisa Passerini described in her work the difference between history and memory caused by the Cold War division in Europe. She claims that on the western side of the Iron Curtain, memory was spontaneous and non-reflexive and history was scientific and critical, while at the same time in the countries of the former Soviet Bloc, institutionalized history writing did not offer a space for critical thinking, and therefore memory became the designated space for critical thinking. This paper, a side project of the qualitative analysis of the post-WWII people's tribunals in Budapest, focuses on how public and private histories about history of political justice in Hungary clash on the individual level in an oral history project. The purpose of the research was to examine what female university students knew about a crucial period of Hungarian history: the post-war political justice process. In a series of interviews, I examined how their opinions were affected by a month of intensive study of related primary sources and court testimonies in the archive, and how they understood these documents and legal cases.

2015

Thirteen witnesses of Hungarian origin testifi ed during the trial. Pinhas (previously Fülöp) Freudiger, who had been the head of the Orthodox Jewish community in Budapest from 1939. After the German invasion, he was appointed to the Jewish Council of Budapest. He and his family escaped to Romania in August, 1944 and settled in Israel after the war. Dr. Alexander (previously Sándor) Bródy, a writer who was assigned to labor service during the war and served as the director of the Joint-funded National Hungarian Jewish Aid Action (Országos Magyar Zsidó Segítő Akció, O.M.ZS.A.) from 1944. He left Hungary in 1949 and settled in Brazil. Mrs. Elisheva (Erzsébet) Szenes, a Slovakian-born journalist who escaped to Budapest but was then captured by the SS and sent to Auschwitz. She survived and settled in Israel after the war. Margit Reich whose husband perished in Auschwitz. She lived in Givatayim, Israel at the time of the trial but her children remained in Hungary. Dr. Martin Földi, a lawyer who was taken to Auschwitz. He moved to Israel after the war. Ze'ev Sapir, who was born in the village of Dobradovo, near the town of Munkács.

2016

Hungarian Cultural Studies, 2015

In this paper, in commemoration of the seventieth anniversary year of 1944 in Hungary, I explore selected women’s Holocaust diaries, memoirs, letters, and other less studied documents, such as recipe books, all written during the war, which can provide invaluable resources for understanding the experiences of the victims of war, by personalizing the events and helping to write the obscure into history. At the same time, such documents allow historical voices of the period to provide testimony in the context of the divided social memory of the Holocaust in Hungary today. I will first discuss several Hungarian diaries and “immediate memoirs” written right after liberation, among others, that of Éva Heyman who began writing her diary in 1944 on her thirteenth birthday and wrote until two days before her deportation to Auschwitz, where she perished. I will then discuss two recently published volumes, the Szakácskönyv a túlélélésért (2013), which contains the collected recipes that five...

Porównania, 2023

Blendungen. Geschichtsoptimismus und Katastrophenbewusstsein nach 1945, 2022

On 12 February 1960, General Secretary János Kádár of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt, HSWP) informed the Central Committee-one of the highest structural organs of the omnipotent Party-of a very sensitive issue. Kádár told those present that Minister of Agriculture Imre Dögei had brought forward serious accusations against some of the political body's leading members. He mentioned that, according to Dögei, "revisionists and Zionists were governing the HSWP" and that the Minister had named specific members of the Central Committee who were part of this circle.1 The allegations sounded serious and could potentially end the political careers of those named. However, during the meeting it became clear that the general secretary did not give credence to the accusations and it was Imre Dögei, not the ones he accused, who was removed from his post and, later, also expelled from the Party for his "sectarian" views. Among those listed by Dögei was István Szirmai,2 then a secretary of the Central Committee responsible for the area of Agitation and Propaganda. His supposed involvement in a Zionist group is rather puzzling, for he had been among those in the Party who carried out policies that led to the annihilation of the Zionist movement in Hungary at the beginning of the 1950s. So why was he included in Dögei's list? The answer can be found in the particular relationship between Communism and the so-called "Jewish Question," but also in the development of the Zionist and Communist movements in Transylvania and Hungary before and after World War II. This paper examines the biography of István Szirmai in order to highlight the hidden presence of the Holocaust and Jewish belonging in the political dis-1 Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives), Budapest (henceforth MNL), M-KS 288. 4/30, Jegyzőkönyv az MSZMP Központi Bizottsága által 1960. február 12-én tartott zárt üléséről [Minutes of the Closed Meeting of the HSWP Central Committee on 12 February 1960]. 2 Ibid., Dobi István kézzel írott feljegyzése a Dögei Imrével történt beszélgetésről [István Dobi's handwritten notes about his conversation with Imre Dögei].