The Holocaust in Hungary: Sixty Years Later [antikvár]

ForewordThe year 2004 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the deportation of Hungarian Jewry. Between May 15 and July 8, 1944, the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators delivered more than 437,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, where the vast majority were murdered on arrival, with frightening efficiency. Until 1944 the historically vital and marvelously diverse Jewish community of Hungary, while subjected to prejudice and increasingly harsh discriminatory legislation during the Horthy regime, had remained largely intact physically. Then, in just a few months, expropriation, ghettoization, forced labor in excruciating circumstances, deportations to Auschwitz, and frenetic killing binges inside Hungary destroyed virtually the entire community outside Budapesthundreds of thousands of innocents.The murder of Hungarian Jewry starkly illustrates something that we have long come to accept. For the Nazis, the destruction of European Jews was an objective as important as military victory. It is more troubling to consider the fact that the Nazis' Hungarian collaborators pursued the destruction of their own countrymentheir friends, their neighbors, their clients, their schoolmates, their business partners, their life-associateswith fervor, urgency, and cruelty, at a time when it was clear that Hungary's war alongside Nazi Germany was going to be lost. And it is painfully disturbing that a world that understood by 1944 that European Jewry was being systematically murdered stood by and watched. For countries, as for individuals, doing nothing was not without its consequences. Inaction in the face of genocide empowers the perpetrators.To commemorate this tragic history, the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in partnership with the Rosenthal Institute of Holocaust Studies of the Graduate Center, City University of New York, organized a conference on "The Holocaust in Hungary: Sixty Years Later" in Washington and participated together with the Holocaust Documentation Center and Memorial Collection Public Foundation in a Budapest conference on the Holocaust. Our Museum also hosted visiting fellows from Hungary and participated in the dedication of Budapest's new Holocaust Museum.vii