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Antisemitism in Post World War II Hungary - violence, riots; Communist Party policy

Judaism, Spring, 2001 by Peter Kenez

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The behavior of the Hungarian people in 1944 (and let us immediately add that it was not very different from that of other Eastern European peoples) convinced manyJews that their assimilation had been a sham, that they had not been accepted, and that their lives and livelihood would never be assured in the country of their birth. Many decided to emigrate. We do not have precise data, but estimates put the number between 20,000 and 50,000 people. Most of the them went to the United States and to Palestine. The Zionists for the first time achieved considerable influence, especially among the youth. The possibility of leaving the country, however, ended by 1949, at which time the borders came to be hermetically sealed.

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Hungarian Jews and Communism

For our purposes, the relevant part of this Jewry is the one that either because of inertia or because of conviction decided to stay. A disproportionate number of these Jews came to be attracted to leftist, radical policies and came to support either the Socialist or the Communist Party. Even though the economic policies of the Communist Party threatened the economic interests, indeed, livelihood of the Jews, the Communists appeared to them as the only force capable of protecting them against the antisemitic Hungarian people. After all, the Communist and Socialist parties possessed a nearly perfect record of opposing the fascists. (Not counting the years of 1939-1941.) This was particularly true about the Communist Party that had been illegal before 1945. The Soviet Union and the Red Army stood behind the Communists. That fact was a great handicap in the eyes of many Hungarians, but for the Jews it was the other way around. The majority of Hungarians did not greet the Soviet occupation with pleasure. Russians had never been popular in Hungary, and the behavior of Soviet troops in 1945 turned this unpopularity into hatred among many Hungarians. But for Jews it was an obvious and indisputable fact that the Red Army saved their lives. Jews and perhaps only Jews could regard the Soviet occupation of 1945 as unambiguous liberation. Jews naively, understood Soviet ideology as an ideology of internationalism, the exact opposite of German and Hungarian nationalism which, in their view, culminated in Nazism.

The promise of socialism was the promise of transcending nationalist and racist prejudice. This pro-Sovietism was an essential feature ofJewish thinking that led thousands ofJews into the Communist party and into communist bureaucracy and political police, into the organs of repression. Even when the party pursued policies that were almost explicitly antisemitic, most Jews could not forget the experience of 1945, when their lives had been saved by the arrival of the Red Army. For Jewsjoining the Communist party was once again an act of assimilation.

Let us admit that some Jews who joined the Communist Party, especially the communist instrument of coercion, the infamous AVO (Allamvedelmi Osztaly State Defense Department), joined not only because they wanted to fight for communism but also because that organization offered the opportunity to take revenge on those who had abused them in the past. (Indeed, there was one instance of unlawful retaliation byJews on their enemies. In 1945 Jewish men who had returned from worker battalions to the village of Gyomro and found that all their relatives had been killed, joined the Communist political police and with weapons that they had received from the Red Army killed some 16 people whom they considered responsible for Nazi atrocities.) [4] The Communists employed Jews in these capacities because for obvious reasons Jews were reliable, and association with the previous regime had not compromised them. Nowhere else could the Party have found so many educated and reliable cadres as among the Jews. No precise numbers exist and antisemites and antiCommunists no doubt for their own reason overestimated the number and percentage ofJews in the Communist Party and especially in the AVO. At the same time there can be no question thatJews were over-represented in this organization and also in the Party. According to the best estimates about one seventh of the Party membership wasJewish in 1945 at a time when Jews made up between 1% and 2% of the population. At the same time itis also evident that the great majority ofJews did not become Communist Party members.

Antisemitism in Post World War II Hungary - violence, riots; Communist Party policy

Judaism, Spring, 2001 by Peter Kenez

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