I first read Braham in English ten years ago. I felt at the time that he had said all there was to be said about the subject. Reading this new edition (corrected and with additions) in a two-volume Hungarian translation confirmed this feeling. Perhaps the impossible is possible after all and one can provide a mirror image of a whole world. This outsize narrative appears to contain everything that happened in that ill-fated year 1944, to my family and to me, to friends and acquaintances, and to all those whose stories I have heard since. Every event is there, every square and street, every death march, the ghetto, every internationally protected house. Braham has written a chronicle, the chronicle of Hungarian Jewry. His tale starts in the Golden Age before the Great War, and as it goes forward in time so the feeling of a fall, of destruction strengthens apace. It culminates in a hell we know: as the chronicler's preface anticipates, the losses of Hungarian Jewry in the Second World War were greater by a third than those of the United States Armed Forces in all theatres of the Second World War combined. The narrative turns this statistic into a tale of horror.

[..]

The location is Hungary within her frontiers at any given time. Braham is not the chronicler of the Holocaust but of the Hungarian Holocaust. At decisive moments in the narrative, the Northern Uplands, Northern Transylvania and Újvidék (Novi Sad) are re-annexed by Hungary. That is when the country chains herself to the policies of the Axis. Újvidék was the scene of the first mass killing of Jews organized by Hungarians, indeed the only one up to the German occupation. In March 1944 the first trains to Auschwitz departed from Ciscarpathia and Northern Transylvania. Just about everybody abandoned the Jewry of the re-annexed territories to their fate. The Second World War events that are given importance are those that had a role in the Hungarian Holocaust, such as German dissatisfaction with Hungarian Judenpolitik, especially after the Wannsee Conference, which decided the destruction of European Jewry, or the establishment and operation of the first death camps, or the fate of Jews in neighbouring countries. The war in the Soviet Union was also relevant as there the Jewish Labour Service shared the terrible fate of the Second Hungarian Army on the Don, but as an extra, just for them, Jewish Labour Service men were also exposed to the murderous pastimes of the sadistic Hungarian soldiers who guarded them.

[..]

This self-restraint in the explanation of the inexplicable is what, for me, places Braham's account above all others. It is the truest book on the Holocaust that I have ever read. When it comes to evil incarnate, Braham is unsparing in his condemnation. In general, however, he does not say that X or Y are guilty but that they were guilty of this or that, at this time yes, and at that time no. One cannot say that Braham judges sine ira et studio, how indeed could he do that in a book full of so much pain and anger? But he is aware and makes us aware how men are ensnared, how they lie to themselves, how they come to be disoriented in a world in which they grew up, and that is why their instincts go wrong. They bury their heads in the sand, they are weak and cowardly, sometimes they want to do good, but not all they want is good, and they neglect to act. He shows how men become the prisoners of their class interests, their ideologies and their conventions, and of the instinct to look after their own—those most like them—in the first place, and by the time they notice that they should have rid themselves of all this, it is too late. Braham is aware and makes us aware that Evil cannot perform evil deeds unabetted. Evil has need of the coward, the lazy and the selfish, just as Evil needs silence and oblivion. In Braham's chronicle Hannah Arendt's proposition on the banality of evil is reversed. Evil here is anything but banal, but banal sins help to make its road straight.

[..]

Why, then, is this book, which hardly touches on German genocide politics and its background, still entitled The Politics of Genocide? What Braham's chronicle suggests, however, is that although the Hungarian Holocaust was not the direct consequence of Hungarian anti-Semitism and systematic anti-Jewish agitation, it cannot be imagined that it could have happened as it did without such antecedents. German Nazi genocidal plans could be carried out with such unprecedented speed because they could rely on twenty years of anti-Semitic propaganda and on expectations and a mentality created by anti- Jewish measures. Men and institutions in large numbers were willing participants. But this would not have sufficed. A twenty-year-long anti-Jewish campaign and the absence or rarity of protests made it natural for non-Jewish Hungarians to identify Jews not as Hungarians or fellow citizens but merely as Jews, that is as enemies or adversaries, at the very least as strangers, as aliens. That is how it came to be accepted as natural that Jews should be concentrated in ghettos, and that they should be deported from their country to places where, it was said, they would be put to work by the Germans. If that is natural, if that is acceptable, then anything may happen because anything goes. In Braham's narrative, Hungarian anti-Semitism is not the cause or the root of the Holocaust, but the catastrophe itself.
Braham looks on German genocidal politics as a donné, without searching for an explanation. True, he notes about some particularly cruel or anti-Semitic individuals that they were of Swabian origin, with Magyarized names, giving their original German names in brackets, but he does not describe a penchant for genocide as a racial characteristic. What he wishes to stress is that Swabians or those of Swabian origin felt a greater loyalty towards Germany than to Hungary. Jews, on the contrary, even in 1944—a most inopportune time—force-fully stressed their Hungarian loyalties.

[..]

According to Braham, there was no conspiracy of silence. But no one, primarily no Jewish organization, reacted as they should have. All of them, the Zionist leaders as well as the members of the Jewish Council, kept silent about Auschwitz. No one told their fellow Jews. Perhaps already in March, but certainly in April, before the deportations started, they all knew the whole truth about the death camps. They were in possession of the plans of Auschwitz, they knew where the gas chambers were and where the crematoria, they knew that the Hungarian Jews would be gassed, but they kept silent. All the Jews who lived in Hungary outside Budapest were sent to Auschwitz in cattle trucks, according to the official version, to work in Germany. Jewish leaders knew that the purpose was slaughter. They did not speak up. Whether people believed the official version or not, the fact is that the Jewish agencies made sure that those who wanted to believe it, could believe it. Of course, if your eyes are not opened you prefer to believe that you are taken somewhere to work, and not to be murdered.
Of course, there are explanations but, as Braham rightly argues, none of them will do. That they did not want people to panic (why not?), that they did not want to take away all hope from the last moments of the lives of the victims, that they would have been killed anyway, even had they known, that they would have climbed into the cattle trucks anyway. That could not have been known then, as it cannot be known now. I, for my part, do not believe that even one single woman would have got on of her own will with her child if she had known that her child would end up in a gas chamber two days later. They shoot at those trying to escape, as they shoot at those who resist. Many die if a crowd is fired on. But not everybody, as in a gas chamber. Christian Hungarians did not see the gas chambers but the butchering of those trying to escape could not have been kept secret from them. If that had happened they could not have believed what suited them, that the Jews were being taken to work. Perhaps more of them would have helped. Perhaps the Churches would have made a move before they did. Braham tells us that the leaders of the Jews at long last, late in June, began to publicize the Auschwitz minutes. A copy was given to Miklós Horthy jr. who passed it on to his father. Quite obviously, Horthy was already aware of the facts, but his son only found out then and, in possession of the facts, he tried to persuade his father to put an end to the transports.

[..]