Jenõ Thassy
The Bad War
Cecil D. Eby: Hungary at War. Civilians and Soldiers in World War II.
The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. 313 pp.
Cecil D. Eby, following his retirement as Professor of English at the University of Michigan, has taken on what must have been his most arduous task. To do so he spent eighteen months in Budapest and Szeged. With what was only a rudimentary knowledge of Hungarian, he interviewed nearly a hundred men and women who had participated in the war or had had to endure it. It should be said he was most fortunate in his choice of interpreter and facilitators to produce this mosaic of Hungary at war.
Interestingly, his preface acknowledges that, of the many works he read up on the period, "foremost... was C.A. Macartney's October Fifteenth... the authoritative account of Hungarian history between 1918 and 1945." Many of us remember Professor Macartney's English-accented Hungarian coming over on the BBC during the war years. When I offered him a cup of tea in my New York apartment in the 1960s, he sniffed at it and asked me if I could give him a fröccs (wine and soda water): such was his identification with the country he had devoted his professional life to.
So what induced another professor to focus on Hungary? He explains that he wished to produce an account that would record and analyse the experiences of
"ordinary" people, to focus on domestic, not military history. He points out that Hungarian culture and history have been neglected by mainstream Anglo-Americans and the Communist years added to this isolation. ("Thus it comes as no surprise to learn that at the end of the war, when Hungarian fliers stranded in Austria tried to surrender to the American army, they had to explain to MPs that the United States and Hungary had officially been at war.") The very unfamiliarity of the country required from the author much more in the way of historical description than in, say, Studs Terkel's The Good War, that classic of the oral history genre dealing with Americans' experience of the same war. As he puts it: "Necessarily more exposition was required on my part than for more familiar topics falling within the 'oral history genre'. (For Hungarians of that generation the genus of 'good war' does not exist.) In my view and by my intent, it is less 'oral history' than reportage."
To set a background against which the reader can place the interviews ("the heart of the matter") the author sketches out a succinct history of inter-war Hungary, its trauma of the loss of territory and population at Trianon, its alignment with Nazi Germany, its internal conflicts, its slow slide into war and Horthy's ambiguous and ineffective signals towards the Western powers.
With the context thus set, the interviews open with the section Soldiers, with more than a dozen individuals narrating their war. A good one it was certainly not. One of them, Gyula Sághy, was a
bank clerk recalled to the colours in March 1942 and sent to Russia as a member of Horthy's hastily improvised Second Army. At Christmas of that year his unit was resting on the Don when a German woman told them that Paulus and the German Sixth Army were surrounded and would have to surrender. She also told them that the Russians would eventually overrun Hungary and impose a Communist regime on the country. He thought all this was the ravings of a mad woman. When they returned to the line, the Italians on their right had broken, their weapons had frozen up and were useless. They reported in every four hours by radio. On January 10 there was no response-headquarters had ceased to exist.
Sághy's twelve man squad eventually struggled back to Kiev, where he was
discharged with a paper indicating that he would never be called up again and resumed work at his bank. When the Russians came and were randomly shipping off people to work as slave labour in the Soviet Union, Sághy was one of the unfortunates to be rounded up. However, he was put under the charge of a woman soldier who forced him to have sex with her and turned him loose. He stayed in hiding for several months before daring
to return to Budapest and resume his pleasantly dull work at the bank.
Other survivors of the annihilation of the Second Hungarian Army on the Don give their stories. The picture is of the chaos of retreat, of the will (and good fortune) to survive. Of starving men learning to eat the undigested grain in goat droppings, learning that to halt was fatal, men froze to death or succumbed to frostbite. Sometimes the stories of the aftermath can be equally revealing. One interviewee, wandering abroad in Austria with his entire family after the war, decided against returning to Hungary (the ever-present fear of being hauled off for "a little work" in Russia) describes how his grandfather refused to consider going to Australia-he would not live among "savages".
For the next section, Jews, Professor Eby again sets the context of a Hungary in which Hungarian Jews were "more fervently Magyar than the Magyars themselves". During the census of 1910, 77 per cent of the Jews living in Hungary listed their
nationality as Hungarian, probably, as he observes, a rough measure of their assi-milation. Not all that unreasonable when one considers that, like other Central Europeans, the Hungarians were such an amalgam of Magyar, Slovakian, Serbian, Austrian, Romanian and other hybrid stock that picking out a purely Magyar bloodline was virtually impossible. But with the reduction of the country by Trianon and
the disproportionate role Jews played in Béla Kun's Bolshevist regime in 1919, Jews had become visible. As early as 1920, a Numerus Clausus law was passed, limiting the percentage of Jewish students enrolled in the universities to the proportion of Jews in the total population. Hungary thus had the dubious distinction of being the first country in Europe to pass legislation that attempted to limit the Jews in public life. (No matter that the law was often simply ignored.) The interviews reflect the ambiguity of Horthy's Hungary: anti-Jewish legislation but no extermination camps, official discrimination but a measure of safety, until the German occupation of 1945, when the safe haven became an assembly line of hell and the transports shuttled off 450,000 to their deaths in under two months. Thus Endre Sásdi was called up twice as a reserve officer for the occupation of Ruthenia following the First Vienna Award (1939), and of Transylvania following the Second (1940); in the summer of 1942 he found himself stripped of his rank and called up into one of the notorious Labour Batallions and sent to the Don. Caught up in the debacle after Stalingrad, he was one of the few who survived the retreat and subsequent typhus. In Spring 1944 he was sent back to Budapest and given twenty-four hours leave. (Estimates of deaths in the Labour Batallions serving on the Russian front run as high as 42 thousand, almost the same figure for all British and British Empire military casualties up to June 1944.) Using connections, he resumed his job as a highly skilled foundry worker, entered into a suicide pact with his wife when the Germans occupied the country in March 1944 (she died, he didn't), went into hiding in October and awaited the Red Army, joined one of the eight divisions raised by the Red Army in Hungary, was demobbed in Austria.
The accounts show the haphazardness of survival: a father
with a First World War military disability pension meant that Judit Herceg
did not have to remove herself to the ghetto or wear the yellow star. Zsuzsa
Merényi, then in ballet school, was taken to the City Park in October 1944
by her mother to be informed that the family was Jewish on both sides. At
this news she and her sister laughed outright-it was so grotesque and inconceivable.
She even made a joke out of it: "Fortunately we have never been anti-Semitic!"
It is the quality of unreality that comes
across again and again. In the section Fliers one is struck by the memories of that last golden summer at Lake Balaton, when a fighter pilot's wings brought entry into the summer houses of the rich and aristocratic. The Royal Hungarian Airforce had adopted a live-and-let-live attitude towards the American and British bombers overflying Hungary. (Until the arrival of Messerschmidt 109 Gs,-the Gustav-no Hungarian aircraft had the operational ceiling of the Liberators and Flying Fortresses high overhead.) When the Germans occupied the country in March 1944, Hungary became a target for them and the delight in flying their new Me 109s was tempered by the fact that for most of that year they were in action against the Western Allies. Yet despite the massive bombing of Hungarian cities and installations, for the carefully groomed Magyar pilots it remained a gentleman's war with an inviolate chivalric code. Nearly all have stories of friendly exchanges with American airmen. Against the Soviets it was a savage battle for survival with no holds barred. Varied too was post-war Hungarian officialdom's treatment of the fliers. Some were ignored, some actively persecuted. Much depended on the whim of a tribunal or the passion of a prosecutor.
Unreality too is a feature of the section on Players, where the cast includes the Volksdeutsche, an aristocrat, diplomats (including a colleague of Raoul Wallenberg's at the Swedish legation), an Arrow Cross member and an ex-gendarme. The very variety here may weaken the focus but it contributes to the broad canvass the book gives of this Hungary.
The book concludes with Siege and Liberation, the horrendous memories of Budapest's seven-week agony and the shock of Soviet liberation. This is the fitting crescendo to a book written by an American academic who had the courage and vitality to embark on the Herculean task of re-telling Hungary's complicated war and misfortunes. He chose his guides judiciously and what shines through these 311 pages of skilfully integrated oral testimony and historical exposition is the
author's sympathy for a nation buffetted by forces beyond its capacity to control.
Jenõ Thassy,
a lieutenant in the Royal Hungarian Army during the war and a member of the resistance movement, left the country in 1947 and eventually settled in the US, where he is still active in the Hungarian section of The Voice of America. His two-volume autobiography, published recently, was a huge success.
