Erzsébet Bori

The Second Wave

Speaking Out on the Holocaust

Péter Muszatics: A folyamat (The Process) - Éva Pataki: Herzl - Zoltán Buzási: Csönderdő (Forest of Silence) - János Zelki: Le hájim (For Life) - Ágota Varga: Porrajmos (Gypsy Holocaust), Fekete lista (Black List) - Tivadar Fátyol: Út a halálba (Road to Death) - Irén Kármán: Szép, sima kő (A Fine, Smooth Stone) - László Martinidesz: Mauthasentől a Dob utcáig (From Mauthausen to Dob Street) - Barbara Spitzer: Ami megmaradt belőle (Memories of a Journey).

Once again we Hungarians did the wrong thing. We did not take the advice of István Bibó, arguably the greatest Hungarian political thinker of the twentieth century. In an essay which he wrote shortly after the war and which has lost none of its pervasive force to this day, he argued that the nation must keep on discussing the Jewish question, learning to cope with it. This did not happen, though it is not (just) the nation that can be blamed here. The subject was strictly taboo right up to 1989, the year of change. I vividly remember a debate in 1988 held by the democratic opposition, where somebody, György Konrád perhaps, said that we had to be prepared: freedom of speech meant that anti-Semites were also free to speak. His prophecy has come true and caught Hungarian society totally unprepared. Luckily, after the taboo ceased, the social sciences and the arts, primarily literature and film, had their say. After the fifteen years that have passed since, the Jewish question may be a delicate subject still, but it is no longer taboo.
The Holocaust was the common lot of European Jewry, but each nation has to deal with it separately. In Hungary, documentary films have done their bit. Péter Forgács's 1988 series Privát Magyarország (Private Hungary), in which he used amateur cine pictures from before the war to show, in a magical film idiom, how a serene bourgeois milieu was darkened and sucked in the maelstrom, was a milestone. The first wave of Hungarian films on the Holocaust emerged around the beginning of the political changes, and since then films are continuously appearing on the subject. Lately, the international success of Imre Kertész's novel Fatelessness and the author's Nobel Prize have given a new impetus to the undertaking. An especially large number of films on the Holocaust were entered for the Hungarian Film Festival in February 2005.
Within the subject, the form and genre of the films greatly varied, from historical educational films through reportage and portraiture to the personal approach. Péter Muszatics's A folyamat (The Process) follows the emergence and gradual strengthening of political anti-Semitism from the end of the First World War, the carving up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the mutilation of Hungary, and the four-months 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic. It first manifested itself in the 1920 numerus clausus (restricted admission) in higher education, then from the second half of the 1930s, in the anti-Jewish legislation aimed at the gradual elimination of Jews in cultural, economic, political and social life. Noted historians of the period introduce the chain of events and point out connections, illustrated by contemporary film shots. The film is similar to Miklós Jancsó's 1995 Elmondták-e neked? (Have They Told You About It?), in which he guides young people, with his own text and personal narration, through the Horthy era he himself witnessed, from the jovial anti-Semitism of the upper classes to the death marches. Péter Muszatics's film begins in a similar vein, with a bon mot attributed to Kálmán Mikszáth, a great writer of the late nineteenth century: "Who is an anti-semite? Someone who hates Jews more than is appropriate." The Process presents current historical knowledge and opinion. It is a pity Muszatics does not go as far back as the Austrian-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 and the atypical rise of the middle classes in Hungary, in which Jews took a share much greater than their numerical ratio, thus laying the foundation not only of economic growth and cultural development but also of anti-Semitism.

Another excellent example of the historical educational film is Éva Pataki's Herzl, on the life and career of the founder of Zionism, with rich illustration material and an international outlook. Theodore Herzl was born and started school in Budapest; his socialization took place in Austria-Hungary. He first encountered anti-Semitism when, as a journalist in Vienna, he wrote on the Dreyfuss affair. He was among the first to have recognized its dangers and persistence, its damaging effect on the personality and identity. He had a dream of gathering Jews in a country of their own, and he tirelessly worked for it to come true to the end of his life. In Israel he is looked upon as the spiritual founding father of the state.
In 2003, the Ministry of Education announced an essay competition for those attending secondary school with the Holocaust as its subject. The winners were taken to Auschwitz to view the Memorial Museum, where a Hungarian exhibition had been refurbished a short time before their arrival. The tour was recorded by two documentary film-makers, Zoltán Buzási in Csönderdő (Forest of Silence) and János Zelki in Le hájim (For Life).

"In the morning we'll go to Auschwitz, in the afternoon to Birkenau" - there is nothing special in a sentence like this, which was said when the Hungarian students were briefed about the schedule of the trip they had won. It is a good programme, and indeed one has to be told in advance about the location of the hotel, and the date and hour of the guided tour of Cracow and the visit to the concentration camp. The student prize winners, twenty-five in number, were from all parts of the country, and arrived with their discmen, guitars and cokes. They still do not know if they are going to be emotional; it is a possibility...

Only a few declared themselves to be Jews; most of them had no family motivation as regards the Holocaust. They had learnt about it at school and/or formed an idea about it from films and books. Before their arrival they briefly said who they were, where they came from, why they entered the competition, what they wrote about and what they expected from the exhibition. As the documentary shows, true to form, sincere and unvarnished, the coach trip was not much different from any run-of-the-mill school outing to begin with. The students were having a good time, laughed a lot, had fun, flirted, etc. When confronted with Auschwitz, however, they were deeply shocked, they wept, some were traumatised. When one realises that these twenty-five were among the best informed and best prepared secondary-school students, one may indeed draw serious conclusions. A good part of the young, indeed of the general public, feel they get "an overdose of the Holocaust'", and dismiss it as a done to death topic, while the fact is that they lack valid information about it.

The Roma Holocaust is a relatively new area even for historians. Research including interviews with survivors started only a few years ago, and the documentary film-makers have been in the vanguard. Two important, investigative works are attached to Ágota Varga's - Porrajmos (Gypsy Holocaust, 2000) and Fekete lista (Black List - Gypsy Inmates in the Forced Labour Camps in 1944, 2002). The work is carried on by Tivadar Fátyol in his film Út a halálba - Roma Holocaust és kárpótlás (Road to Death - The Roma Holocaust and Compensation). The viewer is taken on a time trip with survivors, who talk about their family and their life before the war. The more enter-prising of them then take the train and, on their way to Auschwitz and Birkenau (where the new Hungarian exhibition now includes material on Roma victims too) recall the horrors of the concentration camp and remember the loved ones they lost. Young people are accorded an important role in Tivadar Fátyol's film too - especially the grandchildren, who accompany their old relatives on the trip and tell what they know and think about the past. The reports and confessions are interpunctuated by a long list of names, of the several hundred Hungarian Roma who were gassed in Auschwitz on 2 August 1944.
In Szép, sima kő (A Fine, Smooth Stone), Irén Kármán accompanies her protagonist to his birthplace in north-western Hungary. The elderly man is the only survivor of the village's Jewish community, once populous, prosperous and with its own synagogue. He finds the house in which he was born and recognises the old scenes - chemist's shop, grocery, the doctor's surgery, friends' houses - and meets old playmates. The cemetery, however, is no more. A supermarket was built on the site, and the tombstones were bulldozed, broken up and carried away. A few show up in odd places. Some intact pieces have been set up in the churchyard or are kept in the local historical collection and at the school. A woman used one to pave the spot in front of their dunny - it was "such a fine, smooth stone", now they will not have to step into the dunny with dirty, muddy boots. The authorities shrug, there is no one to take the responsibility. Not a single Jew has returned, the villagers have slowly forgotten about them. A fine, low-keyed film, it neither shows nor induces harsh reactions. The protagonist is a taciturn, friendly man, full of affection and gratitude for those who once helped him. His former neighbours and acquaintances receive him with similar affection and they slowly understand what his tenacious quest for bygone times and memories means. They realise they may have lost something too, by forgetting about the people who were once part of their community.

The largest Jewish community of Central Europe lives in Hungary - that is, in Budapest. During the Communist years, Budapest was a religious and cultural centre, and had the only rabbinical training college in the bloc - there is good reason why the Chief Rabbi of Moscow is fluent in Hungarian. The secularisation and assimilation of Jews, which started back in the late nineteenth century, was speeded up by modernisation and the dictatorship, by the late 1980s it seemed an irreversible process. The change of the political system, however, worked wonders here too. New religious communities have been formed, houses of worship and synagogues built and, even more excitingly, varied forms of Jewish identity have emerged. In his film Mauthausentől a Dob utcáig (From Mauthausen to Dob Street), László Martinidesz looks into a family success story. Lucky to have returned from the death camp, the one-time baker's apprentice opens a small shop in the "Jewish district" and wartime ghetto of Budapest. The shop is nationalized in the Stalinist Rákosi era; later, however, the private sector is allowed to function in order to ease shortages. Incessantly targeted by stand-up comedians of the age, the 'maszek' ( from the Hungarian magánszektor, for private sector) functioned under close surveillance and with tight restrictions. The small pastrycook's, however, survives the hard times, just as its owner did. In the 1980s, Mr Fröhlich's daughter takes over and modernises the running of the shop. The Fröhlich pastry shop prospers today in Budapest's revitalised Dob Street; it is a popular meeting-place where guests can choose from the traditional Jewish sweets.

Franco-Hungarian Barbara Spitzer's film Ami megmaradt belőle (Memories of a Journey) is an epitome of the varied topic of Jewish identity. Her grandparents emigrated to France to avoid the persecutions, and the grandchildren, who were born there, learnt Hungarian to please their grandmother. Barbara became a film-maker, and on the money she made with her first film she bought two tickets to Hungary. Memories of another film fade in here - it is about another expatriate Hungarian Jewish girl, who came back on a visit, this time to Beregszász (Beregovo), not to Bölcske. In A dívány (Divan), Pearl Gluck searched for a legendary divan her family owned in the old place, on which famous rabbis slept. No easy task to find a divan after so many stormy decades, but it is a lot more difficult to answer the question, who am I? Some people are born, live and die in certain places with self-evident ease, and the question never arises for them. But what is one to do when one is half-French, half-Hungarian, and a Jewess to cap it all? In her absorbing, beautiful and slow-moving film, Barbara Spitzer expounds on the complexity of identity, in family and friendly circles, one including the noted historian Ferenc (Francois) Fejtő, who lives in Paris, with people of different ages tied to different degrees to different nations, religions and locations. No unequivocal and definitive replies are offered to questions like this. There are only attempts and approaches, and it may well be that the answer is the search itself - the journey made in time, space and thought.

 

Erzsébet Bori
is the regular film critic of this journal.