János M. Bak
1939–47... and Since
A "Jewish Class" in a Budapest High School
On 8 September 1939, just a week after the first shots of the Second World War
were fired, thirty-eight ten-year-old boys (myself included) entered Class I/B
of the Dániel Berzsenyi Hungarian Royal Grammar School in Budapest's 5th
district (Magyar Királyi Berzsenyi Dániel Gimnázium, henceforth: BDG), a
humanist secondary school named after a nineteenth-century Hungarian poet.
It was a historical moment, not only in the life of the youngsters, but also
because this was the first gimnázium class in Hungary for which pupils were
selected on a religious basis: a segregated Jewish class. In the wake of the Second
Anti-Jewish Law (Law IV of 1939), a numerus clausus (limitation of enrollment)
was introduced in high schools: most schools would admit at most two or three
Jews to every class, "Israelites" by religion (Nürnberg racial criteria were not
applied at this stage), and three Budapest boys' grammar schools started fully
segregated "Jewish classes." The I/B of BDG was such a class.
[...]
Our memories of the eight years (or less) at BDG are, of course, a mix of typical
high-school experiences and some specific ones, being young Jews in the evermore
repressive atmosphere of Horthy's (and then the Arrow Cross leader Ferenc
Szálasi's) Hungary. In general, it seems that the school did not discriminate
actively against the "Jewish classes" (there were four more following ours).
Because of wartime shortages, the heating of the building became a problem and
some classes were taught in the afternoon (secondary-school instruction usually
ended at 1 or 2 p.m.), and two of the Jewish classes were moved to the less comfortable
afternoon hours. This may not have been motivated by anti-Semitism, but
perhaps it was. Actually, in the annuals of BDG between 1939 and 1943 the words
zsidó osztály (Jewish class) features, if I am not mistaken, only once, when it is
stated that in the second semester of 1943, National Defence was not taught to
them. (By that time a good part of the pupils' fathers were serving as unarmed
conscripts in forced-labour units at the Russian front, often exposed to
murderous treatment by their superiors.) At some point, we were also separated
from the mandatory paramilitary training as "Levente," and assigned —in a way
parallel to our parents' fate—to some auxiliary tasks. Surveying the faculty
assigned to these classes, there is no indication whatsoever that they would not
have been taught by the best teachers. Moreover, there were such gestures as the
initiative of our class and Latin teacher Sándor Égner in 1941 or 1942 to hold a
Hanukkah feast in the class instead of (or besides) the general Christmas
celebrations of the school. (Dr Égner, a polyglot maverick of German background,
grew up in Máramaros (Marumureş), a multi-ethnic region with a sizeable
orthodox Jewish population, and so he was well acquainted with Jewish
holidays.) One of my classmates went as far as to record that "BDG was an island
of peace and tolerance in the midst of the storm of blood." Surely, there were anti-
Semitic teachers (even card-carrying Nazis) and the nationalist-chauvinist rituals,
mandatory in the Horthy era—public recital of revanchist poetry, prayer for our
soldiers fighting a ‘defensive war' (!) in Russia—were also imposed on us, but
grosso modo the statement made by my classmate holds true. Someone told me
that one or another of our teachers had helped pupils during the year of worst
persecution. Classmates remember fights with pupils of the non-Jewish classes,
but I also remember fights with pupils of the high school across the street, which
counted as a BDG tradition. How much of that was different from typical boys'
roughing it up is difficult to decide ex post. In the darkest months of persecution
in 1944 we did not attend school. We could not after 8 April, when Jews,
compelled to wear a yellow star, were subjected to a partial curfew and allowed
to be on the streets only for a few hours. And, of course, in the autumn of 1944,
when most Budapest Jews were confined to a walled-in ghetto or were in hiding,
we could not attend classes.
As mentioned above, after the war the sixth form (for the short spring term,
as the school was damaged during the siege and reopened only in March 1945)
was restructured and remained thus for the last years. We sadly registered our—in
comparison with the project of Endlösung, relatively few—losses caused by
the German and Hungarian Nazi mass murder of Jews. That only (!?) three boys
(maybe four) were killed during the Shoah is not surprising: the survival
chances of sons of the professional upper-middle class of Budapest with ample
financial resources and good connections to non-Jews were generally good.
Many of us were able to procure false papers, find Gentile friends who hid
Jews, and most of us simply had good luck. (Such as an Arrow Cross thug taking
a fancy at the pretty sister of a classmate. Since time ran out on him, he could
not "collect his reward"). I have no precise data on the fate of my classmates in
those months, but as far as I know almost all were in hiding, perhaps one or two
survived in the Budapest Ghetto or in the houses under the protection of neutral
states. By age, we were just at the margin of those who survived as "children"
and those who were more endangered (taken to forced-labour units or the like)
as "young men." To be sure, the adults, such as our fathers' parents and older
siblings' brothers, fared much worse. I have no precise figures, but many of
them were killed either in forced-labour units or extermination camps or shot
on the banks of the Danube in Budapest.
One boy was killed by a shrapnel during the allied bombardment of
Budapest and one died in an accident soon after the liberation. A few
classmates emigrated before the end of the eight years, so only twenty of the
original thirty-six graduated together in 1947. During the two postwar years,
many of us were engaged in politics and also spent quite some time attending
war crimes trials (and public executions) in the court buildings near BDG.
[...]
János M. Bak
is a medieval historian and Professor Emeritus of the University of British Columbia
and the Central European University in Budapest. His main interests are the legal,
institutional and social history of the late Middle Ages.
