Information About the Holocaust in Hungary Before the German Occupation, Revisited

ABSTRACT The question of what was known in Hungary about the Holocaust has been a mainstay of research on that chapter since the time of the Kasztner libel trial in the mid-1950s. New studies on various aspects of the subject and new sources that have become available make it worthwhile to revisit it. It is now clear that news about the Nazi persecution of Jews reached Hungary soon after it began and continued to arrive in the period preceding the German occupation in spring 1944. This included information about the massacre of Hungarian Jews at Kam'yanets-Podilskyy in 1941 and Jews in Novi Sad in the Hungarian occupation zone in Serbia in 1942. From the second half of 1941 through the occupation, Hungarian soldiers and Hungarian Jewish labor servicemen learned about mass murder of Jews and brought news back to Hungary. The destruction of Jews was discussed in the Hungarian Jewish press. The activists of the Budapest Relief and Rescue Committee, led by Kasztner and Otto Komoly, were also a conduit for information. Very specific information, including about Auschwitz, reached Hungary in January 1944 when the Hashomer Hatsair leader from Będzin, Chajka Klinger, who had escaped to Hungary, gave her testimony. Around that time, Zionist youth movement emissaries were sent from Budapest to the provinces and, after encountering Klinger's message, passed it on. Despite the availability of much information, as Yehuda Bauer explained many years ago in an article, there is a gap between information and knowledge. To a large extent this gap regarding the events of the Holocaust, which a great many Hungarian Jews did not bridge, derived from the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust.