The foundational dilemmas of Jenő Lévai: on the birth of ... foundational dilemmas of Jenő Lévai: on the birth of Hungarian Holocaust historiography in the 1940s Ferenc Laczó†

The foundational dilemmas of Jenő Lévai: on the birth ofHungarian Holocaust historiography in the 1940sFerenc Laczó†

Imre Kertész Kolleg, Fürstengraben 13, D-07743, Jena, Germany

ABSTRACTThis article studies the beginnings of Holocaust historiography(avant la lettre) in Hungary during the second half of the 1940s byfocusing on the oeuvre of Jenő Lévai, a crucial pioneer of the field.The article provides brief overviews of the contents of Lévai’smajor works, analyzing his stances on key interpretative questionsas well as his use of sources. It argues that Lévai’s impressiveseries of journalistic-scholarly works from the immediate postwaryears not only addressed a host of themes that have beenrepeatedly studied since, but several of the interpretativedilemmas he first raised have continued to preoccupy historiansof the Holocaust in Hungary until the present day.

KEYWORDShistory of historiography;early historians of theHolocaust; survivorhistorians; the Holocaust inHungary; Hungarianhistoriography

Introduction

The Holocaust in Hungary was not only the final major chapter of the Nazi genocide butamounted to “the peak of its evolution.”1 This article presents the beginnings of Holocausthistoriography (avant la lettre) in Hungary during the second half of the 1940s by discuss-ing Jenő Lévai, a crucial pioneer of the field who has remained surprisingly little knowninternationally. Even though various histories of historiography have insisted that inthe early postwar years the Holocaust could not yet be conceived and confronted in itsmonstrous enormity, Jenő Lévai’s impressive series of journalistic-scholarly works onthe Hungarian Jewish catastrophe provides one of the clearest evidences to the contrary.2

This article argues that his diverse works from the immediate postwar years introduced ahost of themes that have been repeatedly studied since and several of the interpretativedilemmas he was the first to identify have continued to preoccupy historians until thepresent day. It is thus no exaggeration to say that Lévai’s oeuvre has functioned as a foun-dational discourse on the history of the Holocaust in Hungary.

After a brief introduction to Jenő Lévai and his oeuvre, I will provide overviews of thecontents of his major works, analyze his stances on key interpretative questions, andaddress his use of sources. The overviews will start with a discussion of Lévai’s briefbook on László Endre, the chief Hungarian architect and executor of the Holocaust orig-inally released in 1945, will subsequently explore Lévai’s first overview of the HungarianHolocaust from 1946 and his story of the Pest ghetto published in 1947, before closing

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

CONTACT F. Laczó [email protected]†Present address: Maastricht University, Grote Gracht 90-92, 6211 Maastricht, the Netherlands

HOLOCAUST STUDIES, 2015VOL. 21, NOS. 1–2, 93–119http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2015.1062278

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with an analysis of his major synthesis Zsidósors Magyarországon [Jewish fate in Hungary]from 1948. The article will conclude with some remarks on Lévai’s impact and reception aswell as an attempt at an overall valuation of his contribution to historiography.

The synopses are meant to show that Lévai aimed to clarify on the basis of primarysources what has remained perhaps the most controversial question regarding the Holo-caust in Hungary: the relations between German and Hungarian perpetrators. Lévai notonly wrote of the similarities and differences between Nazi and Hungarian anti-Semitismand the influence of Nazi Germany on Hungary in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but wasexplicitly concerned with assessing the responsibility of the two sides for the catastrophicevents of 1944. He was also keenly interested in the relations between the counter-revolu-tion of 1919 and the Holocaust of 1944 as well as those between the establishment underRegent Horthy and the Arrow Cross, though he offered a somewhat teleological perspec-tive on the evolution of the Hungarian right. Moreover, Lévai’s early postwar worksalready repeatedly discussed the controversial behavior of the Jewish Council, addressingthe question of how much had already been known about the Holocaust by 1944. Whilefocusing on key manifestations of Jewish resistance in Hungary, they highlighted itsoverall weakness. Last but not least, as I will aim to show, Lévai devoted some attentionto the interactions between perpetrators and victims that in a modest way foreshadowedthe recent agenda of writing integrated histories of the Holocaust.

A one man documentation center in Hungary?

The first trial that corrected the priorities of Nuremberg by putting the testimonies ofHolocaust survivors at the center of its proceeding took place in Jerusalem in 1961.3 Itis well known that the Eichmann trial led to the only death penalty in the legal historyof Israel. It is less known that the trial could be viewed as an extra-territorializedGerman trial as not only the accused but also his defendant and all three judgesstemmed from Germany. It is perhaps even less known how central Hungarian witnesseshad been to its proceedings. It was in the case of events in Hungary that the personalresponsibility of Eichmann could be proven with most evidence, and from where manyof the survivors originated who had personally encountered him during the SecondWorld War and the Holocaust.4 The consequences of Nazi genocidal policy and activeHungarian collaboration in 1944 are, on the other hand, well known: approximatelyevery third victim of Auschwitz-Birkenau was a Hungarian Jew, meaning that HungarianJews constituted the single largest group of victims of this most infamous Nazi campcomplex.

Several researchers have recently scrutinized the attitude of communist-ruled Hungaryto the Eichmann trial.5 They have not only explored issues such as Hungarian politicalattitudes and contemporary press coverage, but have also highlighted the substantial con-tribution a prolific Hungarian journalist and a contemporary historian named Jenő Lévai(1892–1983) made as an expert at historical documentation. In 1961, Lévai published avaluable collection covering Eichmann’s activities in Hungary in three languages.6 Practi-cally unknown internationally until today, the editor of this collection was in fact thedoyen of Hungarian Holocaust historiography (avant la lettre) and one of the earliest his-torians of the Holocaust worldwide.7 A survivor of the Holocaust, Lévai was prodigiouslyproductive until 1948, releasing four relatively brief Hungarian-language books before the

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end of 1945, continuing with the publication of three interlinked book-length studies in1946, adding two more in 1947 and then another two in 1948 – besides appearing inSwedish and English.

In 1945, he published a slim volume on László Endre whom he labeled the chief Hun-garian war criminal.8 He also told the story of Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, the resistancefighter who quickly became enshrined in the anti-fascist pantheon.9 A strong emphasison anti-Semitism and remarks on the Jewish catastrophe were present in his earliestpostwar writings, but they did not yet emerge as his central preoccupations; in 1945,his three major themes appear to have been fascism, war crimes, and resistance. Lévai con-tinued the year after with the publication of three books called the black, gray, and whitebooks that were part of his The Suffering of Hungarian Jewry series and complementedeach other thematically.10 The black book not only included ample documentation butoffered the very first narrative overview of the Hungarian Holocaust, whereas the whiteand gray books were devoted to rescue attempts by Jews and non-Jews, respectively,and intended to offer stories of exceptional humaneness and great heroism.

In 1947, Lévai released his interpretation of the Pest ghetto, offering a complex treat-ment while framing its story as a unique and “miraculous” survival of a Jewish ghettoduring the Second World War.11 Moreover, on the request of the Raoul Wallenberg Com-mittee composed of former colleagues of the world-famous Swedish diplomat as well asindividuals who owed their lives to his rescue mission, Lévai finished a book on Wallen-berg that would soon appear in Swedish translation too.12 If this was not enough, in 1948,the year when the communist dictatorship was more brutally established in Hungary,Lévai completed an even larger monographic study on the Holocaust in Hungary, speak-ing of the Jewish fate (zsidósors) in its title.13 Last but not least, besides the 11 Hungarianbooks he authored since the end of the war, 1948 also saw Lévai emerge as an internationalauthor with the release of his English-language Black Book on the Martyrdom of Hungar-ian Jewry.14

While his primary subject was evidently Hungary and what happened to HungarianJewry, in the brief years between the end of the war and the beginnings of full-scale Stalin-ism in Hungary,15 Lévai traveled to multiple places to conduct research, including Switzer-land, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands,Belgium, and France. He thus became familiar with the existence of historical commis-sions and documentation centers in various European countries and called the lack of aparallel Hungarian institution “incomprehensible.”16 In 1948, Lévai in fact released a Hun-garian-language volume under the title Zsidósors Európában [Jewish fate in Europe] too,in which he, at least nominally, broadened his horizon to the whole continent, though headmitted to offering no more than a representative “mosaic” of documents.17

While his most productive years were indubitably those between 1945 and 1948, Lévaimade several other important contributions during his long life. A graduate of the Buda-pest University of Technology and a sports journalist in his youth, Lévai was capturedduring the First World War and was forced to spend years in Russian captivity.18 He sub-sequently managed to establish himself as a leading journalist of his country, working firstfor Az Újság and later for the Est papers, the most popular dailies of the Horthy era.During the 1930s, Lévai became the owner and chief editor of several papers, such asMagyar Hétfő and Kis Újság, and also devoted himself to exploring the history of Hungar-ian journalism.19 As part of his attempt to expose the dealings of the increasingly powerful

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radical right of Hungary, Lévai released a book shortly before the outbreak of the war thataimed to reveal how intimate their connections to the German Nazis were.20 During theyears of the Second World War prior to 1944, Lévai served as editor of Képes Családi Lapwhere he devoted significant attention to the mistreatment of labor servicemen,21 andedited several volumes in defense of the increasingly legally discriminated and socioeco-nomically excluded Hungarian Jewish community.22

The years that Lévai was to emerge as the “founding father” of Holocaust historiogra-phy coincided with the short period when Hungary was at the forefront of documentingthe Holocaust, serving as a paradigmatic example of a wide European trend recentlydepicted by Laura Jockusch.23 Crimes committed against Jews during the war yearsplayed highly prominent roles in the early postwar trials, the details of which, however,remain to be researched to this day.24 As Rita Horváth rightly noted, the drive torecord witness accounts was also manifested “early and with elemental force.”25 The 29interviewers working for the National Relief Committee for Deportees project alonerecorded the accounts of over 5000 survivors in 1945–46, making the Hungarianproject one of the largest in the world.26 Moreover, the early postwar years saw therelease of numerous Holocaust-related personal recollections too.27 Early efforts by survi-vors to articulate their horrific memories in writing and to record their fellows’ witnessaccounts were already accompanied by attempts to document the recent catastrophe ina more objective and analytical mode too.28

The impressive early wave of intellectual responses to the Holocaust in Hungary wasthen followed by nearly complete silence. Even though its abruptness was directly con-nected to the communist takeover, the drastic transformation of Hungarian memoryculture nevertheless seems comparable to trends observable in the non-communistparts of Europe, such as, most notably, France. In accordance with these broad trends,Lévai’s output also drastically declined after 1948. He would return with several morevolumes in the 1960s though, volumes that included the aforementioned documentaryreleased on the occasion of the Eichmann trial, a volume on Kurt Becher, Chief of theEconomic Department of the SS Command in Hungary,29 and one on the positive inter-ventions of Pius XII and the Catholic Church during the Holocaust.30

Jenő Lévai’s major works from the second half of the 1940s

As early as 1945, Lévai addressed several of the main debates that continue to define muchof the discussion on the Holocaust in Hungary until today, such as innovation versus imi-tation, Hungarian responsibility versus subservience to the Germans, or the preeminentrole of the Horthy regime versus the Arrow Cross. Immediately upon the end of thewar Lévai was requested to write a book on László Endre. As the brief introduction byits publisher explained, the aim of this volume was to provide the People’s Tribunalswith further evidence. The main argument of Lévai’s resulting study, Endre László. Aháborús bűnösök magyar listavezetője [László Endre. The top Hungarian war criminal]was that Endre, who headed the administrative section of the Ministry of the Interiorunder the Sztójay government, qualified as the chief Hungarian war criminal.31

In the main body of the text, Lévai argued that the label of war criminal was justifiedsince Endre had helped the Arrow Cross movement, played a leading role in the treaso-nous movement of Szálasi, and contributed to the prolongation of the war in late 1944;

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thus Endre’s role in the deportation and extermination of Hungarian Jewry remainedunmentioned here.32 The seven points Lévai listed to substantiate this accusation enum-erated Endre’s deeds in a largely chronological fashion and what we now call the Holo-caust thus appeared as the fourth point with the key statement being “as under-secretary he deported more than 700,000 Hungarian citizens of the Israelite faith in thecruelest murderous manner.”33 With the exception of point three, which referred toEndre’s responsibility for the tragedy of labor servicemen, however, point four wasdescribed at significantly greater length than any of the others.34 An intriguing dualitycan thus be noticed: on the one hand, categories such as genocide were yet to be morewidely received in Hungary and its perpetration could not be incorporated into Lévai’smain accusation against Endre, who was rather presented as a nyilas and a war criminal;on the other hand, Endre’s responsibility for the Holocaust was assigned a central rolewhen the factual basis of the accusation of war crimes was elaborated.35

On the pages of this slim book, Lévai recurrently announced the types of sources heused but rarely specified individual documents.36 In the case of László Endre, Lévaicould legitimately write of his “two decades of collecting sources” since he had workedon uncovering the deeds of this chief Hungarian Holocaust perpetrator for preciselythat long.37 What Lévai called “the Endre–Lévai affair,” “the great fight between himand me,” was a famed case that started in 1925 with Lévai’s publication of investigativepieces.38 As he related, afterwards Endre tried all he could to silence him.39 The storyof Endre clearly constituted a most personal one for the author. It should thus come asno surprise that Lévai also provided a concise account of what had happened to himhere, writing that “[o]n the 15th of November, the Arrow Cross captured me. I escaped… on the 26th of November they caught me again and beat me in the basement of 2Blvd. Szent-István till I was bleeding. Endre was no longer in town. Then I was on theship to Dachau but I escaped… .”40 Intriguingly, Lévai framed his personal story as a sym-bolic victory, remarking that upon the end of the war he repaid Endre’s visit to his flat. Inthe context of describing his personal triumph, he even envisioned crucial but sadly lostperpetrator sources on the Holocaust.41

Besides presenting “all that seemed essential and necessary to arrive at an objectiveassessment of this fascist mass murderer devoid of any humaneness” to thereby clarifythe bases for the war crimes accusation, one of the main ambitions of the book was toaccount for Endre’s anti-Semitism.42 The book offered an elaborate character sketchthat referred to Endre’s “cruel” and “violent” nature, with Lévai maintaining that thethinking of Endre was “completely Judeocentric.”43 Lévai at first considered threesimple explanatory layers of Endre’s anti-Semitism, writing of his family background,his extremist milieu, and describing a supposedly crucial incident of his youth. Next tothis, the chief ideological source of his vicious anti-Semitism was also clearly identified:“László Endre proudly told us on various occasions that the main goal of his life wasthe study of the Jewish Question. His basis was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”44

However, Lévai also claimed that Endre “was educated by Lajos Méhely, ZoltánBosnyák, and Kálmán Hubay,” controversially adding “as well as by a Jewish rabbi, BélaBerend from Szigetvár whose strange services he used later on too, appointing him tothe Jewish Council.”45 While picturing Endre primarily as a disciple, Lévai highlightedthat his special – though completely dilettantish – expertise was widely known andmany others turned to him for insight and advice.

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Endre’s career provided important evidence on the controversial question of German-Hungarian relations too. One of Lévai’s story lines was that Endre merely followed andimitated the German example.46 In this spirit, he highlighted that “his contact to thevarious Hungarian Nazi organizations became livelier in 1936,”47 and also that Endre dis-covered that he was of Swabian origin on his mother’s side and started to drift toward theVolksbund, the pro-Nazi organization of the Germans of Hungary.48 Moreover, he waspictured as a regular visitor of the German embassy in Budapest with Lévai even discussingwhat he termed “an entirely unknown chapter” in Endre’s life: his supposedly close con-nection and subservience to the Gestapo after 1941.49 Lévai could not document suchdubious assertions. They rather expose his intention in 1945 to present even the chiefHungarian war criminal as an agent of the German Nazis: Lévai may not have been inter-ested in fully externalizing Hungarian guilt, but he clearly pictured the Germans as theprime movers.

On the other hand, in the course of his exploration of the milieu of Gödöllő, the townwhere Endre served as főszolgabíró (High Sheriff) in the 1920s, Lévai depicted him as aprotochronist who invented the “Zs” sign (using the first letter of the Hungarian wordzsidó) to be used in official records.50 Lévai aimed to show more generally too thatEndre excluded Jews from the realm of the Hungarian Rechtsstaat as early as the1920s.51 In other words, Lévai’s interpretation of Endre revealed that Hungarian anti-Semitism was already radical before the Nazis came to power in Germany, as well ashow Endre became an agent of the German Nazis later on.

Lévai had to take a stance on another controversial question relating to the politicallandscape of Hungary, namely the relations between László Endre, the establishmentunder Regent Miklós Horthy, and the Arrow Cross (the nyilas). Lévai wanted to tell thestory of the Hungarian fajvédők (the race protectors or ethnicists) whose position inrelation to the establishment, the radical right, and Hungarian fascist movements wasnever clear cut. He explained that Endre was a strong supporter of the Regent and wasin touch with the most right-wing faction of the ruling party. At the same time, heclaimed that, upon his acquisition of the post of county administration head in 1938,Endre “built a veritable nyilas rule” in Pest County and interpreted this political changeas “the beginning of the greatest development of the nyilas movement.”52 Lévai explainedthat by the summer of 1944 Endre was part of plans to putsch Horthy, subsequentlyaccepted German protection to cooperate with Szálasi, and thus managed to acquire“unlimited power” for the last months of the war.53 While the agenda of the radicalright within the ruling party and the Arrow Cross movement partly overlapped, it goeswithout saying that they also remained political competitors. Nonetheless, Lévai seemedunable to determine Endre’s exact political position.

Concerning the role Endre played during the Holocaust in Hungary, Lévai first statedthat he ordered “the practical solution of the Jewish question” and personally decided onthe details of the horrible deportations to Auschwitz.54 He explained that Endre traveledaround the country during their implementation and emphasized that he was visiblyproud of his results.55 In one of the speeches the book extensively quoted, Endre evenasserted Hungarian preeminence in launching a program of persecution against theJews, even though this clearly questioned Lévai’s earlier depiction of Endre as a merepuppet of the German Nazis.56 In other words, Jenő Lévai’s book on László Endre from1945 addressed key questions such as Hungarian responsibility versus subservience to

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the Germans, or the preeminent role of the regime versus the Arrow Cross, but seemed tooscillate between various emphases and thus did not manage to offer entirely convincingexplanations.

By February 1946, Jenő Lévai finished his Fekete könyv a magyar zsidóság szenvedéseiről[Black book of the suffering of Hungarian Jewry], his first overview of the Holocaust inHungary.57 He claimed to base this work on “all the relevant materials of state adminis-tration,” on plenty of official Jewish sources, including those produced by the JewishCouncil, as well as on select survivor testimonies.58 On the other hand, Lévai admittedto having omitted several crucial aspects of “Jewish suffering.”59

At the beginning of the book, Lévai articulated a teleological perspective on the devel-opment of the Hungarian right: the declared aim of the book was to show “what a straightline connects Szeged and the counterrevolutionary idea to the Nazi-fascism of Szálasi,since both of them are based on murderous anti-Semitism.”60 According to this contro-versial interpretation, the roots of the Holocaust in Hungary could be traced to thestart of Horthy’s reign: Lévai argued that it was in 1919 that radical right-wing movementsbegan to flourish, political activists launched their Nazi-style agitation, and local admin-istrators started to reject the principle of legal equality.

The narrative Lévai elaborated was that the race protectors or “the men of 1919,” as hesometimes called them, might have been marginalized during the so-called “period of con-solidation” of the 1920s, but under the premiership of Gyula Gömbös (1932–36) theystarted to return to positions of power. Lévai maintained that it was during these yearsthat the country’s economy grew increasingly dependent on Germany, the impact ofGerman anti-Semitism was felt ever stronger, and pro-Nazi elements started to occupydecisive positions in the army too. As already noted, Lévai presented the connectionsbetween Horthy’s counter-revolution in 1919 and the Arrow Cross rule as intimate; none-theless, he would maintain that the Hungarian drive to “settle the Jewish question” rightbefore and during the Second World War emerged under direct German pressure.61 Heclaimed that the Nazi leaders “practically terrorized” the Hungarian politicians as earlyas the late 1930s, considering “the depth of their anti-Semitism as the decisive criterionof their reliability” later on as well.62 Besides highlighting its foreign policy significance,Lévai assessed anti-Jewish discrimination as “the victory of feudalism” as it supposedly“diverted attention from the cause of land reform” and served the interest of greatcapital by “hindering etatization.”63 In other words, rather similarly to his book onLászló Endre from the year before, in 1946 Lévai argued that right-wing radicalizationwas an autochthonous feature of Hungarian developments and not an import fromGermany, but that the radical, even eliminationist anti-Semitism of the late 1930s andearly 1940s had German sources.

However, when Lévai related the story of the Holocaust in East Central Europe in moreconcrete terms, his emphasis on Germans being the initiators practically vanished. Con-cerning independent Croatia, he not only wrote that “the Ustasha organizationimplemented the liquidation of the Jewish question within its own realm,” but also thatit was precisely here that “the extermination of Jews took place in the cruelest way.”64

Moreover, he claimed that Slovakia radicalized their anti-Semitic policies entirely inde-pendently of the Germans and thereby provided a model for other countries. Uponlisting some of the most important facts of the Romanian Holocaust, Lévai would statethat there was a time lag between Hungary and its neighbors: “While Central European

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Jewry was nearly completely destroyed by the Germans [note the contradiction – FL],nearly one million Hungarian Jews were under the protection of Regent Horthy andthe government of Kállay and constituted a physically almost intact Jewish island inCentral Europe.”65 Lévai seemed to reproduce rather well-rehearsed notions of Hungarian‘comparative advantage’ here, but hastened to add a subversive footnote: “Eichmann andWisliceny had merely a supervisory role in Slovakia when Slovak Jews were sent fromBratislava to Auschwitz. The Slovak example was referred to as a model in Hungary toountil Endre and Baky broke the record by deporting 500,000 Jews within 60 days.”66

The second part of the Fekete könyv was meant as an exposé of “how it happened thatthe large majority of Hungarian Jewry got deported and exterminated, and what was thereason behind this.”67 Lévai started by arguing that, following 19 March 1944, theGermans had taken over policies in all matters related to the Jews and could send theirorders directly to the Jewish Councils,68 while they could also rely on the compliance ofthe Hungarian police.69 At first, all Hungarian agencies claimed to lack competence inJewish matters and advised Jews to obey the German requests. As Lévai remarked, atthis stage, the latter still behaved politely in order to mislead the Jews of Hungary andlull them into submission.70 Lévai emphasized that relations were soon transformedthough: by the end of April, the Hungarian government would also directly commissionthe Jewish Council.

A crucial aim of this part of Lévai’s narrative was to show that while the Hungariangovernment well knew what awaited the Jews, members of the Jewish Council did notyet. He discussed that deportation plans were articulated at the 4 April meeting of theMinistry for the Interior, ahead of an order from above, thus acknowledging multiplesources, claiming that the Germans arrived with ready plans of extermination but thatit was actually Hungarian Minister of the Interior Andor Jaross who initiated the massdeportations from Hungary.71 Lévai emphasized that László Baky and László Endre, thetwo chief perpetrators who both worked as államtitkár (undersecretaries of state) at theMinistry of the Interior, explicitly reported to all ministers and thereby the entire govern-ment was implicated in the politics of genocide. Concerning non-Jewish Hungariansociety, Lévai discussed the collaborationist shift of the state apparatus and the activeinvolvement of large segments of society, repeatedly writing of greedy flat requests aswell as a flood of denunciations.72

Overall, he clearly assigned much of the blame to the Hungarian side. “The documentsfrom the People’s Tribunals prove how much all of this depended on Horthy and the gov-ernment of Sztójay. [… ] The solution of the Jewish Question was merely a Germanrequest, like in the case of previous governments,” his Fekete könyv would state.73 Arrivingwith ready plans or not, Lévai argued that due to their insignificant number, 300 of themaltogether,74 the Germans barely managed to keep track of the deportations and wouldnever have been able to execute them on their own.75 Their role was thus rather advisoryand the actual executors of the deportations were the Hungarian police and gendarmerie.It can be seen as indicative of the nature of Lévai’s polemic that even as he praised MiklósHorthy for having decided to halt the deportations in early July 1944, he presented itssuccess as decisive proof that the Regent was still in the position to implement his willand could thus be held responsible for what had happened since March.76

On the other hand, Lévai was keen to argue that the Jewish Council remained “comple-tely uninformed” and sincerely believed the misleading information they received even

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when the Ministry of the Interior was already in the middle of discussing the decree to“cleanse the country of Jews.”77 This is why the Council complied, he reasoned, but has-tened to add that their compliance “proved fatal.”78 While he mentioned the visible massdissatisfaction with the Council’s activities, he underlined that the choices of its memberswere choiceless ones and only losses could result from them: “They expected that Jewswould justifiably articulate the accusation: the Council is exposing them and helpingtheir internment. Would it have been possible to deny fulfilling commandments? Inthis case members of the Council would have been harassed and forced to resign buttheir successors would have inherited the same fate and the situation would not haveimproved.”79 Still, when it came to the question of deportations, Lévai could no longerfully accept their line of self-defense: “To the accusation of having served the Germans,of having collaborated, members of the Jewish Council took the stance that – in theiropinion – it was partly due to this that they managed to delay the date of deportation(?!). They claimed their ambition was to win by letting time run out… .”80

In the explanation of the Holocaust he provided in Fekete könyv, Lévai strongly empha-sized the material side. “Upon the entry of the Germans, the greatest struggle was pursuedbehind the scenes: the aim was to acquire the wealth of Jewry and this is the reason whyeverything had to happen” he argued.81 Besides dissecting what he labeled German econ-omic imperialism, Lévai also pointed to the contest between Germans and Hungariananti-Semitic policy makers who similarly intended to take possession of Jewishwealth.82 Lévai also repeated the explanation given by Péter Jankó, chief of the People’sTribunals, who was judge not only at the Szálasi and the Endre trials but later also atthe Rajk trial,83 that the decades-long “infection” of the Hungarian people with anti-Semitic propaganda and hatred as well as “the robber instinct of the scum of society”were the chief causes of the complete vulnerability of Jewry in 1944.84

Characteristically, Lévai added to this that the lack of Jewish resistance was anothercrucial factor. However, it was equally characteristic of him – after having briefly men-tioned the resistance of Zionist youth earlier – to report on the very last page of his nar-rative how just before the Arrow Cross putsch of mid-October 1944, “Jewry” joined “theresistance movement.”He in effect claimed that Jewish labor servicemen finally got hold ofweapons and committed themselves to fighting alongside communist and social demo-cratic workers.85

Summarizing Jewish losses, Lévai wrote that “more than five and a half million of ourco-religionists became victims of the bloodletting of Hitler and his Nazi hordes.”86 He esti-mated the death toll of Hungarian Jewry to be around 570,000, or 70% of the 825,000people who, according to the Hungarian and German racial theories, belonged to theJewish race.87 He claimed that 220,000 Holocaust survivors lived in Hungary in early1946 with some 145,000 of them belonging to the Jewish religious communities.88

By early 1946, the postwar developments became a concern in their own right for Lévai.He discussed the challenge of returning the deported to Hungary, and complained aboutthe lack of proper rehabilitation and financial compensation of those who were persecutedon “religious grounds.”89 At the same time, he praised the People’s Tribunals for its toughsentencing.90 While he hoped that appropriate forms of commemoration would soon bedeveloped, he also started to foreground the great service of the Soviet Union andexplained how justified Jewish gratitude toward it was.91 In fact, Lévai would now exclu-sively credit “the forward march of the Red Army” with “the rescue of the Jews who had to

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fear for their lives in the two ghettos of the capital city.”92 Last but not least, Lévaiaddressed questions of the future research agenda in his Fekete könyv, stating that“years will pass before the terrible tragedy of thirty age cohorts of Hungarian Jewry willbe completely uncovered,”93 and explicitly arguing that a Hungarian DocumentationDepartment needed to be established.

Lévai’s third major book to be analyzed here was titled A pesti gettó csodálatos megme-nekülésének hiteles története [The authentic story of the miraculous escape of the Pestghetto] and was published in 1947. It explored the history of the great Pest ghetto inthe winter of 1944–45.94 Drawing extensively on official documents of the ghetto admin-istration on the pages of this book, Lévai again made only some general remarks on themwithout specifying concrete pieces of evidence.95 What is more, rather problematically fora researcher, Lévai repeatedly adopted the perspective of the Jewish Council, painting asomewhat idealized picture of the behavior of its leadership in particular. He relied,above all, on the testimonies of Lajos Stöckler and Miksa Domonkos and depicted themas heroic leaders,96 while explicitly praising the Council’s work in general terms too,writing of their “gigantic” and “ultimately largely successful” struggle.97

However, A pesti gettó csodálatos megmenekülésének hiteles története also offered arather sophisticated social historical study of life in the ghetto. Lévai added several the-matic appendices that provided an overall description of the ghetto with data on its terri-tory and population density, explaining that toward the end of the ghetto’s nearly sevenweeks of existence 70,000 people were forced to live in merely 243 houses, which meantthat on average 14 people were crammed into a flat. Moreover, the appendices clarifiedthat a very large part of the ghetto population consisted of the elderly, the sick, and theunderaged. Lévai also discussed how the ghetto administration consisted of four layersfrom flat and house supervisors to 10 zone supervisors and then, on the highest level,the Council with its 12 units.

The book explored in notable detail how the ghetto leaders managed to organize arather elaborate administration, social policy, health care, as well as religious life. Lévaiidentified the feeding of the ghetto population as the crucial problem and explained theconcrete issues of provisioning. He delved into the infernal conditions of the ghetto hos-pitals as well as the impossibility of burying the dead, which by the end of the war resultedin 3000 bodies simply lying around.98 Believing that he lacked sufficient competence tocover religious practices in the ghetto too, Lévai asked Ödön Kálmán, the Chief Rabbiof Kőbánya, to contribute a brief report on them.

Next to his rich descriptions of conditions in the ghetto, A pesti gettó csodálatos meg-menekülésének hiteles története also focused on the perpetrators and even offered a discus-sion of the interactions between perpetrators and victims with Lévai assessing thenegotiations between the authorities and the Jewish leadership positively.99 He went asfar as to argue that “the behavior of the ghetto leaders can be characterized best by thefact that in the course of time the Germans, the Arrow Cross as well as the Hungarianauthorities started to respect their committed stance and constantly entered into nego-tiations about the questions they raised. This was not the least important of the reasonswhy, as the only segregeted ghetto in Europe, the Pest ghetto managed to survive.”100

At the same time, Lévai characterized Arrow Cross rule as an orgy of “boundless,unlimited” terror, highlighting rows of atrocities and “sadist insanities” as well as wide-spread corruption and recurrent robberies. One of Lévai’s choices was to use a rhetoric

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of dramatic climaxes.101 In spite of such a choice, he would at times distinguish betweenvarious nyilas agents, discussing the ambivalent behavior of some higher nyilas officials inparticular. Moreover, giving up on his rhetoric of climaxes, Lévai argued that the last daysof the ghetto actually proved less dangerous. Lévai argued that the safety of the ghetto wasbetter assured once Pál Szalai, the new mediator between the Arrow Cross and the JewishCouncil, made 100 policemen patrol its surrounding. As he put it, Szalai thereby effectivelyjoined “the side of the persecuted.”102

A moot question concerned the intentions of the Arrow Cross leaders: did they plan tomurder all the Jews of Pest in accordance with the “Polish recipe” that Lévai kept on refer-ring to and, if so, when and how? Lévai would not take a clear stance on this crucial matter.On the one hand, he related how rumors spread that the Arrow Cross and the Germanshad been preparing “a plan to exterminate” the whole ghetto population,103 and how byJanuary “no one could truly believe in survival anymore.”104 On the other, he cited howstate institutions “underlined that the safety of Jewish lives would be assured and theirremoval from the country would take place only after the war.”105

At the same time, the book’s overall assessment of Hungarian behavior was thoroughlynegative, even if Lévai articulated his assessment somewhat sparsely. He nonetheless maderemarks such as “we have to confess in accordance with the facts that the Germans, withall their demands and mercilessness, proved to be more humane than the Arrow Cross.”106

Even if bystanders were not one of the major concerns of the book, Lévai told a highlysymbolic story about Hungarian Christian behavior, reporting on general indifferenceand even some visible support shown when a nyilas gang chased Jewish children onChristmas Eve.107 What is more, he directly contested Hungarian practices of externaliz-ing guilt, claiming, for instance, that Horthy’s apologetic depiction of the Hungarian roleduring the German occupation was evidently untrue.

By 1948, Lévai completed Zsidósors Magyarországon [Jewish fate in Hungary], thedeclared aim of which was to be “objective in tone while entailing a summary of thewhole question.”108 Basing his work on a plethora of original sources that had just beenmade available, with Zsidósors Magyarországon Lévai published, a mere three yearsafter 1945, a nearly 500-page long synthesis composed of four chronological parts thatcovered the years 1933 to 1945.109 The first part of the book discussed the impact ofNazism on Hungarian Jewry until 1943 when the Nazis – according to its title – werethreatening neighbors. The second part covered the deportations from Hungarybetween 19 March and 10 July 1944 when the Nazis, in the words of Lévai, “directlyruled” over them.110 The book subsequently devoted attention to the months until mid-October, focusing, potentially with apologetic implications, on Hungarian attempts to lib-erate the country and its Jewish community from the Nazi yoke. Last but not least, thebook explored the last months of the war and the Holocaust, presenting the life anddeath of Budapest Jews under the reign of the Arrow Cross.

Zsidósors Magyarországon was to remain Lévai’s major study on the history of theHolocaust in Hungary. Not only its scope but also its thematic richness and diversesource base make this elaborate work a highly impressive summary to have been publishedby 1948. What is more, Zsidósors Magyarországon touched on a whole row of crucialthemes that have preoccupied historians since. For instance, the book devoted some atten-tion to the special role universities and their student bodies played in anti-Semitic radica-lization,111 the impact foreign policy considerations had on internal policy,112 as well as

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the connection between Hungarian revisionist successes and anti-Semitic legislation.113

Lévai briefly described the fraught relations between international Jewish organizationsand Hungarian Jewry, the socioeconomic consequences of anti-Jewish laws, the militarylabor service system,114 and Jewish cultural life during the war years.115 Zsidósors Magyar-országon also referred to the destruction of Jewish books orchestrated in 1944,116 the infa-mous Nazi-inspired Hungarian Institute for Research on the Jewish Question,117 and thelooting of art treasures.118 Moreover, Lévai addressed several specificities of the Holocaustin Hungary such as the humiliating searches Jews were forced to undergo before beingdeported,119 or the creation of the so-called yellow-star houses of Budapest.120 Moreover,his book evoked famed individual stories such as that of resistance martyr HannahSzenes,121 László Ocskay and his thousands of protected workers,122 and German majorgeneral Gerhard Schmidthuber who provided assistance to Hungarian Jews in the Buda-pest ghetto.123 Anticipating further thematic priorities of later times, Lévai referred to theinternational press campaign to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of threatened Jewsof Hungary when the war had practically been decided and even posed the often repeatedquestion of why the train tracks to Auschwitz-Birkenau had not been bombed, eventhough this could have been done.124 At the same time, Zsidósors Magyarországonappeared to be remarkably even-handed, not failing to mention more positive aspectsof Hungarian behavior during the war years, such as how the country protected refugees,including Jewish ones, during the early stages of the conflict,125 or how the Hungarianarmy ended up saving its labor servicemen from deportation in 1944.126

Beyond its coverage of such a rich variety of themes, Zsidósors Magyarországon com-bined a narrative account with the reproduction of relevant primary sources and also fea-tured some social historical data.127 The sources quoted or reproduced includedperpetrator sources, such as a letter Döme Sztójay sent as Hungarian ambassador fromNazi Germany in 1943 recommending the implementation of the Holocaust inHungary;128 the detailed reports of László Ferenczy, “the leading expert of the deporta-tions,”129 as Lévai called him, from 1944, a centrally important source on the Holocaustin Hungary;130 the presentation of László Endre on the “Jewish question” at the govern-ment meeting of 20 June 1944;131 his contemporaneous interview in the Berliner Lokalan-zeiger;132 or parts of the account of Edmund Veesenmayer, Reich plenipotentiary inHungary during the Holocaust.133 Lévai also used various sources of Jewish provenancesuch as the diary of Jewish Council leader Samu Stern;134 letters sent by the Council toMinister of the Interior Andor Jaross;135 telegraph messages of Miklós Krausz and OttóKomoly that were part of their rescue attempts;136 as well as Jewish leaflets addressingHungarian Christian society distributed illegally in 1944.137 Lévai would also draw onthe account of the single witness who survived the horrendous Buda hospital massacrescommitted during the rule of the Arrow Cross.138 He even employed somewhat less con-ventional historical sources such as ambulance diaries in his attempt to reconstruct theways Jews were being physically attacked.139 However, more often than not, Lévai didnot analyze these diverse sources in greater depth, preferring to comment on thembriefly or not at all.

Drawing substantially on Lévai’s previous works, especially his Fekete könyv,140 Zsidó-sors Magyarországon not only provided several new pieces of information but also offeredsome revised conclusions.141 A major organizational novelty was that whereas in 1946Lévai still divided the story of the Holocaust into three separate volumes (the black,

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gray, and white books), by 1948 he tried to integrate all major aspects into a single one.There were also at least four significant interpretative revisions as compared to theFekete könyv: in Zsidósors Magyarországon Lévai took a much more critical stancetoward the Jewish Council, he now devoted more attention to the Zionist role in self-rescue operations, including a discussion of Rezső Kasztner, traced the rescue missionsof neutral states who operated their embassies in Budapest during the Holocaust, and,last but not least, offered a detailed documentation and repeated praise for efforts ofthe Christian Churches in 1944.

Concerning the Jewish Council, Lévai first remarked on the (admittedly quite incom-prehensible) ignorance they displayed in 1944 and their apparent inability to interpreteven the clearest signs. Their shocking naïveté resulted in “servant-like behavior,” “exag-gerated benevolence aimed at fulfilling all demands and wishes,” even “enthusiastic expertcooperation,” Lévai argued.142 In his major synthesis from 1948, Lévai thus not onlyrepeated how it proved fatal that the Council did not aim at resistance and self-defense,143 but even assigned partial responsibility to its members: “A part of HungarianJewry from outside Budapest would have certainly survived if it had been warned on timeand called on to resist,” he concluded.144

Lévai elaborated that the undemocratic nature of Jewish community organizations hadgrave consequences, especially when its leaders were suddenly forced to serve as politicalrepresentatives.145 Even as he still praised the activities of Lajos Stöckler and MiksaDomonkos during Arrow Cross rule (i.e. after mid-October 1944), he now asserted that“our fathers proved weak in the previous storm.”146 What is more, Zsidósors Magyarors-zágon declared the failure of Jewish endeavors to assimilate in more general terms too.147

In 1948, Lévai propagated a new form of Jewish unity, including close cooperation with theZionists.

In accordance with this newly articulated stance, Lévai wanted to improve the repu-tation of the Zionists. He would now assess their war-time role in markedly positiveterms, maintaining that “the work of the Zionists under the label of the Swiss Embassywas the only truly democratic mass movement of self-defense. It merits fair treatment,which it has not yet received.”148 Moreover, while noting that “no ultimate judgment”could be passed on Rezső Kasztner yet,149 Lévai argued that his efforts at least resultedin the rescue of 1700 people from the clutches of the Nazis,150 and Kasztner thereforedeserved recognition for his “self-rescue” attempts.151

Zsidósors Magyarországon also documented the activities of the Christian Churches onmore than 30 pages, which amounted to the longest section of documents in the wholebook.152 Lévai concluded these pages with the statement that “the vast movement ofthe Christian Churches doubtlessly impacted members of the government as well asRegent Horthy and made them revise their helpless and indifferent ways.”153 Moreover,the book also credited the efforts of the Budapest embassies of neutral countries in anovel way. As opposed to the nearly exclusive praise reserved for the Red Army inFekete könyv, Lévai now argued that the survival of the remaining Budapest Jews wasdue to “the victory of the Red Army and the persistent efforts of the neutral embassies.”154

Lévai’s discussion of Arrow Cross rule did not significantly change as compared to hisprevious works, but some of his statements acquired sharper contours. He still depictedFerenc Szálasi’s reign as a period characterized by brutality, atrocities, theft, and corrup-tion, but also as a time when there was no highest authority to control violent local

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struggles.155 Zsidósors Magyarországon also maintained that the system of labor servicewas transformed under Szálasi: around 60,000 Jews from the capital were now forcedon “death roads” and whoever survived to the border was handed over to be extermi-nated.156 Lévai thus asserted that, next to the more than 6200 Arrow Cross murders inBudapest that the People’s Tribunals had already investigated by 1948,157 the deportationsof Jews to their certain death were also continued, even claiming that the war against theJews was in fact “renewed in a more drastic manner than ever.”158

The complex and controversial question of German-Hungarian relations continued topreoccupy the author. His major synthesis - similarly to his Fekete könyv - argued that thedecisive, joint Hungarian-German meeting took place at the Hungarian Ministry of theInterior on 4 April 1944, where the agenda of “cleansing” the whole country of Jewswas agreed.159 He explained that the Gestapo and the Sonderkommando clearly arrivedin Hungary with the intention of implementing the deportations but Adolf Eichmann sub-sequently decided in tandem with László Endre “how to apply their ideas to the Hungariancircumstances and develop a detailed plan of deportations.”160 Lévai also informed hisreaders of the revealing detail that Endre in fact pleaded for a speedier policy of genocidethan the German Nazis: he recommended six trains daily with as many Hungarian Jews aspossible to move between Hungary and Auschwitz-Birkenau, but the Germans agreed“only” to four.161

Lévai went further in assigning responsibility to the Hungarian side, arguing that “Eich-mann and Endre, the German and the Hungarian ‘dejudaizer’, having the approval ofBaky, started to implement their common program. Sztójay and Jaross are chiefly respon-sible for the fact that they could do so: without their approval this could not have hap-pened [… ] it is certain that Regent Horthy was not against the expulsion [kitelepítés inthe original – FL] of the Jews either.”162 Zsidósors Magyarországon even maintainedthat documents from the People’s Tribunals had conclusively proven that the deportationswere the exclusive responsibility of Horthy and the Sztójay government. In a sentencereminiscent of a key sentence in his Fekete könyv, Lévai now argued that “after theentry of the Germans into Hungary, the Jewish question, like in the case of previousgovernments, was merely their wish.”163 In 1948, Lévai also explicitly stated that theHungarian gendarmerie and its leaders were responsible for the terribly brutal implemen-tation of the deportation decrees.164 This clear emphasis on Hungarian responsibility is allthe more striking since Lévai continued to pursue strongly anti-German discourses andZsidósors Magyarországon also explicitly blamed the rise of Hungarian anti-Semitismduring the 1930s on the influence of Nazi Germany.165

In his major synthesis, Jenő Lévai related again to the struggle that emerged betweenGermans and Hungarians concerning who would be able to rob the wealth of HungarianJewry, sketching alternative ways in which the pursuit of genocide and the program oftheft could be connected.166 Calling the Holocaust “the greatest and dirtiest campaignof robbery in history,”167 Lévai argued that Eichmann prioritized “the physical annihil-ation of Jewry even over the military interests” and also wanted to acquire “Jewishwealth” for himself and his organization.168 He maintained that Endre and Baky werefully committed to the program of genocide too, whereas other members of the Sztójaygovernment seemed “barely interested in the fate of the Jews but all the more so intheir wealth.”169 This distinction was coupled with the assertion that, regarding “the

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Jewish question,” all ministers of the Sztójay government, with the sole exception ofDefense Minister Lajos Csatay, were closer to the Germans than to Regent Horthy.170

In short, years of intense research enabled Lévai to produce an impressive overview onthe Holocaust in Hungary as early as 1948. Zsidósors Magyarországon not only covered awider scope of themes and employed a greater number and variety of sources than Lévai’sprevious works but also shows that he grew much less interested in chiefly blaming theGerman perpetrators. By 1948, Lévai’s assessment of Hungarian as well as HungarianJewish behavior clearly turned more critical. Zsidósors Magyarországon articulated a con-demning perspective on the activities of the Jewish Council and, even more crucially,assigned primary responsibility for the implementation of the deportations to the Hungar-ian side.

The impact and reception of Lévai

There is widespread acknowledgment that Lévai provided the first detailed explorations ofthe Holocaust in Hungary. However, current valuations of his impact are rather polarized.Even if far from all of his factual assertions and conclusions are still considered valid, hisreputation among Holocaust researchers remains positive. Randolph L. Braham, widelyconsidered the most important survivor historian on Hungary and an eminent authorityon the topic,171 has extensively drawn on Lévai’s early postwar works.172 Braham’s mostrecent annotated bibliography calls Lévai “an excellent Hungarian Jewish journalist”173

whose main work Zsidósors Magyarországon is a “detailed and well-documentedwork.”174 Similarly to Braham, Géza Komoróczy’s major two-volume A zsidók történeteMagyarországon [A history of Jews in Hungary] released in 2012 relies heavily on Lévaiin its treatment of the Nazi era and the Holocaust.175 In accordance with these clearsigns of his significant impact, historian of ideas János Gyurgyák recently underlinedthat Lévai’s books “remain essential in historical scholarship.”176

However, in recent years, the reputation of Lévai seems to have significantly worsened.The value of his contributions has been repeatedly questioned without a correspondingacknowledgment of his towering early postwar achievements. It may be seen as illustrativeof Lévai’s exclusion from the contemporary historiographical mainstream that the mostrecent overview on the history of Hungarian historiography written by Ignác Romsicsdoes not as much as mention him (though, if this was any consolation, nor didRomsics reference Braham).177 Moreover, with the sole exception of his book on RaoulWallenberg, which was reissued in 1988, his works from the 1940s had not been repub-lished until 2014.178

If Lévai’s reputation as a crucial pioneer of Holocaust historiography appeared firmlyestablished, contemporary scholars of the Hungarian radical right and fascism tend toengage with him in a rather polemical fashion and often explicitly reject the interpret-ations he offered. The above-quoted János Gyurgyák probably echoed the sentiment ofmany of his colleagues when he declared that Lévai’s works on the Arrow Cross and onnational socialism were “overly ideological.”179 In fact, Gyurgyák’s newest monographon the so-called race protectors ( fajvédők) aimed to “convincingly prove” the untenabilityof Lévai’s “strongly ideological and journalistic conceptions” which became the “main-stream of Hungarian Marxist historiography after 1945.”180 Rudolf Paksa’s recent bookson the history of the extreme right, on Hungarian national socialists, and on Arrow

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Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi provide thorough overviews of their topics and may becomestandard references in the future. Similarly to Gyurgyák, Paksa offers rather stronglyworded criticisms of Lévai’s approach and explicitly intends to counter the negative influ-ence Lévai’s interpretations have had in the scholarly study of the radical right and fascism– without relating to the fact that Lévai was also one of the earliest historians of the Holo-caust worldwide.181

In short, the works of Lévai exerted a marked impact on an older generation of histor-ians (Braham was born in 1922, Komoróczy in 1937) who have written major monographsbut his reputation has recently suffered and his place in the Hungarian historiographicalcanon seems far from assured. What is worse, no study of his life and oeuvremore detailedthan this one has yet appeared. Similarly, no research has yet been conducted that wouldplace Lévai in a comparative or transnational frame, even though his historiographicalinterests, thematic priorities, research methods, and overall aims closely resembledseveral other early survivor historians from elsewhere.182

Conclusion

Lévai studied the acts of the perpetrators, the responses of the victims, as well as the evol-ution of German–Hungarian interactions in detail prior to the end of the 1940s and basedhis presentations on an increasing number and variety of sources. Thereby, he almostsingle-handedly established Hungarian Holocaust historiography (avant la lettre)shortly after the war. Even if some of his methodological choices have been rightly cri-tiqued by later historians and he has – at times rather derogatively – been labeled a jour-nalist, I hope to have shown that he grew more sophisticated and nuanced in the threeshort years during which he produced his most important series of works. Similarly,even though some of his factual assertions and conclusions have rightly come under criti-cal scrutiny, he deserves acknowledgment as the first person to have raised several keyissues almost immediately after the Holocaust.

Some of the questions Lévai first raised have in fact continued to preoccupy historiansof the Holocaust in Hungary. For instance, Lévai grappled with the involvement and inter-action of Hungarians and Germans in the genesis of the Hungarian Holocaust.183 He alsoaimed to assess the complicated relations between the establishment of the inter-war yearsand the extreme right, and their relative responsibility for the Holocaust. Both these ques-tions continue to generate divergent interpretations and heated debates.184 Some of Lévai’score subjects have also proven to be centrally important in the longer term. For example,the economic annihilation of Hungarian Jews is the major theme of important recentworks by Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági, whereas rescuers from Hungary who havereceived the Righteous among the Nations award have now been systematically studiedby Kinga Frojimovics and Judit Molnár.185

Lévai’s early postwar achievement was outstanding in its Hungarian context, but hisactivities were also embedded in a much broader endeavor of Holocaust documentationin a country that until the consolidation of Stalinist rule in the late 1940s was verymuch at the forefront of articulating intellectual responses to the unprecedented destruc-tion. Lévai’s work could also be usefully placed into the transnational context of survivorhistorians. After all, as a Holocaust survivor, Lévai was far from unique in his hesitation torelate his personal stories and his clear preference for a well-documented and seemingly

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almost fully impersonal version of events.186 He also belongs to a larger cohort of authorswho at first tended to embed the Jewish story in a larger anti-fascist plot, even though inhis case this only lasted months: the Jewish catastrophe in fact emerged as Lévai’s centralpreoccupation as early as 1946.

What seems more unusual about Lévai is that he worked as a mainstream journalist in acontext of a highly assimilated Jewish community before the war, and stayed in Hungaryeven after spending several intense years researching, documenting, and narrating theHolocaust. It is similarly unusual that Lévai enjoyed various forms of backing andmanaged to complete several projects but did so without a stable institutional affiliation.He fought for a permanent Hungarian documentation and research center in vain and wasthus practically forced to act as a one man documentation center.

There are also several more controversial aspects of his works from the second half ofthe 1940s. There is his pronounced anti-German sentiment and his ethnicized way ofarticulating it. While his interpretation was primarily an anti-fascist and anti-imperialistone, Lévai thereby helped produce an influential narrative that would be used tosupport the expulsion of ethnic Germans in a country that was formerly allied to NaziGermany.187 A second controversial aspect is to what extent his ideologically chargedinterpretation could account for Hungarian responsibility in a differentiated manner.After all, his pronounced anti-fascism meant that he had visible difficulties accountingfor the fact that the deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau took place before and notduring the Arrow Cross rule.188 Last but certainly not least, there is the moot questionto what extent his larger project as well as concrete narratives resonated with the commu-nist agenda.

Even though at the end of the war Lévai expressed his support of the anti-fascistpopular front from a self-declared proletarian position, he was also increasingly com-mitted to exploring the Jewish catastrophe just before the Stalinists of his country declaredit a strict taboo. In other words, his leftist anti-fascism may well have been conducive tothe increasingly hegemonic Soviet interpretation of the recent past. Much more impor-tantly though, the silence the communist dictatorship imposed on him was only one ofthe factors that assured that his pioneering studies of the Holocaust in Hungary were toremain a towering achievement until many decades later.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Vági, Csősz, and Kádár, The Holocaust in Hungary, xxx. Upon the German occupation ofHungary on 19 March 1944, a mere 56 days were needed for all preparations and another56 proved sufficient for the deportation of 437,402 Jewish individuals. Apart from a fractionof about 15,000, all of them arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau and over 300,000 were immedi-ately murdered there. Hungarian Jews thereby ended up constituting the single largest groupof victims of the most infamous Nazi camp complex. In fact, it was this campaign that madeAuschwitz into a synonym for the annihilation of European Jewry.

2. Various histories of historiography have repeatedly highlighted the pioneering role of RaulHilberg whose The Destruction of the European Jews was originally published in 1961.

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Earlier efforts have become the subject of exploration only in more recent years. Bankier andMichman, Holocaust Historiography in Context already includes much in this regard too.

3. For an accessible overview of the trial, see Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial.4. This point is highlighted in Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann, 25 and 90.5. See Csonka, “Az Eichmann-per”; Bohus, “Jews, Israelites, Zionists.” I would like to thank

Laura Csonka and Kata Bohus for allowing me to read their unpublished manuscripts.6. See Lévai, Eichmann in Hungary. The volume also appeared in German and French trans-

lations. The collection of documents on Eichmann partially indubitably reflected prioritiesof the Cold War contest.

7. Lévai is strangely absent from the otherwise splendid YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in EasternEurope and receives no mention in Laura Jockusch’s impressive transnational study Collectand Record! either. See Hundert, YIVO Encyclopedia and Jockusch, Collect and Record!

8. Lévai, Endre László.9. Lévai, A hősök hőse… !

10. Lévai, Fekete könyv; Lévai, Fehér könyv; Lévai, Szürke könyv.11. Lévai, A pesti gettó.12. Lévai, Raoul Wallenberg regényes élete. In Swedish: Lévai, Raoul Wallenberg, hjälten i

Budapest.13. Lévai, Zsidósors Magyarországon.14. Lévai, Black Book.15. On these years, see Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets; Palasik, Chess Game for

Democracy. On foreign policy, see Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War. For Hungary in a com-parative context, see Applebaum, Iron Curtain.

16. Lévai, Zsidósors Európában, 330. With a little exaggeration, it might be stated that his volu-minous and highly impressive early postwar output made him the equal of a documentationcenter that his country otherwise sadly lacked.

17. Ibid., 5. The explicit focus of this work was Central Europe, more particularly the MantelloRescue Mission El Salvador conducted in Switzerland, which was led by a HungarianJewish émigré named George Mandel-Mantello. Characteristically for his Central Europeanhorizon, Lévai provided translations of his foreign language sources but made an exceptionwhen the original was in German. Providing a list of his sources in this European book,Lévai clarified that the most important tasks related to the war were “naturally” undertakenby Polish organs. Ibid., 330. In this context, he explicitly mentioned the Central Commissionfor the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland as well as the Jewish Historical Institute.

18. During the 1930s, he published several volumes on these experiences. See Lévai, Éhség, árulás,Przemyśl; Lévai, Éhség, forradalom, Szibéria; Lévai, Éhség, panama, Hinterland.

19. See Lévai, Kossuth Lajos néplapjai.20. See Lévai, Gömbös Gyula.21. The Hungarian labor service battalions consisted primarily of Hungarian Jews and leftists.

They were forced to perform duties in the military without being allowed to serve as soldiersor having adequate equipment. See Braham, The Hungarian Labor Service System; Rozett,Conscripted Slaves.

22. See Lévai,… Védelmünkben!; Lévai, Írók, írások… ; Lévai, Írók, színészek, énekesek.23. See Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jockusch highlights the role of Poland and France in par-

ticular without, however, noting that of Hungary.24. Pető and Barna, Political Justice.25. Horváth, “<A Jewish Historical Commission in Budapest>,” 480.26. For the testimonies that address the Buchenwald concentration camp, see Laczó, “<I could

hardly wait to get out of this camp>.”27. The bibliography compiled by the Zachor Foundation for Social Remembrance lists 23 Hun-

garian-language titles released before the end of the 1940s. According to the same list, not asingle one was printed in Hungary between 1950 and 1958. See the website of the ZachorFoundation for Social Remembrance: http://www.emlekezem.hu/bibliografia/bibliografia1.html.

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28. Next to Lévai’s series of relevant works that have already been listed, ErnőMunkácsi’sHogyantörtént? Adatok és okmányok a magyar zsidóság tragédiájához constitutes a most outstandingillustration of this. See also Lőwinger, Germánia “prófétája” and Sós, Európai fasizmus ésantiszemitizmus.

29. Lévai, A fekete SS.30. Lévai, Hungarian Jewry and the Papacy.31. On Endre’s outstanding role, see also Kádár and Vági, A végső döntés.32. Lévai, Endre László, 5.33. Ibid., 5.34. On the rather special Hungarian instituton officially and euphemistically called labor service,

see Braham, The Hungarian Labor Service System and Rozett, Conscripted Slaves.35. On the birth of the genocide convention, see Cooper, Raphael Lemkin.36. He mentioned sources including what he collected “at the time at the very place of the event,”

private sources (such as his own diary, audio sources such as radio broadcasts, and even visualsources such as a film that Angelo Rotta, the Apostolic Nuncio to Hungary, secretly made inwhich Endre could be seen observing “the piles of dead bodies of deported Jews”). See Lévai,Endre László, 11, 64, and 79.

37. Ibid., 111.38. Ibid., 87. Right after the end of the war, Lévai could proudly remind his readers that the jour-

nalist, as he referred to himself, was on the attacking side first.39. Ibid., 91. On 3 November 1944, Endre supposedly personally visited Lévai’s flat, removed

every piece of furniture from it, and distributed all items of his library.40. Ibid., 92.41. “After the liberation, we had the chance to visit his flat. Regrettably, the books of his highly

interesting private library had already been removed and his building manager had burnedmany of his writings, among them his notes entitled ‘What did I do to the Jews in 1944?’An incalculable loss… ,” Lévai ruminated. Ibid., 105.

42. Ibid., 111.43. Ibid., 62.44. Ibid., 33.45. Ibid., 96.46. Ibid., 12.47. Ibid., 35.48. Ibid., 61.49. Lévai argued that Endre “was soon completely in the hands of Jagow and Krappe.” Ibid., 62.50. Ibid., 24.51. On László Endre, see the dissertation by Vági, “Endre László politikai pályafutása.”52. Ibid., 50.53. Ibid., 77.54. Ibid., 66.55. Ibid., 72. Without discussing who his collaborators were in any greater detail, Lévai explained

that Endre’s “enthusiastic supporters were deeply committed to the creation of ghettos as wellas robbing the Jews everywhere.” Ibid., 70. He also pointed out that Endre employed the gen-darmerie and midwives to search for booty and spent much time in Nagyvárad (Oradea) inparticular, which he called “the country’s most horrible ghetto.” Ibid., 68.

56. Endre asked his audience to consider whether the German example was at all needed “whenour Regent, the chief leader of the national army, realized the Jewish world threat and was thefirst among the nations of Europe [sic] to give it priority in the name of the Szeged idea. On 19March, 1944 we merely regained our self-determination that Trianon and the League ofNations took away… .” Ibid., 76.

57. This work is not to be confused with his English-language book, Lévai, Black Book.58. Lévai, Fekete könyv, 5. He drew not only on Soviet interviews with survivors but extensively

reproduced Ernő Toch’s testimony taken on 21 April 1945 in the Hungarian city of Miskolc.

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59. He specified the tragedies of forced laborers, the process of ghettoization and deportation inthe countryside, and the survival of the Pest ghetto as his missing subjects. He also announcedright at the beginning of the work that he understood his black book as the Hungarian con-tribution to a large international project supported by the World Jewish Congress and otheragencies. This larger project was meant to result in the release of a single encompassingvolume to be completed by Ilya Ehrenburg, Lévai explained, though it is doubtful whetherthe plans Lévai referenced ever took such a concrete shape. In English, see the volume pub-lished by Soviet Jewish authors as Jewish Black Book Committee, The Black Book. On Ehren-burg, see Rubinstein, Tangled Loyalties.

60. Lévai, Fekete könyv, 5.61. Ibid., 23.62. Ibid., 36. For instance, Lévai would assert that it was “a result of his negotiations with Hitler

and Rippentrop” that Prime Minister László Bárdossy made his “measures concerning theJewish question completely conform to the Nazi line” in 1941–42. Ibid., 58.

63. Ibid., 26.64. Ibid., 80.65. Ibid., 84.66. Ibid., 79.67. Ibid., 85.68. Ibid., 87.69. Ibid., 91.70. Ibid., 93.71. Ibid., 133.72. For the former see ibid., 111 and 186, for the latter 105.73. Ibid., 129.74. Ibid., 125.75. Ibid., 139.76. Ibid., 184. On Horthy, see Sakmyster, Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback and, in Hungarian,

Turbucz, Horthy Miklós.77. Lévai, Fekete könyv, 104.78. Ibid., 105. The debate about the Jewish Council was re-launched with the publication of the

following volume consisting mostly of documents: Schmidt, Kollaboráció vagy kooperáció?79. Lévai, Fekete könyv, 116.80. Ibid., 157. This expression was repeatedly cited by Lévai, which arguably reflects his incli-

nation to take expressions from the vocabulary of sports. Emphasis in the original.81. Ibid., 196.82. Ibid., 197.83. On the Rajk trial in context, see Hodos, Show Trials.84. Lévai, Fekete könyv, 139.85. Ibid., 215.86. Ibid., 262.87. Ibid., 316.88. Ibid., 316.89. He maintained out that their discrimination had not ended: they were now unfairly neglected

as compared to those who had been persecuted on political grounds.90. He emphasized that Jews did not take revenge on the perpetrators and still there were already

some clear signs of the revival of Hungarian anti-Semitism.91. He reflected that “[t]he small fraction of Hungarian Jewry that survived could not immedi-

ately show its gratitude to the liberating Russian army and its genial chief commanderStalin in an appropriate manner. It is currently being discussed how this could be done.”Lévai, Fekete könyv, 260.

92. Ibid., 256.93. Ibid., 278.

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94. On the Pest ghetto, see Chapter XII of Frojimovics et al., Jewish Budapest. See also Cole,Holo-caust City.

95. A detailed diary of the Jewish Council covering the days of the great Pest ghetto from 1–26December 1944 was available and served as Lévai’s most important source. He quoted it onnearly 40 pages, which made up almost one-third of his narrative and was also typographi-cally different from the rest. At the end of this section, Lévai stated that “[u]nfortunately,the intriguing diary of the Ghetto Council abruptly ends here [on 26 December 1944 – FL]when the hottest days of the ghetto were still ahead. The authentic story of these days willbe told based on many hundreds of witnesses and all available records.” Lévai, A pestigettó, 100. Intriguingly, on the very last page of a book in which he did not relate his ownexperiences at all, Lévai decided to quote himself as a witness: he included his contempora-neous description of the liberation of the ghetto. Ibid., 136.

96. His characterization of relations in the ghetto could at times sound positively elitist. He stated,for instance, that “[t]he inhabitants of the ghetto were completely exhausted, all communalfeelings were extinguished among them and it was only thanks to Stöckler and Domonkosthat no open revolt broke out in this most critical phase.” Ibid., 127. Lévai thereby creditedthe Council with assuring discipline and thereby managing to avoid further massacres.Ibid., 125.

97. He would declare that “[w]e have to appreciate the heroic struggle the Ghetto Council con-tinued” under the dire circumstances, emphasizing that they “conscientiously performed theirofficial duties.” Ibid., 105. Lévai curiously failed to reflect on the problematic nature of Hun-garian Jewish discipline during the Holocaust – admittedly a highly controversial topic.

98. Ibid., 167.99. At the beginning of the book, Lévai discussed howmembers of the Jewish Council managed to

establish a direct phone connection to László Ferenczy, Lieutenant Colonel in the HungarianGendarme who had been in charge of establishing the ghettos and deporting the Jews fromHungary. Ibid., 15. On Ferenczy’s own narratives about 1944, see Cole, “Narrating Concen-tration.” For his reports, see Molnár, Csendőrtiszt a Markóban.

100. Lévai, A pesti gettó, 149.101. On page 103, for instance, the Arrow Cross terror was “raging with all its might.” On page

120, Lévai then wrote, “If this was still at all possible, the level of terror increased again.Now only murderers walked the street, only thiefs moved between hiding places.”

102. Ibid., 125. Regarding this point, Lévai actually directly drew on the testimony of Szalai whocredited himself with having saved 120,000 souls from the program of extermination in prep-aration, thereby giving credit to what was to turn into a persistent myth. Ibid., 130.

103. Ibid., 102.104. Ibid., 109. What is more, at one point he even claimed that “reliable information” arrived that

“after the destruction of the bridges, the Jews of Budapest would be exterminated too.” Ibid.,123. Somewhat incoherently, he praised the Council for opposing what he called “ghetto psy-chosis” and managing to perform their work with “fanatical belief.” Ibid., 110.

105. Ibid., 138.106. Ibid., 107.107. Ibid., 98.108. Lévai, Zsidósors Magyarországon, 5.109. The length of the text of this large book can better be estimated if we add that there are 53

lines on most of its pages. The appendices featured documents from the Jewish Council onthe ghettos and concentration camps, in the countryside, calculations on the cost of theNazi occupation, protocols (including the Hungary-related information of Russian proto-cols), and witness accounts (including those of the Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizott-ság) concerning Auschwitz-Birkenau and various other Nazi camps, documentation ofArrow Cross crimes based on court proceedings, including female perpetrators, coverage ofpunishment, documents of rescue attempts both by the neutral states with representationin Budapest, the Red Cross, and international Jewish organizations, humanitarian help of

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the latter after the end of the war, statistics on the losses of Hungarian Jewry, as well as thelegal document condemning the persecution of Jews from 1946.

110. In the course of this, Lévai somewhat curiously stated that “[u]nfortunately, due to the limitedspace available, the authentic story of the concentration and deportation of Hungarian Jewryfrom the countryside has to be presented relatively briefly.” Lévai, Zsidósors Magyarországon,97. At the same time, he assigned genocidal intentions to Hungarian ghettoization, claimingthat it already “aimed at killing as many people as possible.” Ibid., 96.

111. Ibid., 22; see also 256.112. Ibid., 22. On this topic, see Case, Between States.113. Lévai, Zsidósors Magyarországon, 29.114. Ibid., 51–3. He called it the greatest and most important question for Hungarian Jews after

1941. Ibid., 58.115. Ibid., 60.116. Ibid., 173.117. Ibid., 135.118. Ibid., 251.119. Ibid., 139.120. Ibid., 166. See the following website: http://www.yellowstarhouses.org/.121. Ibid., 379.122. Ibid., 376.123. Ibid., 396.124. Ibid., 357.125. Ibid., 56.126. Ibid., 152.127. See the data on Jewish demography, conversion rates, and migration: ibid., 26–7. In this sense

of a dual function, even if not in others, Zsidósors Magyarországon might be usefully com-pared to Vági, Csősz, and Kádár. The Holocaust in Hungary. While Lévai preferred tospecify many of the sources in the text, this time he also included 179 footnotes. Lévai, Zsi-dósors Magyarországon, 318.

128. Lévai, Zsidósors Magyarországon, 48–51.129. Ibid., 144. On 8 July 1944, Ferenczy reported the deportation of a total of 434,351 Jews. Ibid.,

229.130. Ibid., 151–4. On page 155, Lévai rather problematically based his examples of resistance on

the very same source. Ferenczy is now the subject of a major study in Molnár, Csendőrtiszta Markóban, which also makes available his reports.

131. Lévai, Zsidósors Magyarországon, 214–18.132. Ibid., 163.133. Ibid., 101.134. Ibid., 168.135. Ibid., 112–16.136. Ibid., 157–8.137. Ibid., 164–6.138. Ibid., 398. The only time Lévai directly compared two sources was when he contrasted László

Endre’s account with other witness accounts: ibid., 283. On the problem of a unique testi-mony, see Ginzburg, “Just One Witness.”

139. Lévai, Zsidósors Magyarországon, 380.140. Lévai reproduced, wholly or in part, several key statements from his previous works.141. As Lévai explained in his introduction: “My material continuously grew, was selected and

improved further. It is only natural that my later works are more accurate and correctthan my previous ones.” Lévai, Zsidósors Magyarországon, 6.

142. Ibid., 76.143. Ibid., 81–2. He wrote that “[s]erving the Germans did not bring any advantages for the Jews of

the countryside, but having missed out on enlightening them and advising them against self-defense were terrible mistakes.” Ibid., 87.

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144. Ibid., 83. Tellingly, when discussing concrete charges of collaboration against the Council,Lévai wrote: “The collection of those who were to be interned was assigned to the JewishCouncil. Understandably, they were heavily accused also for this assistance.” Ibid., 128.

145. Ibid., 31–2. He also remarked on the great divide within Hungarian Jewry and the poverty ofthe large majority, complaining about the lack of solidarity and the lack of contribution fromgreat capitalists in particular. Ibid., 57–8. He did note though that the level of democracyincreased after 1938 and there was also increased cooperation between different Jewishfractions.

146. Ibid., 403.147. Ibid., 403. This statement at the end of the book is all the more interesting since Lévai opened

his narrative with several Hungarian national topoi. See Ibid., 7.148. Ibid., 337.149. Ibid., 357.150. Ibid., 357.151. Ibid., 160. However, Lévai did critique Kasztner’s “severe and fatal waste of time” (ibid., 163)

and extensively quoted Miklós Krausz, secretary of the Palestine Office, who accused him ofhaving committed severe mistakes while making many empty promises (ibid., 275). Lévaiexplained that Krausz and Kasztner followed different strategies – while the former soughtways to strike deals with the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, the latter negotiated directlywith the SS (ibid., 241) – without taking a stance on the relative merit of these strategies.

152. Ibid., 145–9 and 179–206.153. Ibid., 206. However, Lévai noted earlier how the Christian Churches contributed to anti-

Semitism and how their leaders supported the anti-Semitic laws of the late 1930s.154. Ibid., 400.155. Ibid., 334.156. Ibid., 350. The number 60,000 appears on page 358; 59,000 is found on page 467.157. Ibid., 386.158. Ibid., 319. This is one of the points where more recent scholarship, especially works by László

Karsai, has clearly contradicted Lévai. Szálasi’s rule was characterized by widespread massmurders against Hungarian Jews but, unlike during the premiership of Döme Sztójay, no sys-tematic program of deportation and annihilation was being implemented in the last monthsof the war.

159. Ibid., 97.160. Ibid., 107. At the same time, Lévai repeatedly stated that the deportations and their conse-

quences could not have remained unknown to the Hungarian government, that they bothknew about them and fully approved of them. Ibid., 140, 161, and 172.

161. Ibid., 143.162. Ibid., 99.163. Ibid., 100. He assured his readers that the Regent and the government were able “to

implement its will, if it wanted and, more importantly, dared to do.” Ibid., 238. The actionaiming at the extermination of Jews was launched by Minister of the Interior Jarossthrough “appointing these two undersecretaries of state [i.e. Baky and Endre].” Ibid., 77.Once Baky and Endre were deposed, Eichmann proved largely helpless. Ibid., 235. Emphasisin the original.

164. Ibid., 97.165. He not only claimed that Hungarian anti-Semitism was due to the impact of Germans (ibid.,

23), but that the Nazi leaders heavily pressured the Hungarian leaders to adopt anti-Semiticmeasures from the late 1930s onwards and saw their willingness to do so as a decisive criterionof their reliability. He even wrote of a German invasion during the 1930s through whichHungary supposedly became part of the German sphere of influence (ibid., 22–3). Explainingthat the “real interest of the masses” was anti-German (ibid., 44), Lévai even maintained thatHungarian anti-Semites constituted a fifth column of Nazi Germany (ibid., 33). At one point,he also contrasted the treason of the Germans of Hungary with the loyalty Jews displayedtoward their country (ibid., 61).

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166. Ibid., 169.167. Ibid., 249.168. Ibid., 240.169. Ibid., 240.170. Ibid., 266. Horthy here provided the counterpole for him. In fact, throughout the book he was

depicted as weak, helpless, and ultimately responsible, but also as a somewhat ambivalentactor.

171. See, above all, his major synthesis, Braham, The Politics of Genocide.172. János Gyurgyák went as far as to maintain that Braham’s standard synthesis “could hardly

have been completed without the works Lévai released directly after the war.” Gyurgyák, Azsidókérdés Magyarországon, 623. Even though Braham is 30 years younger, the two ofthem did in fact cooperate in the 1960s. For instance, Lévai made contributions to the Hun-garian-Jewish Studies series Braham edited.

173. Braham, A magyar holokauszt bibliográfiája I., 174.174. Ibid., 174.175. Komoróczy, A zsidók története Magyarországon I-II.176. Gyurgyák, A zsidókérdés Magyarországon, 624.177. Romsics, Clio bűvöletében.178. Just as I was about to complete my study, Lévai’s history of the Pest ghetto was republished as

Jenő Lévai, A pesti gettó csodálatos megmenekülésének hiteles története (Budapest: FővárosVII. Ker. Erzsébetváros Önkormányzata, 2014).

179. Gyurgyák, A zsidókérdés Magyarországon, 640.180. Gyurgyák, Magyar fajvédők, 14. According to this interpretation of his works, Lévai’s central

theses were the fascist nature of the Horthy regime and the strong continuities between theWhite Terror of 1919 and the Hungarian Holocaust of 1944.

181. See Paksa, Magyar nemzetiszocialisták; Paksa, A magyar szélsőjobboldal története; Paksa,Szálasi Ferenc és a hungarizmus. In the first of these works, which also served as his doctoraldissertation, Paksa declares Lévai to have been a representative of “the communist interpret-ation of the past” whoseHorogkereszt, kaszáskereszt, nyilaskereszt has served as “the source ofmany false beliefs and assertions.” Paksa, Magyar nemzetiszocialisták, 22–3.

182. In accordance with numerous survivors across the continent, Lévai explicitly wanted hiswork to be part of a symbolic burial of millions, to contribute to the struggle againstfascism and to political re-education, to help war crimes trials, and to paint an evermore accurate picture of the recent genocide. A host of early Holocaust historians, includ-ing Szymon Datner, Philip Friedman, Matatias Carp, Léon Poliakov, and Joseph Wulf, areeminently comparable to him, though his output in the first postwar years seems to beboth more voluminous and thematically diverse, if not necessarily more sophisticatedthan that of his colleagues from other countries. See Jockusch, “Historiography inTransit.”

183. This has been a major subject of recent discussions in Hungary. For the summary of one of themost interesting debates, see Laczó, “German Occupation or Hungarian Responsibility?”

184. This is one of the major stakes of Ungváry, A Horthy-rendszer mérlege. On interactions, seeKádár and Vági, A végső döntés.

185. See Kádár and Vági, Hullarablás; Frojimovics and Molnár, A világ igazai Magyarországon.186. He used the first person plural only once to refer to “our situation” (helyzetünket in the orig-

inal). See Lévai, Zsidósors Magyarországon, 54.187. The ethnicist component of Lévai’s works is all the more ironic given his identification of the

chief Hungarian perpetrators as ethnicists.188. At times Lévai reacted to what from his ideological position must have appeared a

paradox by distorting the evidence to – falsely – claim that the war against the Jewswas renewed under Szálasi “in a more drastic manner than ever.” Lévai, ZsidósorsMagyarországon, 319.

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Notes on contributor

Ferenc Laczó (Budapest, 1982) is lecturer in Modern and Contemporary European History atMaastricht University.

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