The key aim of Die Ermordung ungarischer Juden 1944 in Pusztavám, Anikó Boros’ first monograph, is to examine various accounts of a WWII mass murder committed within one day in a single locality and to analyze these accounts through the theoretical toolkit of transdisciplinary memory studies. Remarkably, the author grew up adjacent to the village of Pusztavám, located some eighty kilometers west of Budapest, but it was only in Berlin that she first heard about the mass murder of October 16, 1944. This peculiar asymmetry in reception motivated her to conduct research into the transnational history and memory of this atrocity for her PhD, with special foci on witnessing and memory culture, narratives and identities, silences and forgetting.
It is an uncontestable fact that, upon the spread of malevolent rumors of a „Jewish uprising“, more than two hundred Hungarian Jewish forced laborers (munkaszolgálatos literally: labor servicemen) from two separate units were murdered in Pusztavám the day after Ferenc Szálasi’s Arrow Cross party took power. Sensing the new dangers once it became clear that Miklós Horthy had botched his October 15, 1944 attempt to exit the war, about one hundred of their more fortunate fellow forced laborers managed to flee the village just in time – with a number of them testifying later on. This much we know for certain, however, similarly to Andrea Pető’s recently released „The Forgotten Massacre. Budapest in 1944“1, there is a fluid core to Boros’ tragic microhistory of the war and the Holocaust: the author cannot possibly offer a fully satisfying reconstruction of what happened on the edge of Pusztavám, the available evidence being too fragmentary, and partly also too contradictory for that.
As Boros notes, it is highly probable that an SS unit consisting perhaps of some eight to ten men was chiefly responsible for the atrocity, however, its investigations have remained inconclusive. Even though the mass murder of October 16, 1944 was addressed by the People’s Court in the nearby city of Székesfehérvár in the immediate postwar years and was also examined by a West German court in Frankfurt am Main some three decades later, the former trial did not even attempt to identify individual perpetrators and the latter case was eventually closed in 1980 without having been able to do so. In other words, no legal punishment was ever meted out in connection with the wanton murder of over two hundred individuals in Pusztavám.
The role played by various institutions, including that of the Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn, and by members of village society have remained contested, leaving us with an imprecise sense of the perpetrators and the contours of the „grey zone“. What is more, local complicity has recurrently been questioned or even denied – practically until today. Boros underlines in this context that the politicized functioning of the system of justice has further „confused“ and attenuated people’s sense of moral responsibility while their fear of potential retribution has yielded manifold narratives that, taken together, shift the blame for the mass crime in a circular fashion.
The apparent impossibility to establish direct responsibility and a precise measure of complicity is richly compensated in the book by the author’s broader epistemological and theoretical reflections connected to her detailed exploration of remembrance and witness accounts in a transnational manner – transnational not least because significant parts of the Pusztavám Hungarian German community fled or been expelled shortly after the massacre, with many of them eventually settling in the Bavarian town of Geretsried. Die Ermordung ungarischer Juden 1944 in Pusztavám thus generates new insights into witnesses and witnessing while also exploring the admittedly rather restricted remembrance of the event. Besides documentary evidence of various kinds, sites of remembrance and memory objects, Boros contextualises and analyses the hundreds of testimonies she has located in four countries (Germany, Hungary, Israel and the United States), however, without providing more than succinct reflections on her methods (pp. 6–7).
Following her broad historical introduction and more fine-grained conceptual reflections, Boros combines source criticism with a hermeneutical approach to interpret accounts by four distinct groups: Jewish survivors, locals, expellees, and military personnel. It is widely known that numerous witness testimonies of Holocaust survivors have been recorded in the immediate postwar years and in more recent decades too. Such efforts, no matter how impressive, can never close all gaps in recollecting specific details of the genocide. As highlighted by the author, when it comes to the remembrance of Pusztavám in 1944, only a rather small fraction (some forty relatively brief sources) stem from Jewish survivors – and they are, necessarily, the accounts of those who had managed to flee and survive, and have thus not directly witnessed the mass crime committed on October 16, 1944.
The author uses the varied accounts of members of these four groups to shed light on the role of perspective and the relevance of temporal, political and social contexts to remembrance, zooming in on the implications of the witnesses’ relationship with the court, the interrogator, and the interviewer. Her detailed and thorough analysis – the large chapter devoted to these accounts run to some 160 pages, or more than three-fifth of the book as a whole – allow Boros to draw valuable analytical distinctions between „political-juridical testimony“ and „opportunistic testimony“ and to show how pieces of information and insights acquired after the fact have been integrated into later accounts (p. 244).
As she demonstrates, the enrichment and gradual transformation of witness accounts in the postwar period has not led to their convergence though, with narratives of flight and expulsion to a large extent remaining in direct competition with that of the Holocaust. In this sense, the inability to establish direct responsibility for and a precise measure of complicity in the October 1944 atrocity has clearly shaped remembrance and has hindered any kind of rapprochement in its aftermath. Boros concludes on a rather pessimistic note: with only few „carriers of memory“ still around, the conscious non-representation of the mass murder, and continued fears towards judicial investigation have combined to make active remembrance a rather marginal phenomenon and have also contributed to what the author calls the „non-stabilization of memory“ – which is rather likely to lead to its de-stabilization in the future (p. 249).
Die Ermordung ungarischer Juden 1944 in Pusztavám is an original, well-conceived, well-researched and thoroughly analytical, if not particularly fluently written monograph. Limitations of the book include the primarily national focus of the historical introduction and the relative paucity of references to existing microhistories of violence. Its major strengths lie in its transdisciplinary engagement in memory studies and transnational approach to German-Hungarian-Jewish history – an approach that has remained surprisingly rare when it comes to these complex entanglements and that still promises numerous original insights in an otherwise well-researched area of historical studies.2
Notes:
1 Andrea Pető, The Forgotten Massacre. Budapest in 1944, Berlin 2021.
2 Ferenc Laczó, From Collaboration to Cooperation. German Historiography of the Holocaust in Hungary, in: Hungarian Historical Review 9 (2020), pp. 530–555.