The city at the edge of history

Budapest and its inhabitants emerged from the war shattered and traumatised. Some of the city, especially the once-glamorous Corso along the Danube by the Chain Bridge, looked more like Stalingrad than the centrepiece of a cosmopolitan European capital. The Dunapalota Hotel and its neighbours were a charred wreck of shattered walls, piles of rubble and broken glass. None were rebuilt. All seven bridges had been blown up and lay in pieces in the river. About 80% of the city was damaged, a quarter severely damaged and only one in four buildings remained intact. Much of the historic Castle District, the scene of heavy fighting, was almost levelled. Around 80,000 Soviet troops lost their lives. About 39,000 German and Hungarian soldiers were killed and another 40,000 captured during the siege. About as many civilians were killed, including thousands of Jews who were shot into the Danube.

For weeks after the end of the war, the frozen river brought forth a harvest of bloated, bloodied bodies as it slowly thawed out. As in Berlin and other cities, Soviet troops systematically looted and stole valuables, especially jewellery and watches. Tens of thousands of women and girls were raped, often with extreme violence, leaving terrible legacies of internal damage, infertility and disease.

Youth or age was no protection. Alaine Polcz, a young woman in Csákvár, west of Budapest, was repeatedly gang-raped. The first time she tried to fight back, but banged her head and lost consciousness. She woke up with a Russian on top of her, hearing a voice calling for “Mummy, Mummy”, before she realised it was her own. Eventually the Russians left, leaving her half-naked and bleeding profusely. Some time later another group of soldiers arrived. They laid the women on the ground. Polcz, who later became a renowned psychologist, recorded in her memoir what happened next:

“Eight to ten Russians on their haunches surround me, first one lies on me, then another. They specified the time allotted to each of them. They looked at a wristwatch; they lit a match from time to time and one of them had a cigarette lighter; they kept track of the time. They hurried each other. One asked, ‘Dobre rabota?’ (Nice work?). I didn’t move. I thought I would die from it.”

Of the pre-war population of around 250,000 Jews, including Christian converts, around 100,000 survived in the main and international ghettos. Around another 20,000 survived by hiding with false papers. Several tens of thousands eventually returned from the camps and forced labour (there are no exact figures). 

In 1945 Budapest’s Jewish community was the largest single group of survivors in Nazi-occupied Europe, although a large number emigrated to the west or Palestine. Survivors often returned home to a cold welcome from their neighbours, who had emptied their home of their possessions and taken over their homes. Tens of thousands of Budapest’s inhabitants were deported to the Soviet Union. Many died in captivity, or did not return home until the 1950s. Hungary’s ethnic German minority paid a high price for its widespread collaboration with the Nazis. More than 200,000 were expelled to Germany and Austria.

Numerous war criminals and Nazi collaborators faced swift, if selective and often rough, justice under the People’s Tribunals, which operated between February 1945 and April 1950. The first trial on the Pest side, of two former guards in a penal army squadron who had participated in the murder of 124 Jewish labour servicemen, took place as early as February 3, 1945 while fighting was still raging in Buda. Both guards were immediately found guilty and hanged from lampposts the next day in public at Oktogon – nine days before Budapest finally surrendered. 

Such gruesome spectacles aimed to satisfy the public’s desire for vengeance – onlookers called on the hangman to make sure they died slowly. Overall, around 59,000 people were tried, of whom just under 27,000 were convicted. Most were imprisoned. Of 477 death sentences, 189 were carried out, including, remarkably, those of three prime ministers and a head of state. In the fevered atmosphere after the war, the Hungarian authorities even gathered evidence to indict the leaders of the Jewish Council and the Vaada – the Zionist Aid and Rescue Committee – for collaborating with the enemy, although no charges were brought.

Eighty years on, the profound trauma of the Holocaust and the passive role of the Jewish Council still stirs powerful emotions and unresolved questions. Survivors asked why more of their fellow Jews had not fought back. Ernest Stein was a 21-year-old student in 1944, living near the Great Synagogue on Dohány Street. He refused to wear a yellow star and surreptitiously took photographs of Jewish men being arrested. Stein met with the Jewish Council and gave them the photographs – they refused to circulate the images, for fear of causing a panic. 

After the coup by the Arrow Cross, the ultra-nationalist far right party that led Hungary from mid-October 1944 to late March 1945, Stein escaped from labour service. He joined the Jewish resistance and lived illegally, moving between safe houses and abandoned buildings. Stein refused to do as he was told. Those who disobeyed had a higher chance of survival.

Stein wondered in his memoir why so few followed his example. It would have been easy, he wrote, for the Jewish labour servicemen to overpower their camp guards. “Some of the labour camps had thousands of these men and only a handful of guards… And yet none of the prisoners seized the guns of the guards to try to attack them and escape. Why were we not successful at doing that? How was it all possible?” 

Resistance ran in the family. Stein’s sister Ibolya obtained false papers for 18 people and sheltered them. Stein was ready to fight with his fists and any weapon he could find. Confronted by two young Arrow Cross militiamen, he slammed their heads together, knocked them out and stole their uniforms. When the Arrow Cross planned a raid on the Glass House, Stein and his comrades, dressed in stolen Arrow Cross uniforms, arrived first. 

As soon as the actual Arrow Cross men arrived Stein and the others attacked them. He choked one to death with his bare hands while his comrades killed all the others and then disposed of their bodies. “If we had all removed the Star of David, if we had disarmed those few guards controlling us in the [labour service] camps, maybe we could have interrupted this outrageous genocide, this extermination of the Jews,” he later wrote. But Stein and his group were in the minority.

Matyas Rákosi and other exiled Communist leaders returned from Moscow. They steadily and diligently planned their takeover. In the first elections, in November 1945, the Smallholders, a conservative agrarian party, won an absolute majority. But the crucial Ministry of the Interior, which controlled the police and security services, was handed to the Communists. 

By August 1949, through a well-honed mix of intimidation and brutality, backed by the Soviets, Rákosi had turned Hungary into a “People’s Republic” – a fully-fledged Marxist dictatorship and loyal ally of the Soviet Union. Numerous lower-level Arrow Cross functionaries were allowed to join the Communist party. 

The old Arrow Cross headquarters at 60, Andrássy Way, with its basement cellars and torture chambers, was handed to the new secret police – with some of the same staff that had served the Arrow Cross. It was not until May 1990, as the Soviet bloc collapsed across Eastern Europe, that Hungary held a genuinely free election. The country’s first post-Communist democratic leader was József Antall Jr, whose father József had worked with the British to organise the wartime Polish rescue operation. The last Soviet troops left Hungary in June 1991 and the country is now a member of the European Union and Nato.

Hungary, like every nation that was occupied by the Nazis, is still coming to terms with its wartime history and its participation in the Holocaust. There is still a notable current of nostalgia for the era of Miklós Horthy – the former Hungarian leader and one-time ally of Hitler – and a reluctance among some to face the country’s role in the deportation of the countryside Jews. Yet at the same time, government officials now speak openly of Hungary’s catastrophic failure to protect its Jewish citizens in 1944 and its terrible human cost. 

Each year on April 16 the country observes a day of remembrance for its Holocaust victims. Budapest boasts an excellent Holocaust Memorial Centre in a former synagogue, and numerous memorials, including a row of metal shoes along the Danube embankment near Parliament, marking the place where the Arrow Cross shot their victims into the river. 

Many key wartime sites are still standing but have nothing to indicate their historical importance. The Majestic Hotel on Karthauzi Street in the Buda Hills, where Adolf Eichmann once negotiated with the activists Joel and Hansi Brand over the lives of Hungarian Jews, is once again an apartment building, and Eichmann’s former office a residence. Hannah Arendt, reporting from Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961, described him as embodying the ‘banality of evil’, a faceless bureaucrat following orders. Arendt’s characterisation is wrong because it removes his agency. Eichmann was a fanatical antisemite, who seized every opportunity to deport and murder as many Jews as he could.

Perhaps the real banality of evil lies in the building’s unremarkable features: the tree-lined walkway to the entrance, along which Eichmann walked; the plain staircase inside that led to his office; the corridors down which bloodied victims staggered and the steps to the basement storage area that was once a torture chamber. Inside the cellar the site’s original metal sign rests against the wall. It was repainted after the war and the building given a different name. But that layer has faded in places and the faint outline of the word “Majestic” is still partly visible. 

Eichmann’s former residence at 13b Apostol Street now houses several businesses, including a Pilates studio. Nothing outside indicates that he once lived there. The Andrássy Palace, the centre of the Polish resistance, is now a somewhat run-down apartment house – although here at least a plaque by the rear entrance does commemorate its wartime importance.

The ongoing dialogue about Hungary’s wartime history is perhaps best embodied at Szabadság Square, near the former US Legation where the Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz ran his rescue operation, which saved the lives of over 60,000 Jews – now the site of the US embassy. In 2014, a bust of Miklós Horthy was installed at the entrance of the Hungarian Reform Church, looking onto the square. That same year the Hungarian authorities erected a new memorial to the victims of the Nazi occupation. Intended to unite Jewish and non-Jewish survivors and the descendants of victims, it had the opposite effect. The memorial features a statue of the Archangel Gabriel holding the orb and cross of Hungarian kings, while a menacing eagle swoops down onto him. Gabriel represents an innocent Hungary, the eagle, the bloodthirsty Germans. 

The memorial, widely seen as an attempt to whitewash history, triggered anger among Hungary’s Jewish community and their allies. In response they constructed one of Europe’s most poignant and moving Holocaust commemorations. The People’s Memorial, as it is known, has gathered family stories, copies of documents, photographs of victims, testimonies and personal possessions – all carefully displayed in front of the statues.

Nowadays, such a construct in a Western capital would likely not last long before being destroyed or daubed in red paint. Ironically, Hungary, the graveyard of so many Jews, has become one of the safest places in Europe to be Jewish. Klauzál Square, the epicentre of the wartime ghetto, where frozen bodies were stacked like logs, is now the centre of the Buli-negyed, the city’s party quarter. Old stereotypes still endure, but Hungary has proved immune to the explosion of antisemitism across Europe that followed October 7, 2023. 

In 2024, on Holocaust Memorial Day, Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, was recited in Parliament where more than 80 years earlier three sets of anti-Jewish legislation had been passed. Budapest’s Jews were once forced to wear yellow stars but now freely wear Stars of David. Amid the ghosts of the city’s last days, the People’s Memorial remains unguarded and untouched, the fading family stories and photographs gently rippling in the breeze. 

The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance 1940-1945, by Adam LeBor, is published by Head of Zeus