[Written in 2011]
In the 19th and early 20th century, there was a steady immigration of Jews from neighbouring countries in to Hungary. This immigration increased between 1939 and 1941 to about 20,000, mainly from Moravia, Bohemia, Slovakia, Poland, Germany and other German-occupied European countries, looking for a place of refuge in the relative safety of Hungary (a fiercely anti-Semitic country then, just as nowadays, but not yet genocidal). As Germany’s ally, Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union on 27th June 1941. In the same year, the Hungarian Government agency, the Office of Aliens’ Control, issued a decree that all Jews living in Hungary, including Northern Transylvania and the Lower Carpathians (the Ukrainians called this region Trans-Carpathia), had to prove Hungarian ancestry or face expulsion. My mother, with my father being absent in a forced labour camp in the Ukraine, had to prove that both she and my father were long standing Hungarians. For her, as she was from a family of district Rabbis, it was not too difficult as she had official documents and even a rubber stamp as evidence. My father’s case was different. My paternal great-grand father, Paul Rübner, came over from Silesia in the early or mid 1800s and settled in Mezötur, in the Hungarian Lowlands, and from there, my grandfather Manó Rübner, as an early chozer ba’tshuva (a person who is becoming religious), escaped to join a yeshiva in the northern town of Balassagyarmat.
Leslie Rübner (centre), with his mother and brother.
When in the 1940s, my mother visited Mezötur looking for evidence of my father’s Hungarian credentials, she was surprised to find a family of publicans, totally devoid of Yiddishkeit. There was not even a mezuzah on the front door. Although my father’s ancestry did not go way back, it was just about far enough. Had this not been the case, we, as more than 20,000 others who could not document their origin (and, by the way, also some who could) (mostly Polish, Russian, and others), would have been transported across the border to Poland or the Ukraine, more specifically to the Ukrainian town of Kamianets-Podilskyi (just Kamenets in Yiddish). In preparation for the expulsions, from July 1941 onward, in Budapest as well as in the provinces, the Hungarian Police forces carried out arrests of these ‘stateless’ Jews. Many Jewish communities, especially in the Lower Carpathian region (then under Hungarian control), were deported in their entirety. The Hungarians loaded the Jews into freight cars and transported them to Körösmezö (in Ukrainian, Yasinya), near the pre-war border, where they were taken across to the former Soviet Union. By 10th August 1941, approximately 14,000 Jews had been deported. The Hungarian authorities transferred another 4,000 later in the same month.
The routes of deportations to Kamianets-Podilskyi.
Source: USHMM
The deportees were received with open arms and the Kamianets-Podilskyi Jewish community shared with them their homes and meagre rations. Jewish public buildings, including the school and synagogue, were made available as shelters.
The Germans took over occupation of Kamianets-Podilskyi from their Hungarian allies on the 11th July 1941 and as soon as the 20th, a ghetto was set up and the Jews from the city and its outlying areas, including the 18,000 Hungarians, plus Jews from Holland, Poland and Czechoslovakia were incarcerated.
A Hungarian soldier on 18th or 19th August 1941 recorded the following:
“There are several Jews here, especially women, they are in rags, but they ask for bread, wearing jewellery and with their lips painted red. They would give any money for it. Some count their steps with the desperation shown on their faces; others are crawling on the road collapsed from exhaustion and hunger. Some others bandage the wounds on their feet with rags torn from their clothes… The Jewish quarter of the city is full of Jews; there are many from Budapest among them. They live in unspeakable and indescribable dirt, they come and go in scanty attire, the streets stink, unburied bodies are lying in some houses. The water of the Dniester is infected; here and there corpses are washed out to the bank.”
When at Tarnopol, the 10th Hungarian Hunter Battalion chased some one thousand Jews across the Dniester River in the direction of Kamianets-Podilskyi, the Einsatzgruppe C, the special unit set up to murder Jews, drove them back. Because the Hungarians had refused them, SS Obergruppenfuhrer Friederich Jeckeln, in line with Nazi government policy, decided to liquidate all the Jews in the area. On the 27th August, the SS, in conjunction with their allies, the Hungarian Army, began the massacres. All the Jews in the place were ordered to march in to the nearby forest. The Hungarian Army was using Jewish labour battalions, under torture and deprivation, to do the demeaning, heavy and dangerous jobs. One such Jewish slave labourer, Gábor Mermelstein, had been told about the killings by some locals, so he went to see it for himself and this is what he saw:
“We saw hundreds of people undressing there… we were passing a row of maple trees practically over the mess of naked corpses… suddenly we glanced at a square shaped ditch, at all four sides of which people were standing. Hundreds of innocent people were machine-gunned down. I’ll never forget what I saw and felt; the scared faces, the men, women and children marching into their own graves without resistance. I felt fear, outrage and pain simultaneously.”
It took three days to kill 23,600 Jews.
Jews marching to their execution in Kamianets-Podilskyi, 1941
Source: Wikipedia
The Einsatzgruppe went around murdering Jews and Communists from the moment the Germans attacked the Soviet Union, and prior to that there had been wholesale exterminations of Jews in occupied Poland. But this was the first massive scale massacre committed by the Central Powers.
In January 1942, Hungarian troops, all by themselves, massacred Jews at Novi Sad, now part of Serbia, but then in Hungary. When you hear Hungarians arguing that they were innocent bystanders of the Holocaust, there is plenty of evidence to prove the contrary and relate this story to them.